EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
Unexpected happens in life more often than the expected.
A old story of a gold miner. He spent his entire life searching for the big nugget of gold that would make him a rich man. One day, as he was chipping away at a large piece of rock with his hammer, he decided he had had enough. Thirty five years and still he was struggling to make ends meet. So he threw away the rock, laid down the hammer and left the mine for ever. The next morning, a young man on his first day on the job picked up the large rock that old miner had thrown away. He noted that much of the chipping had already been done, so decided to take one good hard crack at it. Upon so doing, the young man could not believe what happened. The rock split into two, revealing the largest piece of gold, any of the old miners had ever seen. The young man struck it rich simply because the old miner had not had the wisdom and courage to persist until he got what be expected. The young man was jubilant to have an unexpected bonanza.
A person can unexpectedly turn into a threat to the humanity. International Criminal Court convicted Dominic Ongwen, commander of Lord Resistance Army. Dominic Ongwen, aged 45 was found guilty of 61 charges over a reign of terror in the period of 2000s. Ongwen ordered attacks on refugee camps as a Senior Commander of LRA, which under its fugitive chief Joseph Kony waged a bloody campaign in four African nations to set up a state, based on Bible's Ten Commandments. Ongwen was convicted of charges including murder, rape, sexual enslavement and the conscription of child soldiers. Ongwen was himself a victim, a child soldier as he had been abducted by the LRA at the age of nine and suffered psychological damage as a result. The court is aware that he suffered much. However, the case is about crimes committed by Dominic Ongwen as a responsible adult and as Commander of the LRA. The LRA was founded by a Catholic altar boy and self styled prophet Kony, who launched a bloody rebellion in northern Uganda against president Yoweri Museveni. The United Nations says that LRA killed more than 100,000 people, and abducted 60000 children in a campaign of violence in three African nations, Sudan, the democratic republic of Congo and the Central African republic. People could not believe that a child soldier would grow as an evil force and became a big terror to the humanity. A horrible and unexpected happening.
In a popular game show in TV, the contestant was asked about 'Ramanujan Machine'. It is an algorithm developed by researchers from Israel Institute of Technology. It is not a machine, but s concept named after Indian mathematician. Srinivasa Ramanujan. Generally, people provide the input and algorithm finds the solution. Ramanujan Machine reverses the process. It reminds a story of mid 1950s. It was about a shoe company in Kanpur. Towards the end of 19th century Sir John Burney Allens established a group of companies under the banner of British India Corporation with head quarters at Kanpur. The Flex Shoe company was one of the companies of the group, went bad.
The story goes like this, a Harvard educated enterprising proprietor imported a machine which could convert cattle into shoes. They had to herd in sheep and goats from one end and beautiful shoes would emerge from the other, to be put into boxes and shipped to marketing outlets. In today's terminology, it would be called Artificially Intelligent machine. One fine Sunday morning, the neighborhood of the factory found the streets infested with sheep and goats. The police investigated and found that a night watchman, in his drunken revelry. had switched on the factory's engine in the reverse mode. It had sucked in the stack of shoes stored nearby and out came sheep and goats from the wrong end. Although it is an imaginary episode, few inventions bring us unexpected results some times.
'To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.' - Oscar Wilde.
