Algorithms vs lookup tables

I have been working on a science fiction novel for some years now.  I haven't gotten particularly far with it, and I rather doubt that it will ever even be finished.  However, it, in a roundabout way, prompted the idea for this essay.  I suppose the only reason that I am mentioning it is because it is an example of a contention that I have that pretty much any kind of thinking can prompt some useful ideas, and that if you are stuck on something, start thinking about something else.  Generally speaking, thinking about something else will prompt some ideas about what you think you are supposed to be thinking about.

(I don't really have an awful lot of sympathy for those who profess to be afflicted by writer's block.  I can't really say that I have ever been afflicted with writers block.  Maybe I just don't have enough experience, but I do have an awful lot of experience in writing, and in doing all kinds of writing.  Like I said, generally speaking, if you get stuck and can't move forward with a particular piece of writing, then start thinking and writing about something else.  Very often writing about something else leads to thinking about, or some ideas about, whatever it is that you think you're supposed to be writing about.)

The idea that came to me was one that I have frequently had when I have been teaching about technology, and frequently at a very high level.  I am old.  Old people are not supposed to be in the forefront of technology.  And, indeed, I cannot claim that I am in the forefront of any particular field of technology.  But I am teaching those who are.  And one of the things that I have realized, over the years, is that being up on the latest technology is not as important as having a foundation on the basics of technology.  Understanding that knowing the latest app, or programming language, or agentic process with artificial intelligence, or the most recent technology architecture technology with regard to quantum computers, isn't as important as understanding the basics of the bulk of the architecture that is in use today.  As Newton said, we see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants.  We have to understand where we are in order to see where we can get to.

But this is a broad and general outlook.  The particular idea that came to me was one that goes back to a course that I took on machine and assembly language processing, and the building of functions with hardware circuitry.  When you were designing at this most fundamental level, programming with direct machine language, rather than using a higher level language to speed up the process, you start to understand that there are two ways of doing anything: using an algorithm, or using a lookup table.

Computers do arithmetic with binary arithmetic.  When we want to get an answer from a computer, however, we ask it to present it to us in decimal, which is what *we* are used to using.  So, if you are not just calling for functions from a programming language, you have to build your own conversions from binary numbers to binary coded decimal.  There are two ways that you can do that.  You can use the algorithms that will convert a binary number into pieces that can then be used to display decimal numbers on the screen.  Or, you can simply create a lookup table, and directly convert the binary number into a series of pieces that can be displayed on the screen.

Whether you choose an algorithm or a lookup table will depend on how much work you were doing, and partly on how much processing time is going to be used by the algorithm versus simply using a lookup table.  Partly this is determined by the size of the numbers that you were working with.  There are going to be some situations where an algorithm is far superior, but there are also going to be situations where a lookup table is much quicker and easier, not only to create, but also to use.

And I as I was thinking about this fact, I realized that the current grand interest in artificial intelligence, the large language model, is created using neural networks, Bayesian analysis, and Markov chains.  But that is what we use to *create* the large language model, itself.  When we *use* the large language model, the large language model is acting as an enormous lookup table.  An enormously complicated lookup table, it is true.  But, in the end, it is merely a lookup table.  This explains a lot of the limitations of large language models.

Looking back through the history of artificial intelligence, lookup tables feature very prominently.  ELIZA, or doctor, one of the earliest successful artificial intelligence programs, used a lookup table, although the lookup table was used to discard parts of language that were not essential, allowing the program to concentrate on the more important and relevant aspects of a conversation and therefore appear to be very wise in its questioning of its clients.  Expert systems are a rather odd kind of lookup table, using a binary tree to ask yes and no questions to get to the basis of an answer for a particular expert field.

Current large language model artificial intelligence systems are incredibly expensive, require enormous data centers to operate, and have a voracious appetite for stupendous quantities of energy.  To put it bluntly, they are incredibly wasteful.  They are massively expensive, contribute to e-waste, and are going a long way to driving global warming.  We need to change things.

We need to look at some efficiencies here.  And, in the same way that dealing with very large numbers when we are trying to code binary numbers into decimal representation, we need to stop thinking about lookup tables, and start thinking about the more efficient, in the long term and on the large scale, algorithms.

We need to stop playing around with systems that use enormous amounts of computer hardware, and massive amounts of energy to drive them, in order to give us some interesting but possibly not important results.  We need to start looking at the algorithms of actual intelligence.  What are we actually doing when we are thinking.  How are *our* thinking processes adaptable to silicon hardware.

And so we come full circle in this essay.  We have developed writer's block for ourselves by focusing too long on lookup tables in creating our artificial intelligence.  It is time for us to look at, and do the harder work in creating, the algorithms necessary to develop true artificial intelligence.

AI topic and series

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/01/ai-000-intro-table-of-contents.html

MGG - 2.0a - Teaching - sailing, lightning at Gull Lake

(By the time that I remembered to write this up, I couldn't figure out whether it properly belongs with teaching, or with stories about work.  So, in terms of what has already been posted on the blog, it more easily fits here in the numbering scheme, so we'll leave it here, and see if anything happens later.)

As noted with the story about scouting, I had some experiences with outdoor education before I actually got into the formal education system as a teacher.  One of the experiences was that I was asked to be a sailing instructor at Gull Lake Baptist Camp in Alberta for a summer.  I hadn't lived in Alberta for any time prior to this, although I had visited for brief times, so it was interesting to learn the difference between living in a rain forest, and living on the prairies.

While I had done a lot of volunteering as a camp counselor in summer residential kids camps, this was my first experience as sort of full-time summer program staff for such a camp.  We didn't have to bunk in with the kids as full-time staff, so we did have our own accommodation.  I bunked in with another one of the male full-time staff, the two of us in a small, four room, log cabin.  The log cabin was constructed of cottonwood logs, and was definitely showing evidence of the reason that very few people build log cabins out of cottonwood logs.  Living in a rainforest I am familiar with the number of different types of tree species, and particularly those that can be cut up for firewood.  Cottonwood is unique in my experience in that it goes directly from a water logged state, to being rotten punk wood, with no indeterminate state of being useful for, well, pretty much anything.

One of the interesting aspects of living on the prairies was that of thunderstorms.  It's not the thunderstorms don't happen in the rainforest: these days we have constant evidence of the fact that thunderstorms can ignite wildfires in remote locations, which can make it very difficult to deal with those fires.  However, living in a rainforest, even on an island, thunderstorms are relatively few along the coast, and, in other places, generally don't happen where they are visible to you.  So, this was the first time that I had the experience of being able to see lightning storms, and be reasonably certain of being able to see a lightning strike, even if that lightning strike was several miles away across the lake and fields.  Another of the staff who was interested in photography and I went down to the lakeshore one night, when there was a thunderstorm that was striking on the other side of the lake, and we were accompanied by my housemate, who was terrified of the fact that we were down on the beach, obviously the highest point on the beach, and therefore, in his mind, subject to lightning strikes, even though the lightning was striking on the other side of the lake.

But there was another thunderstorm incident that was closer to home, as it were.  We were having a staff meeting, which happened to be held in the log cabin that was my residence, when we heard a thunder that happened at the same time as a brilliant flash of light.  This obviously meant that the lightning strike had been relatively close to us, and presumably somewhere on the camp.  So we all spilled out of the cottage, and had a quick look around all the buildings that were on the property, noting that none of them showed any evidence of lightning strikes.  When we reassembled back at my log cabin, we realized that one of the trees, immediately outside an unused door, showed evidence of missing bark and missing splinters of wood, which seemed to be evidence that it was a lightning strike.  When we examined more closely, we realized that there was heat damage to a clothesline that ran from the tree to a post holding up a small covering over the doorway, and then noticed that from that particular post, the handrail beside the door also showed some damage and missing splinters of wood.  When we got back inside the house, we found that, yes, the lightning strike had entered the house, and blown out a chunk of plaster--immediately behind the chair in which I had been sitting during our meeting.

I should note that the time as sailing instructor was not without incident itself.  The sport of sailing is not unknown on the prairies, but nobody in the camp had any experience with sailing or sailboats.  Therefore, when they were deciding what kind of boats to buy for the sailing program, they had simply asked another organization what boats they had recently purchased.  The boats in question shall not be named because it is probably unfair to tarnish their reputation given the problems with one particular model of their sailing craft.  These particular boats constantly surprised me, all summer long, with different ways that they had to injure or kill you.  The first thing that we learned was that the two-piece molded fiberglass construction was joined together with channel rail, and that the channel rail had extremely sharp edges, with no attempt to cover those edges.  Therefore, when we were lifting the boats on and off the beach, an awful lot of the kids got cut fingers handling the boats.  Eventually we developed a number of safety protocols for the use of these boats.  One of the rules was that no camper was to be allowed to hoist the boats in or out of the water.  Another was that no camper was to be allowed in the boats without an adult who had at least some experience with sailing with them.  We found that the sailboats would not sail without their jib actually in place.  We found that this sailboats would not sail if only the jib was in place, and if the mainsail was not operable as well.  We found that the boats were extremely slippery, and that the seating, on the gunnels, was not stable and that it was quite easy for anyone who was on board and sitting on the gunnel to slip off the gunnel and fall overboard.  We also found that it was quite easy for the boats to turn turtle, as the term has it, turning completely upside down.  Generally speaking it was relatively easy to bring the boat upright again by standing on the bottom of the gunnel, grasping the center board, and using your weight to bring the mast back up.  But on one occasion, when we were doing that, in the middle of the lake, I was not able to move the boat to an upright position, or bring the mast up at all.  I was sailing with the camp director on that particular occasion, and observed that I had never seen this particular inability to right the boat.  He suggested that the mast was stuck in the bottom of the lake.  I observed that the mast was only eighteen feet high, and surely the middle of Gull Lake was not that shallow.  He nodded thoughtfully at my observation, and then repeated, maybe the mast is stuck at the bottom of the lake.  When we got the boat back upright, and observed mud on the top of the mast, we verified that his assumption had been correct.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/01/mgg-20-scouts-beans-and-explosions.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-21-teaching.html

Sermon 89 - Purple Peacock

First indications that my purple peacock plants might produce this year.

Sermon 89 - Purple Peacock

John 12:24

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.  But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

I have never actually bought seeds for purple peacock beans.  I was given four pods by a fellow gardener one time.  Instead of eating the beans, I opened up the pods, extracted the beans, dried them, and later used them as seed.

Purple peacock beans grow, cook up, and can be eaten like green beans.  They have a slightly tougher outer skin, and a slightly milder flavor.  The outer skin is purple, but, if you cook the beans, some of the purple color disappears, and you tend to end up with either a mottled or striated mix of purple and green, which can be quite colorful depending upon the recipe you cook them in.

A couple of years ago I planted some purple peacock beans in a mixed garden patch.  I planted two of the seeds beside two very large sunflower plants.  I had a large number of poles stuck randomly around the garden.  Purple peacock plants grow quickly and prolifically, generating a large number of tendrils, and twining around and over pretty much everything.  They spend a long time producing vines and leaves, and it's only after a few months of producing vines and greenery that you finally get a few small purplish flowers.

I have, elsewhere, written a sermon or devotional about broad beans as an example of God's Providence.  Purple peacock beans don't produce edible material in quite the same variety as broad beans do, but purple peacock beans definitely surpass broad beans in terms of actually producing food.

I probably planted five purple peacock plants in that mixed garden.  The greenery overtook pretty much the entire garden.  When once the beans started to produce, I probably took, at a conservative estimate, five kilograms of beans off each plant.  I could have taken more, if I had allowed the pods to grow to their full size, and if I had maintained a regular schedule of harvesting later into the season.

Jesus once spoke a parable about the importance of sacrifice, even the sacrifice of your own life.  He noted that a single seed was not very much, but that, when planted in the ground it died, but then produced a harvest, of thirty, or sixty, or even a hundred times the original grain.  The purple peacock beans that I planted outdid that by a considerable margin.  Each seed was approximately two grams in size.  Each plant produced at least five kilograms of food.  That's a 2500 times increase.

We can find other, even more prolific, examples.  An apple seed, less than a gram, can produce a tree which, after a few years, yields dozens of kilograms of apples every year.  And, of course, I have also, elsewhere, noted that God doesn't seem too concerned with efficiency.  God provides for us profligately, showering abundance on us.

Garden series

Sermon 2 - Broad Beans

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/01/sermon-2-broad-beans.html

Sermon 3 - Blackberries

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/01/sermon-3-blackberries.html

Sermon 33 - Transplanting

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/sermon-33-transplanting.html

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Fr2al8f0bNT9fTo1nYzwV

Sermon 57 - Leaven

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/02/sermon-57-leaven.html

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3oguUslGkpVxkiFlCjxeAj

Sermon 59 - Corn

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2025/03/sermon-59-corn.html

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1XxT0do4aFywpZPwPWrvHv

Sermon 83 - The Years the Locusts Have Eaten

https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2026/04/sermon-83-years-locusts-have-eaten.html

Sermons: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/09/sermons.html

Review of "Animal Farm" by Angel Studios

I have seen quite a number of productions by Angel Studios.  And I know the book "Animal Farm."  In fact, I have seen multiple movie or video adaptations of "Animal Farm."  So I was a bit surprised to see that Angel Studios would be doing a version of "Animal Farm." The productions by Angel Studios have happy endings.  "Animal Farm" does not have a happy ending.  George Orwell wasn't very big on happy endings.

But then the movie started, and I thought that this must be some different story, since the first animal we are introduced to is Lucky the pig.  I don't remember the part that Lucky the pig plays in George Orwell's "Animal Farm."  Oh, but wait.  Then we are introduced to Boxer, and Napoleon, and Snowball, and Farmer Jones, so maybe we *are* in Orwell's "Animal Farm."  Except that we also have some giant mega corporation buying a farm, and a drone, called Moses, which don't appear in "Animal Farm."

So it's confusing.

The story development of Orwell's "Animal Farm" proceeds pretty quickly, with Snowball being exiled, and Napoleon starting to take over.  (However, the allusions to the Russian revolution are a bit rushed, and therefore lost.)  Angel Studios is very heavily Christian oriented, so it isn't terribly surprising that the story relies less on political machination, and much more on temptation.

The plot of the original "Animal Farm" gets severely messed with, but the theme of new revolutionaries re-implementing the old dictatorship proceeds pretty much as it always did.  Electricity is good, then bad, then good ... and then maybe bad?  Then we get the ending of the "Animal Farm" book, but this movie doesn't finish.

Then we kind of go all "Animal *House*" for a while, and then we finally have a ... well a kind of an indeterminate ending, but I suppose that it could be *seen* as a happy ending.  At least there are a lot of warm and fuzzy sounding platitudes before we all sit and look at the stars, and consider that all the animals who went to the slaughterhouse could be coming back as stars.  Maybe.  Maybe you only come back as a star if you went to the glue factory instead of the laughterhouse.

The moral of the story is that farm markets are good, and wearing hazmat suits is evil.  (The reason why is too complicated for your little piggy brain.)

Or maybe that you can never go wrong as long as you remember that Snowb... Napo... Luck... Boxer is always right.  Except when he's wrong.

Or maybe that someone pretending to be your Dad is always evil.  But people who claim bast friend status are good.

Or maybe that astrology is based on your dead friends coming back as stars.

(Possibly Angel Studios should stick to making feel good films for adults, and avoid simplifying literature for kids.)

Branded Call Display

As it was turning off, my phone offered me branded call display.

That was all I could read before it shut off.  So, I was wondering why on earth I would want branded call display?  Was this something that would allow Norton to jump in whenever I got a spam telephone call, and announce that if I purchased Norton for my phone it would have diverted the call from Telemarketers-Backwards-R-Us?  Would Ford be allowed present the fact that if I purchased a new vehicle it would make the drive to Esther Singleton's house, at 3:25 Oak View Crescent, a distance of 2.7km, much more comfortable?

So I looked up branded call display, and found that, no, it wasn't my phone that would generate the display, but the idea that, if I was a company, I could purchase the fact that Call Display would no longer display the number that I was calling from (even if it was false), and would instead present the name of a company.  So I guess this is why so many recent spam and scam calls are coming to me from "British Columbia."

Review of "Deep Water," 2026, with Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley

"Deep Water" seems to be a very popular movie title, so I have to specify not only the year, but also the stars, since at least *two* movies of that name were released in 2026.

If you know anything about airplanes, aircraft design, water, aircraft flight paths, ocean waves, securing cargo on passenger aircraft, where Guam actually is, or water pressure, you will be annoyed by this film.  (I don't know much about sharks, but I presume that they got most of that wrong, too.)

Given the prevalence of screens and devices, and the fact that the whole thing is set off by a faulty device, it could be seen as an indictment of our modern screen-oriented society.  Or maybe just that smoking can kill you.  (In more ways than one.)

I don't know why Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley signed on to such an egregiously error-laden turkey, but I suppose anyone can make a mistake, and a lot of the goofs wouldn't be as obvious in script form.  (Kingsley gets to die relatively quickly.)

Here's looking at you ...

My computer has a camera.  As a security maven, I don't trust the software switch that turns the camera off (when I don't want it on), and have installed a shutter to physically block the camera.

Yesterday, when I went to start a virtual meeting, the shutter was still closed.  The computer, and the meeting software, warned me that something might be blocking the camera.

So, the computer can figure out that I've probably installed a shutter over the camera.

I'm not sure how I feel about that ...