Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Why does modern life revolve around objectives?
From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated — and nearly everything in-between — our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal.
In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned—The Myth of the Objective, Stanley and Lehman begin with a surprising scientific discovery in artificial intelligence that leads ultimately to the conclusion that the objective obsession has gone too far. They make the case that great achievement can’t be bottled up into mechanical metrics; that innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort; and that we would be wiser (and the outcomes better) if instead we whole-heartedly embraced serendipitous discovery and playful creativity.

“The successful inventor asks where can we get from here rather than how can we get there”

Controversial at its heart, yet refreshingly provocative, this book challenges readers to consider life without a destination and discovery without a compass.

A great review has been written by Leonardo Trujillo: “question the very essence of how a search process should be performed when our goal is to discover something great.”

 modern society erroneously clings to “the myth of the objective“.

This “myth of the objective” is the idea that every goal worth reaching can be stated as a clear and measurable objective, a guiding beacon. Many of us assume that if we define the correct beacon and use it to infer the most promising search direction then the only thing standing in our path is the required desire and effort. Unfortunately, particularly for truly challenging problems, most beacons are deceptive and will lead us astray. 
Instead of striving for beacons that we cannot see through the fog of ignorance, we should instead take a more subjective approach, guided by the intuitions developed through past experiences, whilst freely exploring the space of possibilities. Stanley and Lehman describe promising new possibilities as stepping stones.  The stepping stone does not resemble the final product and that by directly optimizing towards an objective it might be harder to reach. Processes that finds and builds upon stepping stone collectors, like the ‘human ability for invention‘ and ‘biological evolution‘ are two noteworthy examples.

• Discovery and invention are positioned as a search process. The focus goes to the novelty search paradigm, a search process developed for evolutionary robotics. Novelty search differentiates from random search, as is can be described as a principled search strategy that orders the search space from the simple to the complex.
• Biological evolution supports survival and reproduction, which are constraints imposed by nature and should not be seen as explicit objectives. Natural selection is not responsible for the ability of evolution to adapt and produce surprising new designs. 

But what is the alternative to following some objective?
Just performing random actions?
That doesn’t seem terribly efficient either. The book proposes to follow the interesting and the novel instead. The authors developed an algorithm called novelty search, where instead of optimizing an objective, the agent just tries out behaviors that are as novel to it as possible. This algorithm solves problems quicker than objective-based algorithms, even though it is not even trying to succeed!

 “a path not limited by the shackles of a mandated outcome”