How to use a spreadsheet for combinatorial creativity | nair.sh

How to usea spreadsheetfor combinatorial creativity<br>Tuhin Nair17 min read

Have you ever been wrong while solving a complex problem?

Don't mind me: but of course you have.<br>Complex problems don't have immediately obvious solutions. They need some iteration, some trial and error, some time and effort before a solution begins to feel right.<br>Typically, you'd wait for that moment of clarity; maybe when you're in bed or in the shower or on a walk, maybe it'll come to you. A solution that feels especially creative.<br>But what if you only had 48 hrs to find this creative solution?<br>Back in 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev had less than 48 hrs left on his publishing deadline for a textbook (project managers, apparently, are a historically consistent pain in the ass) and he still hadn't figured out how to arrange the elements of Chemistry.<br>Rumor has it that he cut up cards, wrote the element names and properties on them, and began frantically organizing and re-arranging them to try and find what he needed. Historians dubbed this bit of creative play: "Chemical Solitaire".[1]<br>Mendeleev did eventually find his prize, and we might even call this prize 'insight'.<br>But we won't.<br>We'll call it 'potentially new value'.<br>Because, in this guide, we're going to see how a spreadsheet helps us quickly find 'potentially new value' by organizing and re-arranging 'existing value'.<br>To solidify this idea we'll use two fully-worked examples, where:<br>We'll wear the hat of an entrepreneur and create a new and useful time planning application.<br>We'll wear the hat of a writer and create a new and compelling television show.<br>But first, whether the story of Mendeleev playing a card game is true or not, why didn't he just use any of the existing tables and diagrams that organized the elements?<br>What was Mendeleev looking for?

AI companies churn decades, many decades, of human sense and non-sense to make their models.<br>All for the patterns contained in the data.<br>The patterns within human communication are what gives LLMs their impressive abilities. But why? What is so special about this thing we call pattern? And why was Mendeleev scrambling to find one before his publishing deadline?<br>At the time (early 1860s) there were 63 known elements (mostly discovered through breaking, burning, or electrocuting things).<br>Many scientists had tried imposing their way of organizing the elements, creating tables and diagrams that reflected their personal opinions.<br>But they failed to do one thing.<br>Teach.<br>Mendeleev was writing a textbook, and as his deadline neared, he still hadn't figured out how to represent all the elements together in a way that felt good for teaching. It's one thing to list all the elements for his readers, but he wanted some way that would help them grasp why these things were all considered elements. Why did they work as elements? What makes them part of the same category? Why?<br>At the time there was no established universal law of nature he could use for teaching. And so, whether or not the story with the cards is true: he kept arranging and reorganizing the elements until he found an organization that was ….<br>drum roll<br>… periodic.<br>Periodicity, for our purposes, is a repetition of relationships in specific intervals. Mendeleev had found that the elements were periodic based on the relationship between atomic weight and valency.<br>Why was this so mind blowing to the world?<br>Because it explained and predicted things.<br>Predicted! As in, like, the entire point of all of science. This is why patterns are so valuable. Mendeleev's periodic table not only predicted new elements (correctly!), but also predicted that previous measurements of elements were incorrect (later confirmed to be true).<br>Mendeleev, oh my, did he know how to make a table, or what?

Mendeleev and his tableMendeleev Monument and Periodic Table Mosaic. Photo by Aljuh / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.But what does this have to do with creativity? What is this guide even about? Why does this author almost make me miss my LLM?<br>Here's the relevant part of the alleged story: Mendeleev found creativity through visual pattern recognition.<br>So, like Mendeleev, we're going to focus on being able to visually arrange and re-organize things until we spot a pattern. It requires no special knowledge and we'll rely entirely on our current hardware (our juicy brain) to do its thing.<br>But unlike Mendeleev, we're not looking for one singular natural law or pattern. We have the choice to make a pattern, break a pattern, guess a pattern etc. The possibilities are much larger for creativity.<br>It's a slightly different way of finding creativity. Instead of relying on a linear narrative or pure associative thinking (like brainstorming), we're going to rely heavily on pattern recognition.<br>It's still hard work. But it's fast. And if I may say so, bloody effective.<br>To do all of this, to hold all of our work, we might need some kind of sheet …...