Page 172 - Deep Learning

Creative Insight Writ Large 155

100
Easy Tasks
Hard Tasks
80
Cycles to First Discovery 60

40

20

0
None Few Some Many
Number of Connections
Figure 5.5. Process loss in a computer simulation of a creative collective.

subordinates and the doctrine of a religious leader can affect the space of solu-
tions to community problems considered by the members of his church.
One example of the effect of top-down constraints is the failure of the
Xerox corporation to exploit the revolutionary advances of its own research
and development team at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Early in
47
the development of the computer, the team moved away from the prevalent
conception of a computer as a large mainframe, located in a computer cen-
ter, used primarily for number crunching and operated by specialists that
reported directly to the management. In its stead, the researchers at PARC
envisioned the system that is in place today: distributed, networked and
ubiquitous personal computing, applied to every conceivable information-
processing activity. The PARC researchers stacked up an impressive array of
hardware and software inventions to support their vision, including a digi-
tal mouse inspired by a prior device by Douglas C. Engelbart, bit map dis-
plays, separate processing circuits for input and output to off-load the central
processor, multitasking, the Ethernet technology, the first laser printer and
a user-oriented text editing program. As Douglas K. Smith and Robert C.
Alexander tell the story in Fumbling the Future, the top management at Xerox
was so entrenched in the mainframe conception of computing that they were
incapable of grasping the notion of distributed, personal computing. The con-
ception of the management prevailed against the vision of the researchers
and Xerox left the greatest business opportunity in a century to be exploited