I have not posted something in the "meaning of life" category for some time now. I have a bunch of things to say. I will say each individually and in the end connect them all. :)

Weighted Sum of Energies

I am a strong believer in thoughts have power - when you think of something you exert an energy for that to happen. If your energy is strong enough you would cause it to happen. But wait! you are not the only one thinking! Yes, everyone's thought have power, when I think of something I execute energy in one direction, when you think different of the samething you exert energy in a different direction. The net movement is in the sum of the two energies. Say person A's energy moves it 1 unit to the left and person B's energy moves it to 1000 units to the right. The object happens in the right direction (no pun intended :)). Where your energy comes from - is a whole different question - I think it comes from a range of things, your confidence, actions etc..

The movement of events in the world are a weighted sum of all our "energies" (as referred above).

Non-Greedy Optimization

Here is a thought I had. Have you ever heard people say "its for the best" - when something happens, and things seem to have gone wrong for you. When someone says "its for the best" what they mean is for some reason beyond your comprehension this was the best thing that could have happened to you. May be if what ever this event was, did not happen, something worse could have happened.

Say you are working in a graph problem:
You have 4 nodes A, B, C and D.
A is connected to B, with a cost of going from A to B = 1 unit
A is connected to C, with a cost of going from A to C = 10 units
B is connected to D, with a cost of going from B to D = 100 units
C is connected to D, with a cost of going from C to D = 1 unit

You start at A and your final destination is D. You want to minimize cost. You don't know all the costs in advance. You go to a node, and you learn about the costs of visiting other nodes from there.

So, you start at A, and you look at the costs for going to B and C. They are 1 and 10 units respectively, so you would decide that B is the better option, only to later let it cost you much heavier. The journey from A to B to D would have costed you 110 units.

The best way would be, to start at A, choose to go to C, even though it is a higher cost, you would experience a much lower cost from C to D. The whole journey would have costed you 11 units.

Thats 110 Vs 11 units!

I believe this is how our life is. We are at a node, there are a whole range of things that can happen. Something bad seems to happen, and we feel depressed, but I believe its part of a greater optimization algorithm which due to our ignorance we don't realize (and may never)...like the case above, if from A you are forced to take path C, you might feel angered...it cost you more!! but only so that in the end you have a cheaper (better) journey.

Let's try to combine them

The flip side to the second thought is of course, does this mean everything is pre-determined? Well, I think that would make everything somewhat pointless....if everything were predetermined...why!? why do we exist? what can be found...everything is already known. There is no point to anything!

I know there can be arguments against that, since my arguments assume some rationality and things like this is not some crazy experiment conducted for fun by some higher being etc...but thats just a bit too crazy for me to believe in...and I'd rather stick to my thoughts :)

So, here is what I think might be happening. Let me do some defintions to explain my idea:
Entity: An entity can be a person, animal, thing...who knows what else.
Nodes: Nodes are events and things like that. Entities traverse nodes.

An entity traverses through the nodes. The twist is, the nodes don't have static costs. The costs of the nodes vary based on the thoughts of the entities. There is a direct connection between all nodes. The cost of some of them may be really high (think infinity), making them impossible for the optimization algorithm thats running to choose those nodes. But, since the costs between the nodes are based on the thoughts of entities - the energy that they exert - an entity can potentially make a path from a node A to B where it did not exist (i.e reduce the cost from infinity to zero or what ever that works out to be the best).

There you have it! Thats one of my tries/theories to undestand on how our world works under the category of "meaning of life"

There are many more things I want to say, that are starting to come up in my mind...but I have to end this somewhere and its getting late, so I'll end this post here. I hope that was not too intense and that I did not scare any one away...haha... :)

Labels: philosophy, random

Laziness (to post) has been overpowering me for sometime now...I overcome that laziness now and present to you - LanHat: A LAN chat application. You can chat with other users on your network without the need for a central server/internet connection.

So, what do you do?

Scenario 1: Say you're an administrator in a local company and you want to allow your employees to talk to each other, but don't want to/can't give them internet access. They have 3 options now:
- Phone: you're in the same office! unless your office is big, you wouldn't do this. Moreover, this may be complex to implement in small offices, or its just too burdensome to call people (phone is just a hassle)
- Email: You can always send one line emails...emails are not really built for this kind of thing, they are for something more complex
- Face-to-face: Always the best, but its time consuming...say you wanna ask a friend if s/he's ready to go for lunch, you can walk there, and then s/he could say 10 more minutes....aww, what a waste, your work flow just broke

What is the solution? Chat!! You could just use MSN, Google Talk etc... or LanHat!

What is different about LanHat? With MSN, Google Talk etc, you need to have access to the internet, and it may even seem unprofessional (especially MSN of the two). LanHat can operate without internet connection (in fact it has no need for it). The only thing, the computers in the chat have to be in the same network. LanHat's interface does not show ads or a whole lot of "flashy" things to keep it simple and professional.

LanHat is in its beginning versions now and supports the basic features of chat. It will evolve to support advanced features (such as file transfers etc) when the time is right and when it is deemed as necessary/relevant.

You can download LanHat V. 0.0.1 from here (in reality its 0.0.2...but this is how we start!):
lanhat.zip

To sum it up,

LanHat is a simple and intuitive chat application that allows users in the same network to chat with each other without the need for internet access, or account registration. It has a small memory footprint and low cpu usage.

Other scenarios (feel free to suggest additions to the scenarios :D):

Scenario 2: Everyone in your family is in a different room (say in different floors!), and you want to ask something to someone, but don't want to leave your spot, LanHat's here to help. Whats wrong with MSN here? There is no need for account creations or any such hassle with LanHat.

Scenario 3...N: Soon to come!

Labels: LanHat, learning