The Great Chef: A Parable

There was once a boy who loved food. He would sit for hours and read anything that had to do with food and cooking, including the instruction manuals for the kitchen appliances. The boy began to cook by trying out simple recipes. He would make the same recipes over and over and over, until he understood how each part contributed to the whole. His father noticed the boy's near obsession with cooking, and arranged for the boy to apprentice a chef.

Though the chef was not particularly masterful, he was a good chef. The boy was enthralled. He studied every minute detail of the kitchen, every movement of the chef. He studied the way the chef assigned tasks to the others that worked in the kitchen. He studied the way the chef chose his ingredients, and prepared his recipes. The boy became familiar with every tool at the chef's disposal, and eagerly did every job assigned to him, from chopping vegetables to mopping the floor.

Eventually, the boy became a man and he decided to enter cooking school. The first few years were boring drudgery to him, and he learned almost nothing. He had already experienced the inner workings of a disciplined kitchen, and he had continued to be a voracious reader of anything to do with food and cooking. However, in the later years of cooking school a new world was opened to him. He learned cooking techniques only few in the world understood. He learned the potent and exotic flavor of each spice. He learned the magic and the music of cooking.

Delicate dishes were like a symphony, each part had its purpose, and when everything came together the person eating it shared in some great truth, it was almost...mystical. The man had such a profound and heartfelt appreciation for food and cooking, that he found he couldn't even explain it to anyone else. In fact, the only people he could explain it to were others who had the same deep appreciation for food and cooking.

The man excelled at cooking school. His instructors and professors loved him because he was a passionate student. He eventually felt as though his professors were his peers, instead of his teachers. He even taught them a few things as he experimented with creating some truly unique recipes.

Finally, the man graduated from cooking school with the highest honors that could be achieved. He had become a master craftsman, an artisan. He had become The Great Chef. He struck out on his own to start a restaurant. His restaurant soon gained acclaim as everyone recognized his genius. Reservations had to be made over a year in advance.

The Great Chef decided that he would try something that would tax his skills to the breaking point. He had always toyed with the idea of creating this one dish that everyone said was impossible to create. He set his mind to it. If he cooked the tomatoes just so it would bring out the flavor he desired, and that would combine perfectly with the mushrooms. The combination of spices would perfectly complement the other ingredients. He sought out only the freshest meats and vegetables that were at the peak of ripeness, and at great expense.

All of The Great Chef's life's preparation had led up to this moment. By following his finely tuned intuition, he had created a recipe where no single ingredient could be removed without causing the flavor of the whole dish to collapse, because each ingredient depended on the others to draw out and complement its flavors. He only had to make the recipe once to know that it was perfect. He had done the impossible! He had proven beyond any doubt that he had no equal, and in the process he had created a new branch of the culinary arts.

One day, a man came to have dinner at The Great Chef's restaurant. He wasn't a connoisseur but he liked to try strange new things, and when someone told him The Great Chef's new dish was the best, he had to have it. He had made a reservation a year ago, and had come in from out-of-town expressly for this purpose. When it came time to order, the man said he would like to try the new dish, but as he read the description he said, "Oh...I don't like tomatoes. Can you make it without the tomatoes?"

The Programming of Philosophy

Just recently I watched Rich Hickey's presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2009. It is a very interesting and thought provoking presentation, and well worth viewing. In it he takes from philosophy an understanding of time, state, and identity and applies it to the design of computer programming languages and models for concurrency.

Rich's presentation is also a further proof that no science (to include computer science) is philosophically or religiously neutral¹. Computer science in particular is one of the more "philosophical" sciences. We model and reason about information in its purest and most elemental forms. We learn De Morgan's laws in CS classes for goodness sake!

The connection between philosophy, religion, and computer science is illustrated best in the field of artificial intelligence, where we must answer questions like:

• What is intelligence?
• Are human brains nothing more than biochemical computers?
• Can an electronic computer model intelligence accurately?

I find it telling, that most AI researchers today punt on these issues. They have moved away from trying to define and model some theory of general intelligence, and moved towards statistical techniques, and creating agents that "act rationally" by imitating human behavior. However, even taking a pragmatic approach² there is still a philosophical underpinning. For instance, take Jeff Hawkins work at Numenta, which I have written about previously, clearly there are influences of Empiricism.

We each have our own worldview, and our worldview not only influences the way we model the world, but it also limits our model of the world. Programmers are fond of talking about how the programming language you use limits the way you think about solving a problem³. We encourage each other to learn multiple languages especially from different paradigms (declarative, functional, object oriented, imperative, etc.) to gain new ways of solving problems. We have arguments about which languages model the world better. Is action (functional languages) primary or is existence/state (object oriented) primary? In other words which came first God existing, or God creating? You could even liken the debate about static versus dynamic typing to a debate about absolute versus relative morality. Can we possibly come up with a system of rules beforehand that are applied in every situation, or is that too rigid? ... OK maybe that last analogy is pushing it a bit... :)

I like what Rich has done. He acknowledges that his philosophy of state and time has come from Alfred Whitehead. Perhaps there are more lessons that can be learned from philosophy and applied to computer science. Or perhaps if we are explicit about our philosophical underpinnings and follow them to their logical conclusions we will gain some useful insights.

Footnotes:

¹ This will most assuredly set some people afire, but I do not see a distinction between philosophy and religion. They both answer questions we have about the nature of the universe, the limits and proper use of reasoning, etc.

² Pragmatism is a branch of philosophy, by the way.

³ Again from philosophy! See "Wittgenstein philosophy of language"