Fable
The automatic boat at the canal lock and the pilot who runs the open sea
There were two kinds of boat operators in town. On the canal ran a row of identical iron-hulled boats, loaded with programs in their holds, slowing down on their own at the lock, queuing, and passing once the water level equalized. On the open sea ran Old Gu, who for over thirty years relied only on a star chart and a bamboo pole. Out-of-town shipowners came to town to hire crews for cargo, thinking the two kinds of boats were the same — both could carry goods from south to north.
In March the water rose, the canal lock malfunctioned, and the water level no longer followed procedure. The iron-hulled boat swayed back and forth in place—the water level conditions in the program could never match, and no one could rewrite it. Old Gu happened to be on the inland river that day; one look at the water surface told him the upstream floodgate had been opened, so he took a detour of seventeen li along a tributary and delivered the goods that night. The townspeople said Old Gu had won.
But in peak shipping season, the canal had to make two hundred trips a day. Even if Old Gu had three heads and six arms, he could only make four trips a day, and every detour, judgment and decision took effort. The iron-hulled boats queued smoothly, moved at consistent speed, and measured fuel consumption precisely to the decimal. In the peak-season total accounts, the iron-hulled boats' shipping volume was more than twenty times Old Gu's. The mayor summed it up at the dock: one can handle surprises, but there is only one of him; the other cannot handle surprises, but can be replicated infinitely.
Later, someone came to Old Gu to learn how to sail the open sea. Old Gu compiled a lifetime of sea conditions into a booklet. His apprentice memorized it for a year, yet still capsized once at sea—the waves that day were not in the booklet. The iron-hulled ship's engineers wanted to extend the canal program to the open sea. After ten months of writing, they discovered that the number of tidal variation combinations alone exceeded the branches the program could handle.
Broken down, Old Gu's advantage lies not in any single route, but in his ability to judge what situations he has never seen and which direction to try next. The iron-hulled ship's advantage lies in all the situations it has seen; it clears a lock three times faster than Old Gu. What lies outside the boundary is called surprise; what lies inside the boundary is called throughput.
The town set the rules. When canal capacity was tight, the iron-hulled boat handled daily volume, while Old Gu handled urgent items and detour orders. All sea transport was handed to Old Gu—if the iron-hulled boat did not capsize, fine, but if it did, the entire lock would be blocked. One boat traded capacity for the ability to handle surprises; the other traded the ability to handle surprises for capacity.
A mistake new boat owners often make: thinking that upgrading the iron-hulled boat's program will let it sail the open sea. They upgraded the water-level judgment, added a wave-height module, and embedded wind forecasting, but the first time three anomalies occurred at the same time, the boat spun in place. Old Gu passed by, took one look and said: You're not teaching it how to sail the sea; you're drawing every sea route into the blueprint of a canal lock gate.