Einstein's desk and what it suggests about clutter and intelligence

[abutilon]

@prooftheory

Messy people are doing some sort of breadth-first search with some sort of look-ahead. They are making a calculation about how likely a given branch is likely to pay off and then moving onto the next branch. The breadth-first approach requires more memory (and desk space) than the depth-first approach

This is exactly how I start a new art piece. Lay out open books on the desk, hang scans & photocopies above it, keep the drawing tools to hand, everything out on the surface so I can grab whatever I need at the moment to move the idea forward. I have a vague mental image of what I’m getting at, & the images in the books & papers provide inspiration & offer techniques for how others have gotten somewhere similar in the past. So I start breadth-first & then jump from branch to branch, while my desk gets messier & messier.