Patterns 2024

The New Year just began and already patterns emerge. Our time in New York was spent celebrating Christmas with our three married daughters, sons-in-laws, grandkids, Maureen’s brothers and sisters, my brother and sister, extended family and friends. It was heartwarming. Heartwarming is the appropriate word as when the weather is cold (below 70 degrees) that is what I need. So, a white Christmas it was not, but it was heartwarming. Intending to fly back to Antigua the day before New Years Eve, we flew back a week later. Medical issues, which we will finish in the summer, delayed our return.

Before the holidays, Laura and Drew noticed a pattern and knew we were heading their way. Weeks before we arrive in New York, they start receiving our orders from Amazon, Defender, and other vendors. Everything from a large electric motor for our bow thruster to tools, LED lights, kitchen knives, BBQ grill parts, engine parts – all the things that are not readably available down in the islands. It is, as if Santa, FedEx’s our presents to avoid the Christmas Eve rush. We carried back over a 100 lbs of boat parts. The good news is that clearing customs here is very easy. No declarations to fill out (Trinidad), duties to be paid (Grenada) or brokers to be employed if shipped by boat, plane or sled. This pattern is duplicated in the summer. Those who are anticipating more discussion of boat parts and sailing can skip to the last paragraph otherwise, continue on; the discussion may get dense.

Our two months in the summer and two weeks in the winter travelling without Kalunamoo is the pattern we fell into over the last number of years (12!). Patterns, however, applies to virtually everything and everybody, and not just for humans. Leaves, flowers, fish, waves, artistic paintings, melodic music, animals, bacteria, planets all have patterns of behavior and form that repeat year after year. When these patterns are broken, people notice. Perhaps lotto numbers don’t follow a pattern although the players certainly do.

Science is a search for the “why” of patterns. A ball falls to the ground. A pattern is formed. A theory of why is formulated, and thereafter a method of future predictions is made possible.

All this brings me to artificial intelligence. Can you remember the fear that the year 2000 presented? How would computers react to the moment when “now” changed from 1999 to 2000?  Doomsday scenarios entailed all sorts of effects. In short, many computer savvy people didn’t know what was going to happen. Fast forward to today when many computer savvy people don’t know the “why”, AI comes up with the information it comes up with. The “how” underlying the operation of AI is known: searching for patterns. If it happened before, its algorithm dictates that it will happen again. It does this by stringing words, facts, data points together and mimics previously discovered patterns. As I understand, it does not provide an insight to the “why” nor, which is more of a problem, provide the pattern it “discovered”. It’s a black box with answers.

I studied meteorology in college. Most of the history of weather forecasting relied on identifying patterns. “Red sky at night, sailors delight…” type of seat of the pants forecasting. However, after patterns are noted, either by ancient astronomers noting planetary motions or people noting wind directions before certain events, theories are formed to understand the “why” so that predictions by humans can be made. Humans learned! ,

So, it was with weather forecasting. I studied the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and the parameters that could be measured to describe the state of the weather. The relationships of temperature, pressure, density, energy inputs, rotational inputs, feedback effects were mathematically developed: “physical laws”. One of the first uses of super computers were to calculate answers to these physical laws, using all the empirical data of worldwide weather stations, and develop “numerical forecasts”. Today they are called models. It developed the “why” of weather as much as the “what”. Even with super computers it takes hours of processing to run these models.

Enter AI. As written above it searches for patterns and then just repeats it as a prediction. In the case of weather forecasting, it essentially does not provide the “why” of developments, just the developments. Using this method, recent news, reports that many times this method is more accurate than the traditional mathematical models and is much, much faster. This sound like great news. Do we really need to know the “why”? Just mimic the past and you know the future. Choose the right inputs, parameters, and mimic the past.

We all know history repeats itself, so why not use AI to search for patterns. I would love to see how AI advises us how to avoid wars, solve human caused environmental effects, how to best enjoy life, and what I will need to fix next on Kalunamoo. The hundred pounds of boat parts are slowly being ingested by Kalunamoo before we set sail south to Trinidad. The pattern we will follow will entail enjoying the fabulous weather, the clear waters, the amazing sunrises and sunsets, the frequent social exchanges with other cruisers and locals and the varied cuisines among the islands. We realize that we travel only a small section of this large planet, but we still find our patterns fascinating. Kalunamoo was called a “whimsical little ketch” a while back and we kind of like that description. And yes, whimsy can be a pattern that can be appreciated.