Invention is not usually their principal business. They must invent in their spare time. They must invent before breakfast, invent in the Strand between Lyons’s and the office, invent after dinner, invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night! See how they seize a half-holiday, like hungry dogs a bone! They don’t want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whisky, starting-prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, anturic salts, nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings never drag—are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve o’clock at night on the flat of their backs; but not in bed! No, in a shed, under a machine, holding a candle (whose paths drop fatness) up to the connecting-rod that is strained, or the wheel that is out of centre. They are continually interested, nay, enthralled. They have a machine, and they are perfecting it.

Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullet #24: The “Borden Formula” (2008)

“A tired-out rail-splitter crouched over his tattered books by candlelight or by fire-glow, at the day’s end; preparing for his future, instead of snoring or skylarking like his co-laborers. Abraham Lincoln cut out his path to later immortality—in his spare time.

“An underpaid and overworked telegraph clerk stole hours from sleep or from play, at night, trying to crystallize into realities certain fantastic dreams in which he had faith. Today the whole world is benefiting by what Edison did—in his spare time.

“A down-at-heel instructor in an obscure college varied the drudgery he hated by spending his evenings and holidays in tinkering with a queer device of his, at which his fellow teachers laughed. But he invented the telephone —in his spare time.

SAM, The Senster and the Bandit: Early Cybernetic Sculptures by Edward Ihnatowicz

Observing the Senster, and knowing just how simple the controlling program was, he “felt like a fraud and resolved that any future monster of mine would be more genuinely intelligent.” (private papers). He found it disconcerting that “people kept referring to it as an intelligent thing, but there wasn’t an iota of intelligence in it: it was completely pre-programmed responding system”

Bill Powers in Living Control Systems III, p 154:

…one can make overly complex hypotheses about how an organism accomplished what it is doing, when the actual mechanism is much simpler. In the case of the Crowd demo, the impression of intelligence is quite misleading, for the person is doing none of the things one might read into the behavior. I know that is true because I wrote the program. The person is seeking a destination position and avoiding collisions, and that is all. No decision are made, there is no analysis of possible paths through the field of obstacles, no planning of trajectories, no remembering of past experiences, no search for a way out of a trap. The behavior we see is determined completely by the actions and interactions of two simple control processes in an environment containing randomly placed obstacles.

Various versions of the Crowd demo can be downloaded from livingcontrolsystem.com, with Crowd32.zip being the most recent version. (I actually prefer to play around with the quirky DOS version: it comes with a few more ready-made simulations and there’s just something about the speedy full screen DOS interface that works for me.)

During the tournaments, a number of us noted a curious change that would quite regularly occur in the play of a contestant when he began to recognize that he was clearly outmatched. He would first concentrate very hard, then begin to alternate between wild shots and cautious play. It occurred to me that these periods of variability, if we could graph them, would look like the patterns of RT variation preceding a new plateau in the Powers Game experiment. The participants themselves acknowledged this aspect of play as part of their experiments to obtain eventual increases in skill. In this view, what would have seemed a lapse into sloppiness on the part of a losing player took on an opposite significance.

Compare that with what a commenter wrote over at Cal Newport’s blog:

It’s too hard to simultaneously do and diagnose, at first, and the only way to actually succeed at things at the boundary of one’s ability is by accident. So make sure to get many, many attempts at them, to have more chances to do them right by accident. Once that happens, you can get a sense of “what did I do differently then, that made that finally work?”

The key phrase here being “do them right by accident”.

Robertson again:

Powers made the implication that the organism does not know exactly what change must occur. Random excitation caused by the reorganizing system results in various alterations of action. Then the action that begins to bring the desired objective under control becomes the basis of a new control system.

from The Sound of Young America

Also, Merlin Mann was recently on The marketplace of ideas with Colin Marshall. If you’re a fan of Mann, you’ll love that conversation.