Wanderings In The Dark

The day, from dawn to dusk, is the hub of activity temporally for most of human-kind. The sun is out, shining on to us, making the world around us light up. Everything is visible and almost all tasks can be accomplished. All is well. The sun goes down and we retire for the night, comforted within the walls of our dwellings — safe and sound. It’s not long before sleep overtakes us and thus ends our day and the night with it — in beautiful, restful slumber.

It had been a very tiring day yesterday and all I had wanted was to find some place to rest. Finally, at about 12.45 AM I returned to the comfort of my bed and jumped in without even changing — all such thoughts banished from my mind by the need for some sleep. Apparently I’d been a little too tired as when I woke up, the clock ticked at 1.15 PM. I felt well-rested, but a little sluggish as I went through what remained of the day.

By the time the night came again, I could not find any need to rest. Perhaps I’d slept a bit more than necessary. It wasn’t unusual. We usually pulled an all-nighter at least a couple times a week but it was either due to an exam on top of us or something else that we’d be engaged in. But today it was different. I was alone, the night well on its way and I had nothing to do.

A peek through the window revealed a clear starry sky. And an impulse to roam through the campus overtook me. I pulled a warmer over, locked the door and walked out. The air had a nice chill to it which made me glad that I’d had the thought to take the warmer but I still felt my arms tighten around me. The atmosphere felt clear like the one that makes you take a deep breath and inhale as much of the cold, clean air as you can — and so I did.

A couple minutes in, the street lights flickered and in the next minute went out completely. Everything went dark, the whole campus engulfed in a strange black cover. I looked around for any sign of light or life but found none.

That was when I looked up!

Oh! What a sight it was to behold! The heavens above were clear as crystals in all their majesty with no earthly light to filter their beauty. I found myself so small, minuscule in front of the sights above me extending beyond what I could see or even imagine. The amazing view that had unfolded in front of my eyes — I would never forget it — was like a shower of lights, not blinding like their earthly counterparts but rather illuminating the very space around them — making the invisible visible!

I could not take my eyes off it even as my neck complained of the pain. I was afraid that as soon as I’d take my eyes off them, everything would vanish. I do not know how long I stood there looking above — I’d lost all sense of time. It may have been just a minute, or an hour or more but time had stood still for me. However long it was — it was the best I’d felt in a very long time.

And the lights came back and the heavens vanished, never to be seen again.

Note: This is a work of fiction.

Thank you for reading!

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence, or A. I. as we like to call it, has been a major buzzword since the advent of Machine Learning. There have been many different views on the rise of A. I. — both positive as well as negative. Some take it as the revolution that has and will completely change the way we live yet some take it as an attack on our way of living. Most of these views are influenced by science-fiction literature, movies or TV shows that we’ve seen — Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, The Rise of The Machines, Westworld and so on.

But, is the A. I. of today really on the path to become the Skynet of tomorrow?

Well, not really — at least not yet.

The most amazing things that the A. I. of today can do is recognize faces or objects, classify data, or predict some quantities — after extremely intense training that is. So, it’s safe to say that we’re far from such an Artificial General Intelligence.

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But, these tasks for which the systems have been trained on a good amount of data can be done very effectively.

Image Recognition

Source: www.clarifai.com

One such example can be seen in the image above. The image classification engine at clarifai.com can accurately classify an image and present it’s results as probabilities. The above image is classified as “sunset” with a probability of 0.997, “water” with a probability of 0.995 and so on.

This system is able to give such good results because it’s been trained on an enormous amount of data. That is the fascinating thing about machines. Once they learn something, they can do it amazingly fast with an unmatched accuracy. Such systems can be trained to do handwriting recognition with an accuracy of more than 99%.

But even though these systems are so good at what they do, they can’t do much else. They’ll do what they’re trained to do — classify images — and nothing else.

Autonomous Driving

Autonomous Driving

Next, we have another application of A. I. that we have seen in the real world — self-driving cars. There are a lot of different systems in this field. One of them involves just the images of the road and the actions taken by the driver to navigate that road. It’s trained like so:

A neural network is set up to receive images of the road from a camera mounted on top of the vehicle as input. And the degree of the turn of the steering wheel by the driver to navigate that road is also fed in to the network as the “required” output. After going through the process of training, the network learns how much the steering wheel has to be turned and in what direction when such roads are encountered. Thus, the network learns how to “drive” a car.

If you’d like to learn more about neural networks, you can read my previous article:

[Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning
Ever since the advent of computers in particular and technology in general, the idea of creating intelligent systems…becominghuman.ai](https://becominghuman.ai/artificial-neural-networks-and-deep-learning-a3c9136f2137 "https://becominghuman.ai/artificial-neural-networks-and-deep-learning-a3c9136f2137")

But, this is just an oversimplified scenario. We are all aware that driving a car is more than just knowing how to turn the steering wheel. Advanced systems have been built that use multiple inputs like radars and sonars in addition to the visual camera systems and accurately classify the environment. This includes pedestrian detection, distance and speed of surrounding vehicles, road markings and so on. All of these when used together make up a complex system that can safely and efficiently navigate the packed roadways of today.

Natural Language Processing

NLP

NLP is the field of A. I. that helps us to communicate with the machines in a way that is natural to us. It is the system behind virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant as well as a part of fictional systems like J.A.R.V.I.S.

Whenever we have to do any task on our computer systems, we use some form of communication: “typed commands” in a CUI environment, Point-and-Click in a normal GUI environment and Touch-and-Type in a touch-enabled GUI environment.

But, now when we have to set an alarm, instead of tapping on the alarm icon on our phones, then tapping on the “add” button, and then setting the time, we just say — “Ok Google, set an alarm at 5:30 am tomorrow”.

And it’s done. Just as if we had a personal assistant waiting on our every beck and call!

That is the power of NLP systems of today.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A. I. in general and Machine Learning in particular have a lot up their sleeves which makes our lives more comfortable and getting things done a little easier.

But, these machines can perform the above functions only after learning how to do them. So, despite all this, A. I. is nowhere near the level of A. G. I that can effectively do the thinking that a human being can do.

So, we’re safe from Skynet — for now.

Thank you for reading.

Disclaimer: Although every care has been taken to make sure the information presented above is correct, no guarantees can be given.

The Last Flight

I was on an airplane that would never land.

It was a late-night flight, supposed to take 4 hours and 45 minutes, with no intermediate stops. Sleep was the obvious choice. As soon as we took off, I reclined my seat and draped a thin blanket over myself as the lights dimmed. To dreamworld, I thought with a faint smile.

I felt a sudden jerk shake me awake and distant, frantic chattering getting closer. I rubbed my eyes trying to focus my vision but all I could see were blurry shapes moving in and out of my view. The plane shook again and the screams got clearer and louder. I shook my head, unbelieving of the scene before me. Everyone was doing something: screaming, shouting, crying or praying.

TING!

“This is your pilot speaking, the captain is still unconscious. We are doing everything we can to get the situation resolved, please remain calm — aaahh!”

TING!

As soon as the sound cut-off, the plane veered to the left with a loud revving noise. I couldn’t make sense of my surroundings. I tried to stand up but something or someone pushed me back on my seat. I blinked repeatedly, trying to clear my vision from the flashing lights.

Suddenly someone grabbed me by my shoulders.

“There’s no pilot, both of them are dead or unconscious, we’re going down!”, the voice whispered. Or shouted. I couldn’t tell.

I stood up, grabbing the edge of an overhead compartment, its contents spilled into the aisle. I tried walking through, stepping around the stuff scattered on the floor. The plane shook again but I kept going forward, hanging on to the headrests. I felt a force pulling me back and realized the plane was going up. A trolley came tumbling down, dragging a thousand things with it, collecting a thousand more on its way down.

A few more steps and I reached the front exit doorway — the door was nowhere. The portal opened to dense blackness. Out of nowhere, someone grabbed another passenger and pushed them out the door.

“What the hell are you doing?”, I shouted over the noise.

“It’s the only way to save ourselves, come on, jump!”, he shouted in response. He went back, presumably to grab another passenger.

I froze. The man came back with another person.

“Come on now! Jump!”, he screamed at me and pushed his companion out the doorway.

I shook my head. “No! You’ve gone mad!”, I shouted back.

He looked back at me for a moment and then jumped out. He had no parachutes, no ropes attached.

I pushed forward and tried looking through the doorway but I could see nothing. No safety, no land, no sea — just a vast blackness enveloping everything.

Another trolley was blocking the path to the cockpit, held in place by seat-belt-like fasteners. I tried moving it but it didn’t budge.

The lights kept flickering erratically and then went out altogether. For a moment everything went dead-quiet. I caught a spark from the corner of my eye, the bulbs in its path turning on and blowing up a second later — a series of small pops that ended in a big bang.

The explosion tore the plane apart. The bottom half was falling away, yet the top half kept going up — or so it seemed. In another moment, I was falling down the aisle, my fingers trying to grab anything to hold on to but finding nothing. I was almost at the end when my elbow caught up in a seal-belt, stopping my descent with a violent jerk.

The whole sky had lit up with an orange hue, flaming debris falling through like a meteor shower.

The seat-belt broke off.

For a second everything went quiet again.

The whole universe was open before me in its majestic beauty. I could see the stars and the galaxies, the red giants and white dwarfs. Everything seemed to light up and then fade out — as if the universe was breathing.

And then I was free. Falling into that blackness. I closed my eyes with a faint smile.

The world was shaking again.

“Sir! Sir! We’re about to land.”

Thank you for reading.

The Blockchain

Currencies or, in general, money are an integral part of our lives since times immemorial. All worldly transactions involve money and almost every form of money is controlled and regulated by some central authority. These central authorities commonly known as Reserve Banks or Federal Reserves are responsible for and have the authority to print and control said currency. These authorities are in turn under the control of the governments of that nation. If, for some reason, the government decides to remove their “guarantee” of value from some of the currency, as we witnessed not quite so long ago during “demonetization” and all that followed, the value of the currency becomes null. That is to say, the value of the printed currency is only as good as the “guarantee” of the controlling authority behind it.

Ever since the advent of the internet, people had been trying to come up with ways to do transactions that did not involve these controlled and regulated currencies, whether for nefarious reasons or lack of trust or just privacy concerns. Many had even created digital currencies that existed solely in the digital world and could be used to perform transactions online. But, since these currencies involve digital tokens of some kind, and due to the inherent nature of digital data making it easy to copy or fake these tokens, all these currencies were plagued with the same problem — double spending.

Double-spending is a potential flaw in a [digital cash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_currency "Digital currency") scheme in which the same single digital token can be spent more than once. This is possible because a digital token consists of a digital file that can be duplicated or falsified.

— Wikipedia:Double Spending

Now, to counter this problem, there needed to exist a ledger or a book of records from which it could be verified if a token had already been spent. But who would keep and maintain this book of transactions? If we were to designate someone as “trusted” by everyone and allow that entity to keep and maintain this book, we would again arrive square one: centrally controlled currency as there was just one entity controlling the book of records and hence everything. This also meant that if something happened to this central entity, like data corruption or unauthorized access, everything would be lost — what is commonly called as the single point of failure.

Thus, this reason and a quite a few others ensured that these digital currencies did not gain much traction. That is until the one currency — Bitcoin — the first decentralized cryptocurrency came into being.

The question that comes to mind is this: how did Bitcoin solve this problem?

The answer: Blockchain

Blockchain

Blockchain

A blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. Each block typically contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp and transaction data.

— Wikipedia:Blockchain

The blockchain, Bitcoin’s answer to the problems of the digital currencies, is also a ledger of records. But, the main difference is that this ledge is decentralized, that is, controlled by no one and everyone at the same time. Every single participant in the Bitcoin network has a complete copy of the ledger and thus there is no single point of failure.

But, how does this blockchain work? And since it is controlled by everyone, what prevents a malicious attacker from inserting counterfeit transactions into the blockchain and becoming very rich?

To understand this, let us first understand how a blockchain is made.

Let’s say a few people do some transactions using Bitcoin. These transactions are compiled by people (called as miners) into a list called a block. Then, some additional information is added to the block like the timestamp and most importantly a cryptographic hash (we’ll get to this soon) of the previous block. All this data is the run through a special process called as “hashing” which generates a sequence of characters called as the cryptographic hash of the block. This hash is unique for every different input. If you were to change the input data by just one character, the output hash would be completely different.

Now, the Bitcoin network places some special restrictions on the hash of a cryptographic block for it to be inserted into the blockchain. For the sake of an example, let’s say it’s something like: every hash should have 11 zeroes at the end.

What we must know about cryptographic hashing is that the process is such that we cannot predict the output of the process based upon the input, thus, the only way to know what the hash of some data is to run it through the process and then look at the result. So, the miners add some data to the block and then run it through the process and check if the resultant hash has 11 zeroes at the end, and if not, then rinse and repeat. This is essentially a trial and error process. If, the hash does match the criteria, then the new block is accepted by the network and added to the blockchain. This hashing process is computationally very intensive and uses a LOT of resources like computing power and electricity.

This is called as proof of work.

A proof of work is a piece of data which is difficult (costly, time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify and which satisfies certain requirements.

— Bitcoin Wiki

So, why do these miners do it? The answer is that if their block is accepted by the network, they get a few Bitcoins as reward for “finding” the block. And when this block is added to the blockchain, since it contains the hash of the previous block, it is said to be linked to that block and thus forms a “chain” of block which we call a— you guessed it — blockchain.

So, how does all this hashing and computation protect the blockchain from tampering by unauthorized people?

Let’s assume we have blockchain consisting of four blocks: A — B — C — D

Now, if an attacker somehow created a block X which satisfied the blockchain hash criteria and he were to insert the block between block B and block C, since every block’s data includes the hash of the block before it, he’ll need to completely re-generate the whole chain after B to satisfy the linkage as the block C does not contain the hash of Y but that of B and thus the link is broken and the attacker’s chain stops at A — B — X. Thus, as Wikipedia puts it:

Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks, which requires collusion of the network majority.

That is, unless the attacker controls more than half of the complete blockchain network, he cannot modify any data that has already been recorded. So, all a legitimate participant has to do is to check which chain is the longest and use that as the correct chain as all other counterfeit chains will be shorter. This makes the Bitcoin network self-reconciling or self-correcting and thus a highly fault-tolerant system.

Thank you for reading.

Disclaimer: Although every care has been taken to make the presented information accurate, no guarantees can be given.

HTTPS

The internet is an amazing place. But, the internet is so much more than what everyone considers it to be. What we call as the internet is actually the WWW — World Wide Web. The humongous collection of websites containing exabytes of data filled with information in the form of text, images, audio, video and countless other formats available to the whole wide world. This world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 using a protocol he created to communicate between two computers — the client and the server. This protocol is known as HTTP — HyperText Transfer Protocol.

The server is just a computer that has some information and the client is a computer that wants that information (on behalf of its user). So, just like in the world we know, the client sends a request to the server asking for the information it wants and the server sends the requested information back if it indeed does have it and is permitted to give it away. All this communication between the server and the client is done over the internet using the protocol (a set of rules) HTTP.

HTTP is plain text protocol. That is, all the information is sent in plain text in a human readable format.

An HTTP request can be as simple as:

GET /page.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

The above lines, when sent by a client to a server, ask that the document /page.html be served to it from a host known as www.example.com

And, if the server has such a document, it may respond as:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2018 12:00:00 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1234

...the contents of page.html...

The above response is sent to the client with the contents of the requested file if everything goes well.

This is what the world wide web was, and in some cases still is, based on.

But, a lot has changed since 1989. The web is not just a place for storing and accessing documents like scientific research, and other such open information. A major part of our lives is now lived on the web, social media, e-commerce, healthcare, essential services and other such sensitive services also make use of the technologies that the web has brought with it. These services mostly deal with sensitive and private information, be those health details, payment information such as credit/debit card numbers, addresses, contact information, etc. This information should only be accessible to a select few individuals and no one else. But, as we already know, HTTP is a plain text protocol. Everything is open, and since the internet is giant mesh of interconnected computers, data flows between all of them openly and anyone who captures these small data packets flowing through the network can just open and read the contents as they’re in plain text.

There needed to be a way to secure this information and make it available only to the intended recipients. The answer was simple — cryptography.

Cryptography: The art of writing secrets.

We’re all familiar to the concept. Take a message and change it to a code using a technique that only you and your intended recipient know about and you can send it in any manner you like and be confident that no one else will be able to read it (if the technique is good enough).

Let’s take a simple real-world example:
A wants to send a message to B. The message must pass through C who is not trusted by either A or B. So, they must find a way to secure their message. A and B go to the market and get a box and a lock with two keys. The box and one key is kept by A while the other is given to B. A writes down the message and puts it in the box and locks it using the lock and key and the sends off the box to B. It passes through C who, even though he has the box, cannot open it as he does not have the key to the lock. This box then reaches B and he opens it with his key and reads the message. To send a message back, he repeats the same process. This is known as symmetric key encryption. “Symmetric” because the key used by both parties is same.

But, what if you had to send a message to someone you’d never met before?

Let’s take another example:
A wants to send a secret recipe to B but A and B live in different countries. They can’t meet physically so they cannot exchange keys like in the case above. The message, as above, must go through C whom they do not trust. So, what do they do?

They could send the keys to each other but they’d have to go through C. What if C keeps the key and box sent by B and then sends his own key and box to A? A won’t be able to know if this is the same box and lock as sent by B and that way, when A locks the box, C can then open it using the key he has and read the message and then close the box using the key sent by B and send the box on to B who won’t ever know that C had already read the message.

But, A and B are pretty smart. They devise a new way. Since A wants to send a message to B, B sends a special box created by their friend Z whom both A and B trust. This box has a special SEAL OF APPROVAL from Z saying that Z personally knows that this box belongs to B. This seal is such that it cannot be forged or tampered with without destroying the box itself. This box has an open lock which can be closed without a key. When A receives this box and checks and verifies the seal from Z, s/he can be sure that this is the box sent by B and not something that C sent himself. Then, A puts in the message and closes the lock. Now, the box is closed and only B can open it using the only key to the lock and read the message. The same process can be repeated by A to get a message from B.

This is known as Public Key Cryptography.
This is so called because it involves two things: The box — known as the “public key” and the key — known as they “private key”. The public key is shared with the world and the private key is kept, well, private!

So, how does this help us in securing HTTP?

HTTPS To The Rescue

This Public Key Encryption system allows two parties to communicate securely even if they’ve never met each other. And when we’re using the internet, our computer — the client, has never met the server (supposing that we’re accessing the site for the first time) and thus must use this system for securing the data. The role of Z is played by special entities called as Certificate Authorities (CAs) which issue those seals of approval called as SSL Certificates.

However, as compared to symmetric encryption, public key encryption is quite slow and does not scale well as the amount of data increases. Thus, Public Key Encryption is only used as an authentication and a key-exchange mechanism, that is, to verify the server’s identity and to exchange keys which can then be used for symmetric encryption of the data as symmetric encryption is faster and can be used with as large amounts of data as you’d want.

All this is implemented in what we call as TLS — Transport Layer Security (formerly SSL — Secure Sockets Layer).

Now, we can securely communicate over an insecure transmission medium (the internet). This type of communication is known as HTTP over TLS or simply HTTPS — HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure.

And that’s HTTPS for you — securing your important communications — be that your payment information or service accounts or social logins or anything else at all!

Thank you for reading.

Disclaimer: Although every care has been taken to ensure that all the information presented in this article is correct, no guarantees can be given.

The good news is that we have already made an amazing amount of progress in just the last couple years. This has been evident to everyone as given the amount of news coverage Artificial Intelligence and particularly Deep Learning has gotten over the last couple of years, even the most disinterested in the field would have read about it just to know what the hype is all about.

But the question is why just the last couple of years? Have we recently stumbled upon a game-changing way to do something that has caused all this interest in the field?

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Well, not really.

The fact is that the concepts on which today’s Deep Learning is based upon have been known since 1943! The ideas and the mathematics behind all this have been known to us all along, the technology to implement them is what hasn’t caught up yet — well, until now (a few years ago, to be exact).

(Artificial) Neural Networks

The most beautiful thing about Deep Learning is that it is based upon how we, humans, learn and process information. Everything we do, every memory we have, every action we take is controlled by our nervous system which is composed of — you guessed it — neurons!

All information that our brain processes and stores is done by the way of connections between different neurons and their relative strength. That’s the concept on which neural networks are based upon. And on the very basic level, neural networks are just a bunch of neurons connected to each other. This presents an interesting concept: The structure of a neural network is independent of the job it has to do. The only things that change are the parameters of those interconnections between different neurons. So, a neural network created to do one job can do something else as well, it just has to re-train— learn everything about the new job.

But how does an artificial neural network actually learn?

To understand that we must learn a little bit about the basic structure of an ANN (artificial neural network). The simplest of the ANNs can be created from three layers of “neurons”. The input layer, the hidden layer and the output layer. Information flows from the input layer, through the hidden layer to the output layer and then out.

Simple Artificial Neural Network

In the image above, the green circles represent the neurons on the input layer, the blue ones — the hidden layer, and the red one — the output layer. The arrows represent the connections between the different neurons.

Each of the connections has a number associated with it called the connection weight and each of the neurons has a number and a special formula associated with them called a threshold value and an activation function respectively. These are the parameters of the neural network.

When a neural network is being trained (in one of the methods of the training), it is provided with a set of inputs as well as their corresponding outputs. It runs the inputs through the neurons on each of the layers of the network, and using the parameters above, each neuron transforms the input in some way and forwards it to the next layer and so on. The result that it receives on the output layer is then compared to the outputs supplied above and it checks how far apart the two are and accordingly adjusts the parameters on each of the neurons through special algorithms (Gradient Descent, Back Propagation) designed to bring the actual and produced outputs as close to each other as possible. It learns to adjust its weights and threshold values to arrive at the correct output. This is what we call as “learning” for the artificial neural network. This process is repeated a (very high) number of times until the produced and expected outputs are as close as possible. That completes the training.

Now, when new inputs are supplied to the neural network, we can confidently say that the predicted outputs of the network will be fairly close to the actual outputs. Such ANNs can be used in predicting house prices based upon certain features of the houses (sq ft area, location, no. of rooms etc), classifying objects and images and what not!

Deep Learning

ANNs like the one above with limited number of layers and neurons can only do so much. To represent more complex features and to “learn” increasingly complex models for prediction and classification of information that depends on thousands or even millions of features, we need ANNs a little more complex than the one above. This is accomplished by simply increasing the number of hidden layers and / or the number of neurons per hidden layer. More layers and more neurons can represent increasingly complex models but they also come at the cost of increasing time and power-consuming computations.

Such neural networks which consist of more than three layers of neurons (including the input and output layer) are called as Deep Neural Networks. And training them is called as Deep Learning.

And now, with deep neural networks, extremely complex problems of prediction and classification can be solved in very much the same way.

This is the beauty of how such simple constructs can do such amazing jobs!

Thank you for reading.

Disclaimer: This article is only meant for general information and no specific care has been taken to make it mathematically and / or conceptually accurate. It’s only meant to give a general idea.

Sometimes people ask me why I like computers so much and why I spend so much time learning about them, tweaking them and programming them.

If this question is asked of anyone, almost all the answers would somehow be tied to the use of these amazing machines and the way they have made our lives easy and connected. That is indeed true, but the truth for me is the answer that I don’t give. When I’m asked, I just shrug and smile and stay silent.

During my early childhood, whenever I would be given a toy, I would play with it for just a while — a couple hours at most. Then my curiosity would get the better of me and I would run outside to that special spot in the side alley of my home and take the small round rock that was always there and smash the toy open to see what made it work. I always enjoyed learning the internals of these small trinkets more than playing with them.

As time went on, I moved on from using rocks to using screwdrivers to neatly open and sometimes even put them back together after changing some things to see what I could make. It may seem of no particular consequence but through time I realized why I was so much interested in doing this to my toys despite the numerous scoldings I got after the newest toy would be in pieces before me, scattered all around the floor.

It turns out that I have always dreamed about and wanted to believe that the makers of these tiny things had built some secret features into them which could only be unlocked in some specific ways. I guess what I want to say is that I always wanted more than what met the eye. As time passed, I realized that this would never happen. So I moved on.

I started breaking things, but now, used the parts in making small machines and bots of my own. An LED here, a motor there, a syringe, a few pipes and voila I had a fully functioning excavator!

But I was again limited by the things and resources I had available.

Then came the computer.

At first, it was just another toy or machine depending upon your usage. You could play a new game every day or do all your tedious calculations in fractions of a second. You could write your letters, do your budgets and taxes and everything else but it was just a machine.

I still remember that day when I found, while looking for a solution to some problem online, a page that said “Copy these lines into a Notepad, save as .vbs and see the magic!”.

These were the lines:

Just 4 lines of simple text. No magic, right? I thought the same.

But, just for the fun of it, I decided to give it a try. I copied the lines, pasted them in a Notepad as instructed and saved the file as something.vbs

Double-clicking something.vbs did something that I’d never thought would happen — a window appeared!

The Magic Window

I entered some text, I do not remember exactly what, and clicked ‘OK’. The window disappeared and, for a moment, nothing happened. Then, suddenly, a voice out of nowhere began speaking the text I had just entered. This amazed and fascinated me beyond imagination.

For I now had the power.

The power to do anything. And it took no resources, just a PC, a notepad, and some lines of text. As I learned about the art of programming, the magic of making your computers do anything you could every wish for, I became more and more fascinated.

I had finally found the machine. The machine that I’d always been looking for, the machine that had all the secret features. And what was even better was that I could decide what secret features I wanted and like a magic genie grating wishes, a few lines of code would make my wish come true!

With computers, having the power to program them gives anyone full access to the limitless potential that I’ve only dreamed about. These little machines are truly made to have unlimited secret features that we have literally reformed our complete lives around them. Every single industry, culture and economy has reformed itself to fit into the wonders achievable.

There is no limit of resources. All you need is a computer, and the willingness to learn the language and the possibilities are endless. Truly limitless.

Thank you for reading!