One of these Things is not like the Others
Saturday July 10, 2021
This Nat must be an early riser. It’s not typical when arranging a rendezvous at the river to cut invasive water chestnuts to suggest a 5:30 am start, but it’s true that this way we’ll have the best use of high tide and it’s probably not a bad idea to beat the heat.
I met Nat at an informal gathering of volunteers to kick off the annual water chestnut wars a couple of weeks ago. A few years back the town purchased a gigantic clumsy pontoon boat with paddle wheels fitted out with an arrangement of sickle bars, conveyor belts and hydraulic pistons custom built for the purpose of harvesting floating water chestnut weeds and dumping them in piles to rot.
The team of volunteers is coordinated and cajoled by a dynamic Italian lady in her late 50s who organized the bring-your-own-beer meet-and-greet and who will later hand out awards at the end of the season for most loads cut, bravery shown in the face of thunderstorms on the river and so on. Everyone gets a prize.
I got involved partly because I love the river in its many moods and cutting weeds gives an excuse to get out on the water, and partly because I find it difficult to say ‘no’. It is this latter weakness that has landed me in a parked car at 5:30 am nursing a huge thermos cup of coffee and waiting for Nat to show up.
My phone rings. It’s Nat, who decided to walk to the park from his house a quarter mile down the river only to find that the tide is too high to make the shoreline walkable. He is heading inland, bushwhacking, but will be here in a few minutes.
Not a problem. I’m enjoying the coffee and it’s barely light enough to get started anyway. The river appears as an expanse of steel gray in the dimness, throwing nearer objects into silhouette. Trees, picnic tables, small stone benches scattered around overlooking the view.
A corny little jingle from a children’s television program has lodged itself in my mind and is playing over and over like a loop tape. ‘One of these things is not like the others / One of these things does not belong / Can you tell which thing is not like the others / By the time we finish our song?’
I actually never watched TV as a child, but I found old episodes of Sesame Street on YouTube after reading an article about Artificial Intelligence.
If you have been following recent developments in the quest to create an ‘artificial intelligence’ you will know that computer scientists have moved beyond algorithmic ‘if-then’ type logic and now use computer models that attempt to mimic the human brain. So-called ‘neural networks’ are composed of massive banks of computer chips wired in parallel that are capable of ‘learning’ after a fashion.
Neural networks have been taught to play chess, as well as an Asian game called ‘go’ which is apparently even more complex, and in both cases have won tournaments against the best human competitors.
Fascinatingly, in spite of their superior abilities in chess and go, these neural networks have a glaring weakness. They cannot be taught the concepts of ‘same’ and ‘different’. According to the article I read, thousands of examples of similar and dissimilar images were fed into these networks, tagged appropriately as ‘same’ and ‘different’.
Apparently this is the standard way to train such networks, and has been used to successfully teach them the difference between cats and dogs, pedestrians and street signs and so forth.
Sometimes it seemed that a network finally understood ‘sameness’, only to be defeated by subtle edits to images such as changing size or line thickness.
All of them failed miserably to identify the thing which was not like the others when shown past episodes of Sesame Street, something 95% of three-year-olds can achieve after watching only one or two examples.
I was intrigued, and as I said, went out and watched some episodes myself on YouTube. I have to say, I can empathize with the neural networks. In one case, a beanie cap with a propellor on top is presented alongside of three pairs of sunglasses. Each pair is a different color, and has differently shaped eye pieces: red hearts, blue stars, green circles.
Perhaps due to missing out on Sesame Street as a child, I struggled mightily in high school with multiple-choice aptitude tests which asked ‘which of the four following words does not fit with the others’? Andrew, Jimmy, Mary, John. Which could it be? Three are two-syllable words, so John. But also three appear in the bible, so Jimmy. Start with a consonant? Andrew? DANG! THINK! THINK! THINK!
Thinking about it now, I’m not sure I even understand sameness as an adult. If you substituted a pair of socks and a banana for two of the pairs of sunglasses in the original example, wouldn’t the banana be the odd one out? How can the hat sometimes be the same as the sunglasses and sometimes not?
The light is gradually growing, and I can see that the benches that were previously dim silhouettes are made of polished marble, vaguely reminiscent of tombstones. I wonder what’s taking Nat so long. Hopefully he didn’t get lost in the woods.
Pretty soon I’ll be able to make out the inscriptions: ‘In loving memory of Beatrice, painter, poet, wife.’ ‘To William: fisherman and friend. May we gather at the river’.
I’m reminded of one of those rabbinic tales.
A rabbi gathers his students and asks ‘when is the exact moment when the night has passed, and a new day has dawned?’
‘Is it’ asks one student, ‘when you can look across a valley and see the difference between a fig tree and an olive?’
‘Perhaps’ asks another, ‘when you can look into the pasture and see the difference between a sheep and a goat?’
But the rabbi is not satisfied with either answer.
‘Hear and understand’ says the rabbi, ‘the moment when you can look into the eyes of a stranger and see your brother — that is the moment when the night is over, and a new day has begun’.
I’m startled out of my reverie by a loud tapping on the window. It’s Nat. Time to get going with the weed cutting!
