Donkey-YoYo

Decisions making implies the freedom of choosing an outcome. Between imagining a phantasmic outcome and that choice becoming reality lie some hard problems. To solve them, one has to be really, really clever, or – in the absence of sufficient intelligence – lucky. Although, relying on luck is considered bad practice when solving important problems. That is because luck is unreliable. It is based on an underlying stochastic process subject to inherent randomness. Accordingly, converging on optimal solutions by chance alone might take a really long time. While the unreliable randomness would not the worst thing in itself, luck becomes a terrible guide in combination with constrained resources and the effects of bad decisions on the lives of people. It turns out, luck and randomness, while being strangely capable concepts for discovering solutions, do not scale to pragmatic requirements in an easy way.

So, it seems we have to rely on intelligence as the best possible way for problem solving. But what does that mean for hard enough problems? Problems that aggregate complexity to a degree that shrouds their optimal solutions even from the capabilities of the best straight thinking minds. It implies that persons in power and the structures that support them, as relatively clever as they may be, have the potential to break apart whole systems in their absolute ignorance. Relying on such a kind of analytical intelligence, which is constrained by inherent complexity, has limited usefulness for hard enough problems. Instead, it makes sense to explore how to elevate the concept of luck – or rather the gray area in-between luck and intelligence for problem solving, since neither luck nor intelligence on their own seem to do the job. Therefore, the proposal is to consider – as a source of organizational power – an idea for a brand new invention: a luck machine that has the goal-oriented rigor and reliability of a well oiled industrial device while maintaining the abductive fuzziness associated with randomness. The best part is, all you need to build this luck machine are a bunch of donkeys and yo-yos.

Excursus on hard problems and intelligence: At this point, it seems necessary to circumscribe some semantics. The problem addressed here is the inference problem, that is to predict the causal evolution of the real world through time and space faster than it actually occurs in order to influence said evolution in a desirable manner. The required form of inference can be achieved by building a model of the real world and by performing “efficient computational operations“ on an executable version of the model, which can be described by intelligence. Computational operations in theory could be arbitrarily complex but their complexity is limited in practice by available resources and mechanisms for which efficiently computable algorithms are known. These constraints arguably imply an upper ceiling of intelligence that is hard to circumvent. However, the computational notion of intelligence as used in this article is a pragmatic approximation of a potentially more “true“ intelligence. Similarly, the computational notion of intelligence differs from the shrouded concept of rare exceptional forms of “true“ intelligence as allegedly shown by, e.g., Einstein when he imagined the scene of a falling painter or later a man in an elevator falling freely in space, a scene which he transformed by some unknown intelligent procedures into the theory of general relativity. Like Einstein, Newton had his apple which became the law of gravitation, and Descartes had his fly on the wall which became the coordinate system linking algebra and geometry. While there is historic evidence of the phenomenon of “true” intelligence, there seemingly is no known computational notion of intelligence available today that is equivalent to such transformative procedures that resemble “true“ intelligence, working e.g., by enabling metaphors between a scene from the physical world and a useful (semi-)formal system efficiently describing the physical world. Such metaphor-based intelligent mechanisms and others are not yet fully explainable and expressible in computational terms. While “truly“ intelligent mechanisms would possibly be an effective way to solve the inference problem as well, their concepts have not yet crystallized and as a consequence it is not clear whether or not corresponding computational algorithms can be found and executed easily. Such algorithms could be a fierce competition for the proposed luck machine, as their realization of a more “true“ intelligence could possibly help to find novel solutions of larger scope more effectively. Rather, the luck machine employs known concepts that can be executed by systems today utilizing readily available forms of intelligence unlike Einstein’s, Newton’s, and Descartes’. If all systems could humanize or otherwise employ “truly“ intelligent mechanisms similar to the working in the minds of these exceptional beings, there would be no need for the luck machine. But let’s be real here.

It also has to be mentioned that the luck machine is available in different sizes. One will be able to rely on a perfectly sized luck machine specific to a problem, whether it is for personal use, or to solve problems of groups of people, organizations, and societies. But let’s look at the most basic version first, which needs only one donkey and one yo-yo to operate.

But why a donkey? A donkey is definitely not a majestic horse, does not resemble its beauty and elegance. The horse is the intelligent man. The horse parades at different speeds and styles, knows tricks and stars in scenic photographs. On the contrary, the donkey is stubborn in its mind and essence. It slowly walks in one direction, undemanding. The donkey does not really die, but rather it is replaced by another one that does its job. It is the executing military man that receives directives as a frame of reference best not to reflected about. That is the donkey in all is usefulness. There is nothing unclear about the donkey, you put on it some weight in one place to be carried to another place, which it does effortless.

But why a yo-yo? A yo-yo is a nifty gadget. It starts with a massive amount of energy only to unleash a force into a fatal direction before being coerced to return into its high energy state. At both extremes of the yo-yo’s path its movement becomes unstable. Naturally, the yo-yo wants to leave these states, as remaining would mean to accumulate error instead of energy, with a dooming prospect of a speedy breakdown. At its high energy state, the yo-yo condenses all possible paths to take. It simultaneously harbors the potential to explore them all. And yet, the yo-yo is useless and boring in this state. Its options are meaningless phantasies that drift unguided in an empty space as it would require considerable effort to imagine, yet alone implement them all. Now here is the strange thing. As the yo-yo approaches the bottom of its path where excess energy is spent, the yo-yo is actually in a duality state of yo-yo and donkey. That is just the nature of things. In this state, the yo-yo is similar to a whip which is the aspect of a donkey providing directions. It takes relatively little to change the donkeys direction, and generally the whip has enough excess energy to do the job. But while a simple whip is a cruel device, there can be beauty in the movements of a yo-yo, since in between its high and low energy state, the yo-yo completes all kinds of tricks. 

Hold your horses – that is insane. How in the world do donkeys and yo-yos assemble in the luck machine? Here is the answer. The luck machine is a systematic device made from operative and strategic parts. On the one hand, donkeys implement the operative ways of execution, the interface to real world entropy. They are the ones solving problems in reality directly linked to time and space. However, they would blindly march into chaos along predetermined events on a fateful course without alternative and narrative. On the other hand, yo-yos implement the strategic side of the machine. They are making decisions about what paths to take, what solution to try, and how to implement them. 

Now, as yo-yos lift themselves into the imaginative space of possibilities, some of their freedom is predetermined by the previous cycle. There is an end position and an energy state that the yo-yo approaches after a trick. Building on the previous one, now only a nudge is required for the yo-yo to start its next run. For that nudge, only a tiny spec of intelligent guidance is needed. The rest is augmented by luck – in the sense that, if the scope of luck is constrained, it take on the role of intelligence (i.e., if the numbers that can be picked in a lottery are constrained to only the winning ones, it is easy to make an intelligent decision randomly). Likewise, the next trick of the yo-yo is constrained, as was the previous, because the donkey is aware of all the starting parameters in a world that would otherwise be infused with randomness. In the world of the donkey, it is easy to transform a vision into reality, as there is only one direction to take. The power of luck can be harnessed because chaos breaks down on the short path that the yo-yo takes between its high energy state and turning into a donkey. Embedded in an endless cycle, a corresponding decision is pretty reliable on the short term. The donkey confines the exploration through luck and limited intelligence by the yo-yo while the yo-yo guides the exploitation of rigorous blindness. Together, they solve hard problems in a systematic way.

Ideally, the donkey and the yo-yo would work in parallel with a feedback loop and not in sequence, but the approximation is fine as long as there are fast enough iterations of a short yo-yo going up and down while the donkey moves. Now, unless the yo-yo goes infinitely fast, the luck-machine will not always produce the optimal solution, but it should produce pretty good results. Likewise, the luck machine can be best seen as a pragmatic controller permanently acting on a system instead of a one shot device.

If you want longer-term solutions you might be tempted just use a longer yo-yo, but be aware that the longer the yo-yo travels, the further it moves away from the augmenting effects of the donkey, which implies that an increasing need for “true“ intelligence emerges as you can no longer rely on luck. (You just have to be a better yo-yo player, gravity will no longer do all the work for you.) But these are the small details of parametrization best left to the users of the luck machine. The luck machine is available with standard settings, messing with them is possible at your own risk.

Of course, the luck-machine can also be scaled in size. It is possible to employ an army of donkeys lead by one yoyo, but with every yo-yo added there is an increasing chance of entanglement. Also keep in mind that the donkeys needs to eat, sleep, and fuck from time to time, otherwise the donkey gets bored after which it might no longer obey its path and the machine breaks. Keeping an army of donkeys happy is an equal challenge to keeping the yo-yos disentangled.

Critics might say the luck machine is made from snake oil rather than donkeys and yo-yos. It would certainly be an outrageous claim, as only the advertised components could deliver the properties of the luck machine:

• Reduced Risk and Cost – Runs with averagely intelligent yo-yo operators while producing the long-term effects equivalent to employing multiple Einsteins.
• Stackable – A donkey going from point A to point B can become another machine’s yo-yo going up and down; and vice-versa.
• Lean Reuse – Through abstraction, the tricks that make up the wild paths of a yo-yo in one machine can be freely used by another.
• Action as Answer – The luck machine is not a meta-level uselessness but an instance level application. Neither is it a reactive device, but rather a proactive one.

However, there is also a small risk to using the luck machine. It essentially draws its power from a cleverly&luckily reduced solution space. The risk is that optimal solutions lie outside that space. In a paradox of efficiency this can lead to diminishing or even negative returns. The best example is the introduction of the potato in Europe, which was one of the few instances a luck machine failed, even tho it could be argued that it was the operators fault. The potato is a masterpiece of nature that can feed a whole population. It seems only reasonable that the yo-yos in the luck machine drove the donkeys to plant as many potatoes as they could. However, this efficiency became optimized inefficiency when a potato monoculture emerged that specialized molds gobbled up at a rapid rate leading to many cruel deaths. Doing the same trick all over again is not the spectacular point of a yo-yo.

In case you wonder from time to time if you are the donkey or the yo-yo in the machine, just be aware that both are equally needed parts in a machine that easily breaks, often leading to explosions equal in force to 801 atomic bombs. And also keep in mind that one man’s donkey is another man’s yo-yo, in a cyclic hierarchy of dependencies.

The metaphor of the yo-yo implies also another thing: it takes effort to move the yo-yo. An external energy. Sometimes the yo-yo is relaxed and sometimes it is stressed. It is most stressed whenever it changes direction. Being able to freely switch between stressed and relaxed, between up and down, is the essence of the luck machine. Fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae. Every man is an artisan to his own fortune.