TREND MICRO ‘GO RED’
In 2001, while Méndez was creative director, leading the Brand
Integration Group (BIG) at Ogilvy & Mather, Los Angeles, the Taiwanese
security software firm Trend Micro came looking for a global brand
campaign, including the creation of the Brand concept, visual language,
global advertising campaign, website, and collateral materials. Trend
Micro was a leading innovative information security company, the first
to understand the virus problem would migrate from floppy disks to
email. When asked how he was able to anticipate, the founder and CEO
answered: “I just know.” Méndez recognized a respect and understanding
of intuition in how the founder talked about his business practice. This,
and Méndez’s long-time interest in french philosopher Henri Bergson’s
concept of intuition, inspired a global brand campaign built around this
concept, as explained in the following strategy report written for a full
page print ad in the Wall Street Journal.
The Hidden Intelligence: Innovation Through Intuition
The oldest game in the world offers new strategies to secure online information. Chief amongst these is intuition, posing the greatest challenge to computer science yet.
The game Russell Crowe plays in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ is GO, the oldest board game in the world. An ancient game of strategy originated in China some 4,000 years ago, its rules have survived millenia practically unchanged. It is still played by millions. GO is a supreme tactical challenge known on occasion to drive people mad. Yet for centuries, its intricacies of capturing and defending territory were taught to the samurais of Japan in order to prepare their minds for a life of confrontation and battle. The winner of the yearly tournament was allowed a seat in the government amongst the Shoguns.
One can learn to play GO in an afternoon, but it takes a lifetime to master. Longer. One starts with an empty board, a nineteen line grid with 361 points, the stones are black and white, all alike and equal in value, and the opponents take turns placing their stones on the intersections.
To play GO one needs single-minded focus. With time to study, and even more to play. As experience is gained and knowledge grows, one learns to take every detail of the board into account ‘To think underneath the stones’ as one of GO’s many proverbs proclaims. Many more abilities become natural: to recognize the patterns; thrive on changes; take the initiative; anticipate, plan, think ahead; evolve strategies; make life and/or death decisions. To be patient and co-exist with your opponent (with just a little bit more of the space in your possession). Guided by the intention to always make the best move at exactly the right time, the ultimate goal of GO players –beyond winning– is to play the (forever unattainable) Perfect Game.
So far, the fastest computer can’t beat a professional player at this game, not even a well-versed amateur. A single move IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue would ponder over for three minutes, calculating a staggering 200 million chess positions per second in its epic victory over World Chess Champion Gari Kasparov in 1997, would take it 70 years to mull over in a matchup with GO. “GO may be,” as one journalist from the Dallas Morning News writes, “the last refuge of human intelligence.” Or, at least, as one programmer claims, “the Holy Grail of computer programming” and “the biggest challenge in computer science.”
To think that by merely using the brute force of computer processing power to overcome the subtleties and complexities of GO, automatically assumes the human brain can calculate trillions of moves per second to remain superior to the computer. No one really believes that humans are able to do that. We must be using a short cut. An immediate path to direct knowledge giving a quick, clear and full apprehension of a complex group of data. We do: it is called intuition. It is intuition that gives the GO-player the flashes of insight “to just know” the best move to make.
Carl Jung described intuition as “one of the four ways human beings process the world,” placing intuition as “the function by which one can see around corners”. “There is only the way of intuition”, Albert Einstein is famous for saying, considering it the most important aspect of his talent, calling intuition “the free invention of the imagination”.
Time after time it appears that major human achievements involve intuitive leaps of imagination. It is the intuitive, pattern-reception faculties associated with the right hemisphere of the brain that break through existing formulations of the truth and expand the body of knowledge. The stabilization of intuitive insights, and their usefulness to humanity, are subsequently determined by careful, logical examination and validation, but the original vision or insight is intuitive.
Ever since The Age of Enlightenment struck, the analysis of Science has become the prevailing means to understand reality, operating from predetermined methods with a fixed concept. However, analysis is an imposed viewpoint from the outside, a static solution substituting the reality it aims to understand. Intuition is a means to immediate knowledge through evolving, flexible concepts. Where analysis is rigid and stagnant, intuition is active and mobile. It is a combination of both that will supply true answers.
Transposing this analogy to computer technology, and especially information security, it becomes apparent how software on its own is a static, stagnant solution to yesterday’s problem. Between updates it does not have the ability to anticipate, adapt, or learn. What is missing is the human trait of intuition; the ability to see the whole picture, to recognize the patterns, to have insight and foresight, and the decision making power to evolve the strategy. To build these tenets into the capabilities of the computer network is the greatest challenge for computer science.
– Adam E. Eeuwens
The Hidden Intelligence: Innovation Through Intuition
The oldest game in the world offers new strategies to secure online information. Chief amongst these is intuition, posing the greatest challenge to computer science yet.
The game Russell Crowe plays in ‘A Beautiful Mind’ is GO, the oldest board game in the world. An ancient game of strategy originated in China some 4,000 years ago, its rules have survived millenia practically unchanged. It is still played by millions. GO is a supreme tactical challenge known on occasion to drive people mad. Yet for centuries, its intricacies of capturing and defending territory were taught to the samurais of Japan in order to prepare their minds for a life of confrontation and battle. The winner of the yearly tournament was allowed a seat in the government amongst the Shoguns.
One can learn to play GO in an afternoon, but it takes a lifetime to master. Longer. One starts with an empty board, a nineteen line grid with 361 points, the stones are black and white, all alike and equal in value, and the opponents take turns placing their stones on the intersections.
To play GO one needs single-minded focus. With time to study, and even more to play. As experience is gained and knowledge grows, one learns to take every detail of the board into account ‘To think underneath the stones’ as one of GO’s many proverbs proclaims. Many more abilities become natural: to recognize the patterns; thrive on changes; take the initiative; anticipate, plan, think ahead; evolve strategies; make life and/or death decisions. To be patient and co-exist with your opponent (with just a little bit more of the space in your possession). Guided by the intention to always make the best move at exactly the right time, the ultimate goal of GO players –beyond winning– is to play the (forever unattainable) Perfect Game.
So far, the fastest computer can’t beat a professional player at this game, not even a well-versed amateur. A single move IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue would ponder over for three minutes, calculating a staggering 200 million chess positions per second in its epic victory over World Chess Champion Gari Kasparov in 1997, would take it 70 years to mull over in a matchup with GO. “GO may be,” as one journalist from the Dallas Morning News writes, “the last refuge of human intelligence.” Or, at least, as one programmer claims, “the Holy Grail of computer programming” and “the biggest challenge in computer science.”
To think that by merely using the brute force of computer processing power to overcome the subtleties and complexities of GO, automatically assumes the human brain can calculate trillions of moves per second to remain superior to the computer. No one really believes that humans are able to do that. We must be using a short cut. An immediate path to direct knowledge giving a quick, clear and full apprehension of a complex group of data. We do: it is called intuition. It is intuition that gives the GO-player the flashes of insight “to just know” the best move to make.
Carl Jung described intuition as “one of the four ways human beings process the world,” placing intuition as “the function by which one can see around corners”. “There is only the way of intuition”, Albert Einstein is famous for saying, considering it the most important aspect of his talent, calling intuition “the free invention of the imagination”.
Time after time it appears that major human achievements involve intuitive leaps of imagination. It is the intuitive, pattern-reception faculties associated with the right hemisphere of the brain that break through existing formulations of the truth and expand the body of knowledge. The stabilization of intuitive insights, and their usefulness to humanity, are subsequently determined by careful, logical examination and validation, but the original vision or insight is intuitive.
Ever since The Age of Enlightenment struck, the analysis of Science has become the prevailing means to understand reality, operating from predetermined methods with a fixed concept. However, analysis is an imposed viewpoint from the outside, a static solution substituting the reality it aims to understand. Intuition is a means to immediate knowledge through evolving, flexible concepts. Where analysis is rigid and stagnant, intuition is active and mobile. It is a combination of both that will supply true answers.
Transposing this analogy to computer technology, and especially information security, it becomes apparent how software on its own is a static, stagnant solution to yesterday’s problem. Between updates it does not have the ability to anticipate, adapt, or learn. What is missing is the human trait of intuition; the ability to see the whole picture, to recognize the patterns, to have insight and foresight, and the decision making power to evolve the strategy. To build these tenets into the capabilities of the computer network is the greatest challenge for computer science.
– Adam E. Eeuwens
