Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Science, and just about everything else, continues to advance with the number of eyeballs on every problem.

Linus Torvalds is credited with saying:

Given enough eyeballs, are bugs (problems) are shallow

It is a simple concept: if many people are staring at a problem, at least one is likely to see the solution.

I left grad school in 1986 (yes, I am that old) to return to full-time work. I had much work ahead of me to finish my grad degree. I bought a home computer for $3,000. That is three thousand 1986 dollars which is like several million dollars today (perhaps I exaggerate inflation, but just a tad). That computer had just enough compute power for me to work through my research problem and graduate by the slimmest margin.

There weren’t many people in 1986 who could buy a $3,000 computer so they could stare at a problem in the evening and on weekends.

Today, $500 will buy a powerful computer. And that is five hundred 2014 dollars. If you need more computing power, get a one-year free trial of Amazon compute cloud, just one option of several, and run experiments on your problem there.

The number of people who can afford this approach to stare at a problem is maybe ten million times more than in 1986. I am not writing ten million people; I am writing ten million times more people.

The number of eyeballs has and continues to explode. No wonder the Google boys did what they did. The same for the Facebook boys and all the rest. And this goes behind computing and software and those things. The number of people who can write the next Harry Potter has exploded as well.

There isn’t anything new or earth shattering in this post. It is simple a reminder that we have plenty of problem solvers out there. And I am thankful for that because we have plenty of monumental problems out there.