A programmer’s paranoia

I’m very pissed of having been born in the last part of XX-century. This does not mean that I would have passed my childhood during fascism and the first 2 world wars. It’s just a matter of worldwide knowledge level gained. I was born in 1980. I started to study and cultivate my current interests only after I was 18 years old. I’ve passed 9 years of my life seeing always the same thing. Everything that it’s important, interesting and useful in the science world has already been discovered.

Too many times I jumped like a mad person after having experienced a strange, odd or interesting math/programming/geometry idea. Too many times I kick my desk cause an Elbonian J. Random Scientist have already studied, solved and perhaps given a better solution than mine.

Now after two serious scientific articles (I spent a lot of blood writing them) thrown in my trash bin I have decided to abandon the idea to give my name to a theorem or an algorithm. There is nothing, in my own opinion, that can be discovered nowadays. Nothing that is already written in “The Art of Computer Programming” by Don Knuth. Nothing that can be found without a gazillion-flops capable machine.

I just code and study for fun on those days. I do not even take a look at wikipedia before starting to study a problem. It’s just like buying a book only looking at the cover. Trust me it’s very funny.

For example I’m studying cellular automata right now focusing on those patterns that have a long life before dying or stabilizing in small period constructs. I’ve written a nifty application in Cocoa using Quartz and stuff like that with a scanner for long life patterns.

You know, I’ve write the classic brute force program with some smart optimizations here and there. I’ve put a sound-spawning event if a particular long-life pattern is found by the program.

Well my MacBook wake me up at 2:12am. Watching on my monitor the high-20-8-67.automa evolving process was such fun. Finding that what I discovered was a well-known pattern called acorn was funny too. Even more funny if you consider that high-2-c0-47.automa is well-known too. It’s called die-hard.

I just given up to modern science and taking it easy. Am I doing wrong?