Circular thinking in patterns and rhythms. [015]
A Mutable Mind
Practicing improv gives you a mutable mind. You learn to make yourself believe things; it’s like a muscle you can flex to make-believe.
Never mind six impossible things before breakfast. In improv, we become our characters and sink into the reality of the stories and situations and scenes we create.
It is wild. It might be a form of psychosis; it’s certainly close to crafting your own delusions. Improv is almost akin to being in The Matrix, except that our mind becomes both the player in the game as well as the game world. We break our minds into director, actor, scriptwriter, and audience, and somehow still keep the mind going.
What I’m trying to say is that improv has made me able to believe anything, and I feel like that makes it easy for me to learn algorithms.
If this is true, what else is true?
I can’t sing. I don’t have the pitch control. But I can definitely remember the lyrics, and I can absolutely rap. It’s all just timing, which is memorisation of the lyrics plus timing to the rhythm.
And rhythms are a pattern.
I like dancing too. Once again, it’s all about rhythm-as-a-pattern. But in dance there are turn patterns layered on top of musical patterns, and possibly dance moves encoded into code blocks.
As I’m studying to become a data scientist, algorithms feel like a pattern I’m already familiar with. Things like recursion feel natural (repeat until completion; keep trying until you find the answer); heuristics like greedy algorithms (the best possible answer at this step in time) seem to make a lot of sense.
It’s all patterns within patterns, echoing across different disciplines and ideas.
I once wrote that the best way preparation for improv was to have a good life; a fulfilling life with plenty of experiences and emotions and situations to draw on. Strangely enough, improv seems to be great preparation for learning algorithms, and algorithms seem to echo many lessons I can learn through life.
The beautiful perfection
And just like in life — I keep looking for the beautiful answer, the perfect, flawless, storybook ending. Yes, I’m looking for my own fairytale as well, my own happy ending. But that only happens in movies and stories.
It’s a good mentality; if you find a good move to look for a better one. It’s the beautiful answer that represents the peak of perfection, it’s the competitive spirit that drives me to do better.
But as a classmate told me: try to get the damn answer first, settle the practical things, before searching for the lofty, perfect answer.