stanford app personal essay
fall 2016
The lessons we take from failure can be fundamental to later success. Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?
I can’t recall a time when computers weren’t a major part of my life. Even as a toddler I idolized my mom’s clunky, internet-disabled computer whose 3D maze screensavers and Microsoft Paint left me in awe. When I was old enough for a hand-me-down laptop with actual internet access, my fascination with electronics knew no bounds.
After several years passed, my internet explorations led me to a computer program called Scratch that taught coding to youngsters like me. I don’t claim to remember what convinced my nine-year-old self to try it out, but I do know what inspired me to remain a programmer afterwards. I’ve been infamous my whole life for my lack of artistic talent, especially when juxtaposed against my naturally talented older sister. Many teachers who had the both of us as students were appalled to see my scribbled handwriting after acclimating to her calligraphy. Yet when I programmed, I had total creative freedom—there no longer existed the smudges, wobbly lines, and disproportionate shapes that usually plagued my works. Armed with a keyboard as my brush and a monitor as my canvas, I felt not only competent but masterful in the art of producing video games and simulations. For once, I was part of a world where the quality of my work wasn’t judged by its appearance, but rather its content. I was hooked.
As I continued to explore the vastness of electronics, my interests ventured to the subject of artificial intelligence, or AI. When I read about the yet unconquered Turing Test, I was awestruck by the incredulous concept of a machine acting convincingly self-aware. I toyed with chatting robots like Cleverbot in an attempt to see what made them tick—I wanted to get inside their “heads” and understand their thought process. But after awhile, I realized that these ostensibly logical machines had the attention spans of goldfish and lacked any conversational rhyme or reason. These bots responded to each sentence independently, as though they were entirely different frames of reality. These robots were shameful, not nearly living up to my idea of what a humanlike robot was supposed to be: a witty, amiable conversationalist. If no one else was going to put in real effort, I would. It was time to program my own artificial intelligence.
Being an eleven-year-old, I undoubtedly had all the experience necessary to manifest my own do-it-yourself consciousness, so I was quick to devise a plan. With excited haste, I used Scratch to fashion a basic program that took user input, passed it through a series of logical filters, and produced an appropriate lifelike output. To fix the cold emotional detachment present in other AIs, I developed a conversation mood tracker that detected each word’s different connotations. When I tested the program, though, it birthed a lifeless automaton rather than the exciting and friendly companion I had imagined. Luckily, I realized a simple solution: adding more responses to the raffle pool of possible replies. Yet I soon discovered that even this left me with nothing more than a machine that predictably regurgitated the words programmed into it. I was astonished as to why I couldn’t seem to create the realistic artificial human that I had envisioned. Despite my complete confidence, I was proved unable to replicate the simple input-output mechanisms of consciousness and wallowed in confusion.
Then I had the epiphany that set me on the course I tread today: my brain was unable to comprehend its own system of comprehension. This unbelievable yet indisputable reason for my shortcomings shook my mind from its foundations, compelling me to re-evaluate a universe I had taken for granted. My mind was racing: what other topics had I assumed to have simple explanations? As I sat pondering the many uncertainties I had glossed over in my lifetime, I accepted that naivety had been my long-standing vice. Now I was determined to vanquish it for good.