Unusual

The link below will direct you to [name's] login page, our 3rd party background agency, where you will be asked to enter your package ID, login, and password information to complete an online authorization form. You will be asked to provide the following information, and may be contacted to provide additional details, if needed, during the verification process:

I scan down the bullet points of my background check form. Its a sad fact that a person as innocent as I am in the eyes of the law finds situations such as these a touch nerve-wracking.

• All previous residences for the past seven (7) years.

I sigh and begin counting on my fingers. I had realized previously that I move around often, but I had not realized how often. Even not counting my bouts of sleeping on friend's couches or being legitimately homeless, I have had no less than 18 changes of primary mailing address over the aforementioned period.

"Well," Bobby laughed, "Guess that sucks for whoever has to process your background check doesn't it?"

I find it bizarre to try to reach back in my mind to my freshman year of college and remember which apartment I subleased a room in for a month between jobs. It isn't long until I am pouring through my inbox to try to find old shipping and billing invoices for online orders. A few addresses still evade my knowledge, and it isn't long after that that I am walking my old towns from millions of miles away in Google StreetView, carefully hoping to locate a house number.

I submit the form only to realize I forgot to list my Hong Kong address but the system is locked and can not be edited.

I can't imagine what this looks like. I'm perfectly aware that I live in a society where we are all boiled down to a calculated risk in all facets of life, and that the mathematically correct thing to do for less certain statistical predictions is to plan for the worst. I'm aware I'm an anomaly and therefore there will be less people who they have data on who are like me, and thus less data to use to make predictions about people like me, and therefore the computer will default to a safe bet of me being high-risk. That might be just as well, as I am not sure many people who walk this particular path come out the better for it. At least they don't know definitively that my population segment is high-risk.

You could consider the whole world a genetic algorithm if you wanted to. Ideas which work get passed on for other people to emulate, and people who try ideas that are too outlandish and dumb don't get an opportunity to try them twice.

This model is nearly perfect, but there is a catch. The problem arises from the fact that people are conscious and aware of the fact that unusual behavior is considered high-risk behavior, and we are living in a time where people go through a lot to avoid such "risky" behavior.

At Torii we are beginning outreach efforts to the local community. I keep bringing up a Tinker School model, and everybody is smiling until the photograph of a 10 year old kid with a power drill.

"You can't give the kids power tools."

"Why not?"

"They could get hurt."

"Can you explain to me how a child will do permanent damage to himself with a cordless drill or a hammer and nails?"

They never can, but the discussion is always closed anyway. Nobody wants to get sued, and everybody believes that if their program introduces engineering with popsicle sticks and masking tape that they will be safer.

"I tried to make a genetic algorithm which would play blackjack in online casinos and make me money while I did my undergrad," the man said. He's sitting at the front desk of the Torii late at night, staring off into the distance a little bit.

"Oh?"

"Yes, I taught it the rules of the game and then programmed them to play against a programmed dealer. Each generation I gave the virtual players 1000 dollars of imaginary money and at the end of each generation ranked them by who had the most money. I took the two most successful ones and one which was dead medium and created a next generation from them."

"And what happened?"

"The computer gave up on beating Vegas. All the algorithms always would stay, they would never hit, and they would bet the absolute minimum bet. They were just basically trying to live as long as possible in a losing game."

He paused, then laughed a little, "I guess I deserved it, what was I doing making a whole new generation of solutions from only three parent ideas?"

This fear ruins the diversity of the algorithm, and as any loser computer science master's student will tell you, this will cause the algorithm to believe it has reached the global maximum when it has in fact settled on a random local maxima. Another way to say it might be that if you want to do better than your average peer, you probably need to do something a little different.

I'll get my background check back in about a week. I can't imagine I'm unusual enough to make myself anything other than a funny little curioisity, but I suppose I will find out.