The Hindu Business Line : This is "One Microsoft Way"

HOW would you weigh a jet plane without using scales? Why do mirrors reverse right and left instead of up and down? How many times a day do a clock's hands overlap? Count in base `negative 2'. These are some of the sample questions from a typical Microsoft interview, where they pose riddles and logic puzzles to gauge the candidate's intelligence, imagination, and problem-solving ability - "qualities needed to survive in today's hypercompetitive global marketplace". William Poundstone discusses Microsoft's `cult of the puzzle' in a book titled puzzle-ish, "How would you Move Mount Fuji?" A few snatches:

Gates does not like to lose in social games any more than he does in the game of business. A game of charades once ended with Gates accusing another player of cheating (Gates was losing). A friendly Internet bridge game with Warren Buffett ended abruptly - "The miserable little cheat unplugged his computer to avoid losing!" is Buffett's story.

An interview question for humans: There are four dogs, each at a corner of a large square. Each of the dogs begins chasing the dog clockwise from it. All of the dogs run at the same speed. All continuously adjust their direction so that they are always heading straight toward their clockwise neighbour. How long does it take for the dogs to catch each other? Where does this happen?

A golden question: One of your employees insists on being paid daily in gold. You have a gold bar whose value is that of seven days salary for this employee. The bar is already segmented into seven equal pieces. If you are allowed to make just two cuts in the bar, and must settle with the employee at the end of each day, how do you do it?

The assets that matter are the human ones. Hiring is no longer a matter of finding a few executives to manage a team of interchangeable worker-drones. A start-up mentality prevails at Fortune 500 companies. Businesses feel that their survival depends on filling every position with the most talented and mentally nimble people.

To deal effectively with puzzles (and with the bigger problems for which they may be a model), you must operate on two or more levels simultaneously. One thread of consciousness tackles the problem while another, higher-level thread, monitors the progress. This self-awareness is characteristic of good problem-solvers.

Just one more question: How can you make Gates give away all his money?

Will we survive the gene-byte?

MAN, and that includes woman, has been changing over the years. And he, as well as she, is bound to change more. In "Our Posthuman Future", Francis Fukuyama, argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA will have "profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions". This is a book that is classified by Picador as `current affairs/ science' because Fukuyama treads the dangerous area of policy as a `social philosopher' to describe "the potential effects of genetic exploration on the foundation of liberal democracy - the belief that human beings are equal by nature". Here's more:

Biology can in theory supply information about the molecular pathways linking genes and behaviour. Genes control the expression - that is, the turning on and off - of other genes, and they contain the code for the proteins that control chemical reactions within the body and are the building blocks of the body's cells.

Modern neuroscience has, in effect, lifted the hood and permitted us to peer, however tentatively, at the engine. The dozen or so neuro-transmitters, such as serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, control the firing of nerve synapses and the transmission of signals across the neurons in the brain.

People want smarter kids so that they will get into Harvard, for example, but competition for places at Harvard is zero-sum: if my kid becomes smarter because of gene therapy and gets in, he or she simply displaces your kid.

My decision to have a designer baby imposes a cost on you (or rather, your child), and in the aggregate it is not clear that anyone is better off.

Data, after all, are data, and better data can often be obtained by bending the rules or ignoring them altogether. A number of the Nazi doctors who injected concentration camp victims with infectious agents or tortured prisoners by freezing or burning them to death were in fact legitimate scientists who gathered real data that could potentially be put to good use.

The posthuman world could be one that is far more hierarchical and competitive than the one that currently exists. "Shared humanity" may be lost because we have mixed genes with those of so many other species that we no longer have a clear idea of what a human being is.

It could be one in which the median person is living well into his or her second century, sitting in a nursing home hoping for an unattainable death.

Frighteningly realistic. Pray for a good gene, and pray for a good computer that would be crunching all the `data' to make it.

The survival game

A BLACK book with a seemingly pessimistic message. Yes, that is what Martin Rees's "Our Final Century" is. The question he poses is simple: "Will the human race survive the 21st century?"

Rees is no doomsayer when he says that our civilisation has but a 50/50 chance of surviving, because he "brings scientific authority to his theme". A sampler:

Robotics and miniaturisation are weakening the short-term practical case for manned space flight. In the coming decades, swarms of miniaturised satellites will orbit Earth.

And robotic fabricators will assemble large structures, perhaps extracting raw materials from the Moon or from asteroids.

Designers of nuclear reactors aimed to reduce the probability of the worst accidents to less than one per million "reactor years". To do such calculations, all possible combinations of mishaps and subsystem failures have to be included. Among these is the possibility that a large aircraft might crash onto the containment vessel.

The obverse of technology's immense prospects is an escalating variety of potential disasters, not just from malevolent intent but from innocent inadvertence as well.

We can conceive of events that could cause worldwide epidemics of fatal diseases to which there is no antidote, or change society irreversibly.

And robotics and nanotechnology could, in the long term, be even more threatening.

The phrase "theory of everything", often used in popular books, has connotations that are not only hubristic, but also very misleading.

A so-called theory of everything would actually offer absolutely zero help to ninety-nine per cent of scientists.

Some "brains" (out there in the outer space) may package reality in a fashion that we can't conceive and have a quite different perception of reality. Others could be uncommunicative: living contemplative lives, perhaps deep under some planetary ocean, doing nothing to reveal their presence.

Still other "brains" could actually be assemblages of superintelligent "social insects". Absence of evidence wouldn't be evidence of absence.

There is a choice to postpone the `final' century, if only humans act responsibly.

Books courtesy: Landmark, www.landmarkonthenet.com

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