Bend your brain, it's good exercise

A trip through nature’s order, computer chaos and my existential 13-year-old mind

Trilobite fossil - the oldest animal on Earth

When you say organic, you think the opposite of structured or geometric. But nature creates the most beautiful, structured designs and if you look, they’re everywhere.

Here’s a bunch from my backyard:

Fractal¹ is the mathematical term used to describe patterns like these succulents. It describes a design made up of ever smaller versions of itself. We are forever creating terms and formulas to explain the brilliance surrounding us in nature.

Romanesco Broccoli is the Fractal pinup:

Photo by Barthelemy Rigaud on Unsplash

I bet you’ve oogled these at the market² and in the same way I bet you’ve also seen a Nautilus shell. Another of nature’s marvels, the perfect symmetry of the Nautilus shell shows up a lot in branding.

The Nautilus (the animal that creates the shell) is called the living fossil since it has been around almost as long as the Trilobite. It’s been showing off it’s timeless shell design for 100’s of millions of years. It’s a fascinating creature³.

Nautilus shells exhibit repetitive patterns building on each other in a Fractal pattern but wait! Their shell takes it even further by creating a perfect logarithmic shell or 'eternal line' with a constant geometric progression. Again, Nature inspires us to math.

Photo by A R on Unsplash

We need ever more sophisticated maths as we try to understand the universe around us and it gets really weird when we venture into the world of explaining the very big and the very small.

Not to be one-upped by Mathematicians, Computer Scientists created a technique to use nature’s pattern magic called Recursion. Recursion is where a bit of code calls or references itself to get to the bottom of a task. For example, crawling a complicated hierarchy or tree structure, you might see how repeating the same task in a nested way until you find the top of every branch would be very powerful. It's a great way to reveal every combination and permutation of a pattern.

A simple example is the Fibonacci numerical sequence. The rules are simple, starting with 0 and 1, each subsequent number in the sequence is the sum of the preceding two. Like this:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, … ⁴

You could create a conditional loop to calculate this but we want Fibonacci-ception⁵ so we have our Fibonacci subroutine call itself.

Be careful though - this can hurt your head. Like looking into a pair of mirrors and seeing endless reflections; disorienting. The first time I managed to use a recursive procedure in college I felt like a programming god. I wasn’t, I just managed to understand the assignment.

Recursion can be very elegant code, but it isn't used a lot, not only because it hurts peoples heads - but also it’s hard to debug and you can easily run out of space (memory) for your calculations. You can see how that would happen with our Fibonacci sequence - there is no end to those numbers.

Running out of memory generates an error called Stack Overflow. I like that term because you can visualize the space or memory the computer has allocated for you as a stack of commands like dirty dishes rising exponentially higher with each instance of the procedure calling itself. You run out of dishes right quick, the stack becomes unstable and dishes crash to the floor.

Stack Overflow is also the name of an online community for programmers. In a twist of Recursion Stack Overflow defines Stack Overflow:

Stack Overflow: How does a "stack overflow" occur and how do you prevent it?

Like the Stack Overflow example, the word Recursion has become a broader descriptor of something that builds on itself. In an article I wrote about the Turing Test, I mentioned how AI is being used by Nvidia to create better AI chips - Recursion.⁶ I think, therefore I am - Recursion. Short is a short word - Recursion. How about Russian Nesting dolls made up of ever larger dolls built around smaller ones - Recursion!

Recursion can make your head a little squirrelly.

I had a mental Stack Overflow back in 8th grade. My English teacher enthusiastically introduced us to Existentialism or the philosophical examination of human existence. We read Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis about Gregor the traveling salesman who wakes up one morning as a gigantic cockroach. In retrospect, that was quite a thing to throw at 13-year-olds.

I wrote about it back then. I have no idea what I wrote but I do know it threw my brain in a recursive loop trying to figure out how I came to be and how I have this particular Andrew Sniderman consciousness in all the universe. I was a voracious reader of sci-fi at the time and it was a potent combination of ideas. I'd think and think until I got into my own Stack Overflow state.

While we’ve developed lots of ways to explain nature like Fractals and Logarithmic lines there is still a lot we don’t understand. We don't understand ourselves. We don't understand the 3lb greyish pink lump inside our skulls. We don't understand consciousness.

When I was 13, in the middle of building up my sense of self and where I fit in, I was particularly attuned to this. I would think about it until it got circular and recursive, and I reveled in the sensation. In the 45 years since then, I became pretty grounded in myself plus I had a lot of work to do so I didn't think of it as often.

Now that I have a few brain cycles to spare it’s fun to think (and write) about it again.

Give it a go. Marvel at the beauty of nature. Be thankful you didn’t wake up a cockroach. Deep breath. Visualize of one of those never ending universe pics. How the #*& did you end up here? Repeat/Recurse. Did you bend your brain? Let me know.

best, Andrew

1. A fractal is a never-ending pattern.

2. Tastes like brocolli

3. Nautilus are fascinating including how they manage air in their internal chambers like the ballast tanks of a submarine to adjust it’s buoyancy

4. Shirley you’ve heard of Pi day March 14, 3/14 representing the first three digits of the mathematical constant π, so of course Fibonacci day is 11/23!

5. We can’t have a Tech Tales article without a movie reference, right? Inception was a mind-bending movie about getting into people’s dreams. Ever have a dream where you are dreaming? Recursion. The movie was such a brain bender that popular culture started putting the suffix ‘-ception’ after anything that felt vaguely recursive. Mind bending scenarios are all over popular culture. We like to hurt our heads. Time Travel is another one that drives me nuts.

6. There are lots of clever recursive Acronyms in Tech. Of course Wikipedia has a list. For instance, the popular image format PNG unofficially stands for PNG is Not a GIF. Another fun one - search Google for the word Recursion and it will come back with Did you mean: Recursion?