Saturday, January 28, 2006
Finished the sucker
The last piece went in on Thursday night. I stayed up a little too late doing it, but I was on a roll and there's a certain finishing-the-puzzle momentum that must be heeded.Now, of course, my life is largely devoid of meaning.
The last pieces were transitional ones, containing a little of this image and a little of that, too complex to look at and immediately see their place in the grand scheme. Along with the puzzle, I've been slogging through Murray Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar, which is in part about complexity and simplicity, and how you define them. Turns out the puzzle and the book are not unrelated.
It is not simple to say what makes a thing complex. A lot of wicked smaht people (as we say in Boston) spend a lot of time thinking about this.
One concept that Gell-Mann talks about is "algorithmic information content" (AIC), known in some circles as Kolmogorov complexity." AIC is, roughly, the least possible amount of information it takes to describe something unambiguously. A jigsaw puzzle piece that shows just one more section of picture frame of a certain regular dark brown wood grain has relatively low AIC; one of my transitional pieces has a lot higher AIC, since it has a lot of different things going on in it.
See, and you thought it was just a jigsaw puzzle.
