Added CSP Scene: Pinkie Pie is So RNDom · 4:31pm Jul 17th, 2017
So, the first couple of constructive pieces of criticism of the new chapter hit home, and I'm writing this to address, if not totally fix, the problem they rightfully pointed out... well, fix it as much as I can without basically ripping out a third of the chapter, which isn't going to happen.
This scene will (probably instants after I post this blog) be edited into the existing chapter, so if you read Changeling Space Program Chapter 11 after the posting date on this blog, you've missed nothing.
(after finishing) Argh. I had a clear idea of what I wanted last night, but couldn't stay up to finish it, so of COURSE it's completely gone when I wake up. This is the best I can do.
George Cowley, who was the least suited to the current discussion of crafting instructions for calculating machines of the gathered scientists, leaned back in his chair and considered the nature of genius.
In his long lifetime Cowley had known only a handful of true geniuses- beings whose talent for lateral thinking and leaps of calculation or inspiration changed the nature of their chosen field. The one common feature they all shared was a tendency for eccentricity. The kind of mind that could change the world often had trouble changing its shirt.
Take Goddard the Griffon- definitely a genius, as his creation of the equations that made practical rocket flight possible and his insight into the use of liquid propellants showed. He was also a certifiable crab even by griffon standards, with a vile sense of humor that generally only surfaced with the misfortune of others. Short-tempered, gruff, socially inadequate, and when given the opportunity a workaholic. And, the old bird's secret shame, he was a baseball fanatic, an advocate of (of all teams) the hopeless Vanhoover Lumberjacks. At least the Griffonstone Falcons had been in the playoffs during Goddard's lifetime, but Vanhoover? Eccentric, oh yes indeed.
But if eccentricity was the measure of a genius, then Pinkie Pie might, in Cowley's opinion, qualify as the next step in pony evolution.
For two days thus far the minotaurs had enjoyed, more or less, a front-row seat to a display of genius at work(269). Pinkie Pie’s explanations consistently went faster than the astonished scientists could follow, took unexpected and far-reaching tangents, and often as not made no sense at all. In fact, von Brawn and his associates were often having to un-learn as fast as they were learning, once they figured out that some of Pinkie Pie's methods worked for her and no one else on Equus.
For one example: Marked Knee and George Bull had created a programming method called "top-down design." You began by stating the one big thing you wanted the program to do. You then broke that one big thing down into a series of steps, and then you broke each of those steps down into smaller steps, until you reached the simplest possible actions. Flow charts often got involved in the later stages. It was methodical, it was logical, and it worked.
Pinkie Pie used Bottom Up Design, or "the BUDdy System" as she called it. Somehow she was able to begin with all the little things a program needed to do and then, after the fact, build a framework for them all. This system worked fine for someone who had accurate information popping into her head from apparently nowhere, but for mere mortals it was simply unworkable. The tragic part of it all was the the minotaurs, even Cowley, could see how much time and trouble could be saved by Pinkie's system... if only you knew at the very beginning everything you needed to get the job done. They'd learned the hard way how unlikely that was.
Ah, yes. And apparently Pinkie Pie had just come up with another Don't Try This at Home concept, judging by the consternation on all three of Cowley's colleagues. Silently he removed the earplugs he'd been using to shut out the unimportant babble- he'd been following progress by the chalkboards and whiteboards.
"- random number generator has no place in a precision computing machine!!" Marked Knee was insisting.
"Yes, it does!" Pinkie Pie insisted. "There's all sorts of uses for it- checking formulas, probability analysis-"
"An electrical circuit is either on or off!" George Bull insisted. "We have to structure our programming logic around that fact! We need rigid rules for action, not- not-!!"
Pinkie Pie held up her forehooves. "Lemme explain it like this," she said. "Suppose you have a computer baking bread."
"A what?" von Brawn asked.
"Just suppose," Pinkie insisted. "The computer runs the kitchen like this one will run a rocket. You can program the rocket with the proper recipe and cooking time, but sometimes the oven isn't working quite right, sometimes you get a bad batch of yeast, or maybe the milk has a little bit too much cream, but I like when that happens because the bread comes out extra crusty and makes the most splendiferous crunch when you toast it! Of course, it's also good for sandwiches, but-"
"The computer," von Brawn reminded Pinkie, just as Cowley was reaching for his earplugs again.
"What about the computer?" Pinkie blinked, then said, "Oh yeah!" before the bulls could remind her where the example was supposed to go. "Anyway, there are a lot of little things that can change from one loaf to the next, and if your computer just does the same thing every time, your bread won't be very good. So, say you tell the computer, 'There's a five percent chance that doing this now will make the bread bake better, try it and check results.' And those rules kick in when the computer sees something off with the loaf in the oven."
"I don't think that works, Miss Pie," George Bull said after a moment's thought. "Even if we grant the point that a rigid set of rules isn't always appropriate, your fuzzy method seems likely to produce more bad outcomes than good outcomes. Your five percent chance would work out well a lot less than five percent of the time."
"At first, yeah," Pinkie nodded. "But it comes good in the long run!"
"I still say this is absurd!!" Marked Knee insisted. "A computer should do what it's told based on data received, nothing else! It shouldn't be doing things because it rolls the dice and follows the numbers instead of reality!"
Pinkie Pie looked at Marked Knee. "But how can anypony learn anything," she asked, "if they can't try new and different things? If they can't make a choice of their own?"
Marked Knee opened his mouth... and closed it again. He sat down, lowering his eyes, obviously thinking hard about something. George Bull looked like he would say something, but after a moment he too joined his younger colleague in deep thought.
"I think this philosophical problem is going to have to wait for another day," von Brawn finally said. "Let's move to practical considerations. What would we use the RND command for?"
"Well, your stability system is pretty good," Pinkie Pie said. "Pretty good. It detects rotation in the ship and gradually cranks up pitch, roll and yaw until it maxes out, and cancels the rotation, right? But it overcorrects a lot, doesn't it? So I figured if the computer can guess how much force it needs to exactly counter the rotation, instead of just pushing until it doesn't feel the rotation anymore, it'll work better!"
Almost instantly George Bull and Marked Knee reached for the same piece of paper. After a bit of a faff fighting over it, they picked up pencils and set to work together on the same page, not speaking, just writing out lines of code, scratching them out, making notations, and filling up the page in no time.
As they reached for more paper, von Brawn cleared his throat. "As grateful as I am to Miss Pie for inspiring you two gentlebulls," he rumbled, "we have a few other things to iron out in this meeting. We still haven't finalized the reaction wheel designs."
"Did that last night!!" Marked Knee said, not looking up from his scribbling. "Assembled this morning!! Interface specs are here." He paused in writing long enough to slide another bit of paper over to von Brawn.
von Brawn picked up the document and looked it over, Pinkie Pie shamelessly leaning over his shoulder to see. "Are these proportions correct?" he said at last.
"Space and power constraints within the probe body limited my scope!!" Marked Knee said. "The torque will be much less than normal!! Maybe as little as one-fifth that of a capsule system!!" He slid a second paper across. "I also designed a much larger system that can be used on heavier rockets!! It would increase our control authority at the cost of higher energy demands!!"
von Brawn picked up the second design and considered it. "A good idea," he said at length. "But we don't have time before launch to test both. We'll focus on the self-contained full system."
Marked Knee nodded, his eyes never having left his work.
"Can I see?" Pinkie asked. Before von Brawn could agree, she picked up the reaction wheel designs and looked them over. "Why don't we just dump one of these wheels?" she asked. "There's only three ways you can turn, but you have four wheels and gimbals here. You could save a lot of power-"
"Gimbal lock," George Bull said, not glancing up.
"Huh?"
"One of the first problems we discovered when developing our navigation system," von Brawn explained, "is that if you get two of the reaction wheels coplanar with one another, they lock together- they continue rotating in the same plane. You lose control and navigation in that axis, which usually means you lose the ship."
"Oh, so it's like a spare tire!" Pinkie nodded wisely.
"It's much more than that," von Brawn explained. "We can use the fourth wheel to reset any of the other three, because the fourth wheel provides an independent frame of reference. So long as the other wheels are mechanically sound, we can recover from gimbal lock situations and still have four operational reaction wheels."
"So it's like having a tire patch kit instead!" Pinkie grinned. "I get it now!"
"What's a tire?" George Bull asked as he wrote.
"So, we have attitude control and SAS, in addition to basic rocket function," von Brawn said, preventing Pinkie Pie from going down yet another of the tangents the minotaurs had already learned to dread. "Now we just need to integrate them all into a single-"
"Working!" Not quite in unison, both Knee and Bull tapped the notes they were working on with their erasers. After a moment, they resumed their scribbling.
"Oh, is THAT what that is?" Pinkie Pie asked. "I wanna see!" Jumping onto the table, she walked over to the notes, turning her head sideways, then upside down, then through two complete rotations before her neck unwound in a spin that made Cowley, the armchair observer, dizzy just thinking about it. "That can't be right," she said, pointing to a line on the fourth page of scribbles. "Where'd this function call come from? I don't remember it from specs!"
Without speaking, both Bull and Knee slid the second page of scribbles over to her.
"Oh," Pinkie said, and then, "Wait a minute. If you do it this way you're setting yourself up for a recursive loop. See, if this reads zero but THIS reads negative, then-"
The third page of scribbles slide across to Pinkie's hooves.
"Oh. Yeah. That's brilliant! Wait, no. Um. That's no good either. Now it conflicts with this function over here. Lemme show you." Pinkie bent her head down for another pencil, then paused as she realized there wasn't room for her to mouth-write between the large, rapidly moving fists of the two minotaurs. "Um, guys, can we take this to the chalkboard?" she asked.
George Cowley nodded to himself and reinserted his earplugs. Things were going well, aside from arguments and distractions- much faster than the minotaurs normally proceeded. He took out his own notepad and paper and, Knee, Bull and Pie shifted their design work to the blackboard, and as von Brawn watched in silence, he began copying things down.
He had the most important job; making sure that, whatever the team accomplished with Pinkie Pie's erratic aid, they would be able to do again when she went back home. After all, unlike Pinkie, they couldn't negotiate sweetheart deals with the fundamental physical laws of the universe.
But with enough teamwork, they might be able to sneak in a couple of loopholes.
The new scene reads fine to me, I think.
Aye. I could do with a more thorough explanation of gimbal lock, but I'm willing to grant that a) the characters don't, and b) it would interrupt the flow of the story. I suppose I'll Google it instead.
4604330
Long story short: Gemini used the four-gimbal system for their navigation. Apollo, built by another contractor with a major Not Invented Here problem, used only three, making gimbal lock a major headache for the entire program. Apollo 13, immediately after the oxygen tank explosion, came very close to gimbal lock while Jim Lovell tried to stabilize the craft- hence the line in the movie, "I'm well aware of the damn gimbal lock!" and the shots of the 8-balls flirting with a red zone which would have meant the loss of navigation and, at the least, made it quite a bit harder for 13 to get home. Pretty much every spacecraft since has used four wheels or gimbals for reaction-wheel or gyroscopic navigation. The Kepler space telescope had one wheel break down early in its mission; it's down to two now, making up for the third through a neat trick involving, as I understand it, adjusting the telescope's solar panels to use solar wind to turn the craft in that axis. Without that trick, Kepler would have been dead for about four years now.
4604359
Huh.
" But if eccentricity was the measure of a genius, then Pinkie Pie might, in Cowley's opinion, qualify as the next step in pony evolution. "
I'd use something different.
"But if eccentricity was the measure of a genius, Pinkie Pie might, in Cowley's opinion, be a yard stick marked entirely in irrational negative numbers and divisible by three."
4604421 That would be if you were using genius as a measure of eccentricity. }:-{D
Quite a good scene. Pinkie goes from being the pony genius who saves the poor benighted non-ponies, to one genius amongst many in the room who works together to solve a problem no one could solve alone.