As a toddler ,one of the my most favourite stories was the one that dad told me.All the
animal fables seemed too commonplace by comparison.Predictably it was the story
Cinderella and the 'process of finding Prince Charming'.The story seemed to have it all,the magical fairy Godmother who appeared on occasion to provide love advice ,fancy transport,designer apparel with fashionable accessories and yes, the unforgettable glass slippers which is now at par with Coco Chanel's Little black dress in fairy-tale country ;all this accomplished with the help of every Godmother's must-have accessory ,the magic wand...
Cinderella goes to the royal ball in the pumpkin carriage ..dances right into the prince's heart and dashes out at midnight before the magic wears off conveniently leaving a sparkly shoe behind..All this in a span of a few hours...The smitten prince run a search algorithm which involves all the gals in town trying out the shoe and apparently it fits only her.Imagine,what would happen to the bulk shoe manufacturing industry if this was the norm.She on the other hand,has no qualms marrying a prince who seems to make his decision so impulsively on the basis of a single dance without knowing anything about her.
The Conclusion: True love strikes in a moment and conquers all and then they live happily ever after.The " Attend ball -find target -dance-search -find target again " Algorithm is infallible.
Twenty years and an overdose of a dozen such stories and movies later I write this post
as an observation of the real world 'find process' in particular amongst the weirdest
human subspecies who call themselves engineers.This species learns to model all objects
in nature mathematically,observe and make logical conclusions based on the same for four whole years and all this training is flushed down the drain in a minute during this
process.The algorithms are no longer so simple or result oriented.
The decision on the target itself is arbitrary.The real life 'Prince finding process 'no longer takes place in ball rooms but in fancy coffee shops ,college fests,class rooms,office cafeterias and basically any venue that you can dream of.The prince no longer is so impulsive and fixated on a single person and the female generally is confused and has a million doubts.They spend inane amount of time in coffee shops, talking mundane stuff,sending sappy msgs over sms,take long walks and dedicate songs in fests.The more tech savvy mail each other corny songs written by 17th century poets freshly googled from the net,set soppy caller tunes,ask the other person out for an ieee paper search session( the new fangled/boring replacement for a waltz),talk about their jobs and sometimes write optimised matlab code for denoising filters to prove their mettle.The time spans of the process are comparable to run time of Ekta kapoor serials and the runs are as murky as the serial plots itself.The emotional drama is much more heightened with no ending in sight.
The Conclusion: Newer algorithms are being developed by the species.The observation of this weird behaviour is in progress with no strong conclusions of successful algorithms in sight and raises deep suspicions on the claims that humans are amongst the most intelligent of God's creation.
