7 July 2002

Hussain Rizvi quotes Khwaja Ghulam-us Sayyidain: "Instead of laying out beforehand plans of what the child is to be and to do and what learning and skills are to be taught to him—that is, casting him in a preconceived mould—the school must recognize that every child is a unique and vigorous little individual who has to be consulted, as it were, about his own future and allowed to shape his own course of development under tactful and understanding guidance." 7:30:58 PM     Real education is about the thrill of discovery Richard Dawkins savages "the stifling effects of exams, and the government obsession with measuring a school's performance by them" in this weekend's Guardian.  By comparison, he relates several stories of F. W. Sanderson, a 19th-century headmaster who, for example, left the doors to the chemistry labs and workshops unlocked so pupils could work on their own projects as they wished. Needless to say, this led to a few, er, accidents, and eventually Sanderson was forced to lock the rooms again.  But he had established such a culture of enquiry and action that disappointed pupils just started studying locks instead.  "We made skeleton keys for all Oundle... For weeks we used the laboratories and workshops as we had grown accustomed to use them, but now with a keen care of the expensive apparatus and with precautions to leave nothing disorderly to betray our visits.  It seemed that the head saw nothing; he had a great gift for assuming blindness -- until Speech Day came round, and then we were amazed to hear him, as he beamed upon the assembled parents, telling them the whole business, 'And what do you think my boys have been doing now?'" It seems the Hacker Ethic goes back further than we thought. 7:20:33 PM     Zbigniew Michalewicz and David B Fogel, "How to Solve It" Despite the title, this is not really in the tradition of Polya's classic.  Whereas Polya offered a toolkit of intellectual strategies for tackling problems, Michalewicz and Fogel focus on computational strategies for intractable problems, primarily optimisation problems.  However, like Polya's work, this is far from a simple cookbook.  It offers an armoury of heuristic techniques for your toolbox, but stresses that they are strategies and concepts rather than trying to offer you a canned implementation.  When you consider that, for example, neural network get just one chapter out of 15, it's clear that the authors are trying to give you breadth not depth. That said, I did think there was too much focus on the authors' three specimen problems (satisfiability, the travelling salesman problem and non-linear programming).  It would have been nice to see the techniques applies to a wider range of problems.  To be fair, though, the specimen problems are representative of a pretty wide field of intractable problems, so the information on applying strategies to particular problems should be applicable to the majority real-world situations. So well worth reading alongside, not instead of Polya.  Polya will help you figure out how to use the tools at your disposal, but Michaewicz and Fogel will help you ensure you have the most up-to-date tools. 7:01:35 PM

© Copyright 2002 Ivan Towlson. Last update: 26/7/02; 00:11:34.