Algorithm - the beginning of AI

Simple solution - choose diversity over efficiency.

'Data through Illumination'

Here's the hardware - just need the software so the lights can talk to each other:

Insight into Networking and Scaling

Scalability = Accelerating Continuous Innovation: In order to scale, you must continue to innovate at a faster and faster pace...

Flow - Inspiration #4: Design

Designing a software (p. 72):

"What makes these activities conducive to flow is that they were designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve. They have rules that [1] require the learning of skills, they [2] set up goals, they [3] provide feedback, they [4] make control possible."

Flow - Inspiration #3: User Enjoyment

Understanding the below should help us better to understand user enjoyment so that we can design a software that will encompass some of the philosophy (p. 46):

"Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectations or satisfied a need or a desire but also gone beyond what he or she has been programmed to do and achieved something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined before.... Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment."

(p. 49)

"...the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following."

1) The experience usually occurs when the users confront tasks they have a chance of completing

2) Users must be able to concentrate on what they are doing

3) The task underwritten has clear goals

4) The task provides immediate feedback

5) Users act with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life

6) Allow the users to exercise a sense of control over their actions

7) Concern for the self disappears, yet, the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over

8) The sense of the duration of time is altered

(p. 52)

"In all the activities people in our study reported engaging in, enjoyment comes at a very specific point, whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities."

(p. 57)

"The kind of feedback [the users] work toward is in and of itself often unimportant... What makes this information valuable is the symbolic message it contains: that [the users] have succeeded in [their] goals."

(p. 61)

"...what people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations."

(p. 67)

"The key element of an optimal experience is that it is an end in itself. Even if initially undertaken for other reasons, the activity that consumes [the users] becomes intrinsically rewarding."