The New Culture of Collaboration

Nice piece in Nature about the rise of collaborative Web efforts in science, with special focus on Tim Gowers' ongoing Polymath Project (started as an experimental project in 2009):

http://www.nature.com/news/crowd-sourcing-strength-in-numbers-1.14757

"Gowers' online challenge was a radical suggestion for mathematics — a field that is often viewed as the domain of lonely, secretive figures who work for years in isolation. And it went against the grain of the wider academic culture, which tends to encourage researchers to share their ideas only by publishing them."

The article points out that there are now some commercial or incentivized collaborative projects as a way to increase participation, with even the Government getting involved: https://challenge.gov/

Business, mass education, and social media (and porn!) may be among the Web's most dominant uses, but I've long thought that truly the most ideal and promising use of the Internet would come in the form of scientific collaboration… the hive-mind solving problems, one-after-another, in a fraction of the time formerly required, leading to an exponential growth of knowledge/progress previously inconceivable. We've barely just begun... kudos to Gowers, Terence Tao, and others at the forefront.

The Future Will Be Crowd-sourced

Still more from weekend NPR....

I've long touted the value of large-scale collaboration, crowd sourcing and the like that the internet has turned into a reality (100,000 used to be a huge number for collaboration, but in the digital-age millions can take part at once). This week's TED Radio Hour from NPR covered the subject well -- TED Radio Hour is a great offering from NPR, but doesn't yet have the distribution of long-time favorites like This American Life or RadioLab,
so if you missed it the entire hour-long show is here:

http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/

 It includes segments with Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia and author/commentator Clay Shirky, but my favorite segment, which was both fascinating and eye-opening, was from Luis Von Ahn on massive crowd sourcing that you're not even aware you're participating in (you'll learn what's actually going on in the background of those annoying "captcha" spammer-filtering challenges!):

http://www.npr.org/2013/07/12/191620023/can-you-crowdsource-without-even-knowing-it

Give the whole show a listen. The material isn't altogether mathematical, but is so vitally important, so timely, and related enough to things that mathematicians have a hand in, or are behind, that all math buffs ought find it interesting.

Hive Mind and Collaboration… Driving the Future

(via Waugsberg/Wikimedia)

Yitang Zhang's recent proof regarding twin primes keeps generating press pieces… including some good recent ones for lay readers, first from the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/fodS89bFVdFCaO17Sh9fLN/From-70-million-to-two.html

and then from popular science-writer Amir Aczel over at HuffPost Science:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amir-aczel/the-mystery-of-the-primes_b_3391666.html

And finally, this update from New Scientist:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23644-game-of-proofs-boosts-prime-pair-result-by-millions.html

(I think all 3 of these are worth a gander as they touch on different aspects of the twin prime/Zhang story.)

Things are moving fast… Zhang's work was quickly taken up by a bevy of individual mathematicians, and now also by the Polymath Project group (a Web collaboration of many mathematicians). Zhang's computed upper limit of ~70 million has, in just a few brief weeks, been reduced to under 400,000! (the latest figure I've seen, but it will keep changing). Phenomenal!

The Polymath Project (largely inspired by math icons Tim Gowers and Terry Tao) is, to my mind, an example of the premier use of the internet, to utilize the 'hive mind,' as never before in history, to solve or work on significant problems (in this case math, but it can be applied to other subject areas). In the past, dozens or perhaps 100s of individuals could be brought together to work somewhat collaboratively on a problem, but today 100s of 1000s can be easily drawn from. Books have already been written about the power of the "hive mind" (some quite critical). Solutions to many problems will come at a warp-speed previously unattainable. Can the 'hive mind' be cluttered with junk science… pseudoscience… quackery… tomfoolery… Yes, of course, GOBS of it;  But the beauty of the hive is how rapidly and efficiently it can sort through masses of information and ignorance to arrive at the productive core. "Open access," "crowdsourcing," collaboration, and the hive, are the wave of the future.

My current post over at MathTango is a doff-of-the-cap to those leading the way in the current evolution (revolution???) of math education, with a focus, by the end, again on how rapid/broad Web collaboration is currently leading the way to shape the 'flipped classrooms' and MOOCs of the near future… and, obviously, so much more.

Mathematics Via Collaboration

I love that there are so many ways educators are employing the Web to try and improve young peoples' engagement with math! The "Collaborative Mathematics Project" from Jason Ermer is an interesting attempt to involve young math enthusiasts (or enthusiasts-to-be) through the internet's social connectivity. Read about it here:

http://www.collaborativemathematics.org/how-it-works.html

The object is, as he writes, "to use video as a means of connecting a worldwide community of mathematical problem solvers." And, as he states elsewhere on his site:
"...one of the goals of Collaborative Mathematics is to help cultivate a productive attitude toward challenging problems: one of creativity, resourcefulness, self-confidence, and perseverance.
I believe helping students to develop this productive attitude may be the most important educational objective in the classroom."

I think there may be some glitches with the effort (but I've never been good at predicting the success of such endeavors), but they can likely be overcome along the way, and it will be interesting to see how the project evolves.

Here's Jason giving out the introductory challenge:

Chess Fans…

(image via Wikipedia Commons)

A very interesting post from KW Regan on the rapid growth in networked communication (via computers/internet) here:

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/the-speed-of-communication/

The last third-or-so is a recounting of an event I don't even remember: a "Kasparov versus the world" chess match in 1999 between then-reigning world chess master Garry Kasparov and a collaborative world community. Kasparov, heavily-favored, eventually won the game after an amazingly hard-fought 62 moves and called it the "greatest game in the history of chess."

The earlier portion of the post deals with archival Kurt Gödel correspondence.
Great stuff!

Polymath Redux

Speaking of crowd-sourcing (as yesterday's post did)... I've reported on Tim Gowers' collaborative Polymath Project in the past, but it's been awhile. Here though, a critical review/update on the Polymath concept from a "bystander":

http://boolesrings.org/krautzberger/2012/04/30/waiting-for-the-polymath-revolution-thoughts-from-a-bystander/

I can't help but think the author is overly critical in seeming to view the Polymath effort as not revolutionary enough, and not including enough of the mathematics community. I view it (like I view Khan Academy) as being young and still a work-in-progress. I'm not certain it's even meant to be "revolutionary," so much as simply productive. And the author seems to  want to spread the wealth of that productivity to the broader math community; I just don't know how practical that will be given the Polymath focus on highly complex problems. The author actually summarizes well though the basic potential of the Project:

"Mathematics has the greatest potential for 'doing research online'. There’s no physical entity needed and our primary standard of scientific communication is the written word. There’s nothing in mathematical research that cannot be digitalized. We will never face the problem that somebody on the other side on the net would have to actually look at our specimen, our antibody staining, our test subjects. The web works perfectly for us.
Hence, mathematicians could be at the forefront of experimenting with new research activities that use the connectivity the web can offer in new and imaginative ways."

In the end though the author pleads, "...please, for a change, let’s not ask Tim Gowers to do everything for us!"

Anyway, an interesting discussion...

Crowdsourcing to Solve the Riemann Hypothesis

h/t to C.Pickover for this piece about an Indian mathematician's "ZetaTrek Project," looking at "one-dimensional quasi-crystals" to potentially crowd-source a solution to the Riemann Hypothesis:

http://blog.zombal.com/post/a-quest-to-solve-one-of-maths-great-puzzles

also here:

http://fadereu.posterous.com/knk103-the-crystals-of-mt-zeta

(I have no ability to judge how productive this approach may... or may not be???)

Collaboration via NY Times

The NY Times "Numberplay" column this week addresses "open science," collaboration, and the Traveling Salesman Problem:

http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/open-science-numberplay-style/

The column poses two problems (one involving numbers/distances and one involving words/letters) for readers to work on. I'll be interested to see how well collaboration succeeds, in particular, on the first, enormous  problem.

(The inspiration for this column, by the way, was the following, more general Times piece on collaborative science in the digital age: http://tinyurl.com/78apwyy )