Is God the best programmer ever?

Posts : 111 Join date : 2013-07-08

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Is God the best programmer ever?

s a computer programmer, I have written a lot of code over the years. As described in Outliers, I have had over 10,000 hours of coding experience, which, I guess, makes me an outlier!

As I look at all the coding I have written, I realize that a lot of it has to do with defining consequences when certain conditions are met. Initially, coding started out in a single dimension. Either something was “off” or it was “on”. It was all binary. As it began to evolve we introduced the “If.., then.., else” clauses and then moved on to “Case statements”, that could deal with multiple conditions. Over time, we introduced Time to our coding. We all remember the Y2K era, when every company was scrambling to avoid a catastrophe! With the advent of mobile devices we have now started to code based on location, GPS, Near Field Communication and geo fencing introduced code that would behave differently based on where we were! If we consider the backward compatibility of operating systems and other software, we are looking back to prior generations. Looking back we have now moved from a single dimension to perhaps the 6th dimension.

Comparing this to life, we all know that life defines consequences for the choices we make. Is it possible then, that Life is really a huge program that considers even more dimensional coding? Could it be an infinite loop of “nested if statements”? We have perhaps not discovered the most intricate loops and that explains the new discovery in medicine and other fields to this day.

It has been said that smoking is injurious to health. However, we still see smokers outliving folks who have lead a “clean” life and folks who’ve made healthy choices. A lot of studies have been performed on death and its causes. Would we learn more if we spent more time on life and how some people live up to a 116 years? For this, we may not have the data to look back several generations, as we did not have the means to document health and life history until recently. Perhaps, in the future, we could know enough to create a “perfect” humanoid!

At a recent seminar it was shared that on an average an adult makes close to 35,000 decisions a day! Each of the decision has multiple choices and each of those in turn lead to specific consequences. A lot of the decisions may be simple; such as where do I sit, do I fold my legs up, which lane should I take when driving, how far should I open the kitchen faucet, how warm should the water be for my bath, which music or song should I listen to, which channel should I turn the tv to, etc. Then there are other decisions, simple but with varying levels of consequences. For example, how much chocolate should I eat, ho much alcohol or soda should I consume, should I spend all day in front of the tv, should I spend a lot of time in the sun, etc. Each of these over time can lead to long-term impacts and makes us unique.

As we learn more about the brain, we have realized that it controls the entire body. It has deployed monitoring “agents” across the body that keeps communicating with it to provide key metrics that it can act on. For example, it may receive a signal that a surface the hand touches is too hot and the brain sends an impulse to immediately withdraw the hand. If a burn occurs, the blood flow is reduced to that part of the body to prevent pain. The brain commands the creation of chemicals to fight the threat.

Today’s programs do pretty much the same. Companies such as Microsoft, BMC, Compucom and a whole lot of others have created agents that reside on servers to alert the “listener” that something is wrong or some threshold has been breached. Based on these messages the “listener” takes specific actions.

The concept of “Internet of Things” (IoT) takes it to a whole new level. Several “brain” centers communicate with each other to create a network. This is the same as relationships between humans. At close proximity or sometimes even over a distance, humans are able to “connect” with each other. It is said that if one stares at someone else in a crowd, eventually the person being “watched” will turn around and connect. There are perhaps radio signals that we are yet unaware of.

All these experiences make me feel that God is certainly the best programmer. In fact he has written a program that is self-learning and evolving. Hence there is no end to it. This too has now pervaded the computers. Several computer programs are now able to self learn based on actions taken in the past.

Computer programming is nothing but discovering the work of “God”. It is a religion. Do you agree?