recent reflection

There is an essay talking about the LISP Curse , which is so much familiar with the development of Computer Vision/Machine Learning with signal processing. I have taken two consecutive courses of computer vision, and one paragraph of description in the essay above could summarize all of my feelings:

"Programs written by individual contributors tend to follow the scratch-an-itch model. These programs will solve the problem that the contributor, himself, is having without necessarily handling related parts of the problem which would make the program more useful to others. Furthermore, the program is sure to work on that lone contributor's own setup, but may not be portable to other implementations with even similar scenarios, or to the same implementation on other platforms. Documentation may be lacking. Being essentially a project done in one's copious free time, or based on the only destination of making a proposal to apply grants, the program is liable to suffer should real-life responsibilities intrude on it. As Olin Shivers noted, this means that these one-man-band projects tend to solve eighty-percent of the problem"...(at maximum).

Those two courses were just copying and trying hard to duplicate other works from some other professors. All of the works were self-contained. The instructor wished that some of the duplications would lead him any insight, and then let some of his own students to add some other specifications on it, to make the so-called "breakthrough", and to publish one or more papers. Yes, the papers are the ultimate destination, which could both make the students graduate and reveal the extraordinary achievements of the professor.

I should have somewhat lucky feeling not choosing this lab, although I might also learn a lot by choosing it and complete my doctoral degree... And in the latter scenario, the lucky feeling seems exactly like a useless self-consolation. But, anyway, collective intellectual is definitely the right way to improve one field of study. And more importantly, I should leave myself sufficient time to learn more and think about everything.