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A Perfect Design for Everything?


DubWolf

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I was wondering, seeing as engineering works to make improvements towards a product for maximum convenience and price and such, is there a perfect design that just can't be improved anymore? Say an airplane that somehow has no drag, maximum fuel efficiency from is fuel, etc. what do you think?

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Maybe not perfect, but just something that is very very efficient to the point that well.. There isn't much left to improve. All progress converges at some point, doesn't it?

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In this world, nothing is perfect so that is why everything is equal because we have our imperfections. No one can achieve a perfection level, has to be imperfect first.

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As long as man makes it, it can be improved.

 

Now if said man is supposed to build a house to keep a family warm and he does so, than it can be called perfect since it serves its purpose. Though it can always be made better, as technology progresses. When science and technology stop, than we'll be able to make "perfect" (or near so) things. Until that time comes though, everything can be improved. 

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Just look historically at things that haven't changed greatly throughout the ages. While not truly "perfected" (as small improvements are ocassionally made) these things demonstrate a sort of technological plateau. However it is impossible to determine if it is a true plateau, because the introduction of an unexpected technology that works better will cause a paradigm shift and then maybe THAT technology wont be changed for hundreds of years.

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Well...that depends on a lot of things actually. Context and resource use comes into play as well.

 

For example, lets say we design the most efficient flying airplane. What if that efficient design is heavily dependent on a limited resource? As soon as that resource runs out, then we would have to alter it's specifications.

 

Also, this efficient flying machine is only efficient in this atmosphere. Say, if we moved the plane into a different atmospheric pressure, like the ones on Venus. It would have to have a completely different design for it's environment.

 

That's the issue with technology and even evolution. T-Rex as an efficient killing machine, but in the end their weren't enough resources for the species to continue existing at the size they were at and they shrunk in time. We have chickens as a result, if we are willing to grant evolution and what the documentaries tell us as true.

 

The world is not static. It changes and our technology must adapt and change with it. Nothing is absolute, and that which is absolute is only absolute for a limited amount of time.

 

Perfection is formless.

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First off, no. nothing can be truly perfect. Their will always be ways to improve a design. My second thing to say is that picture thing at the bottom of your post? for example, KelGrym has one that has Princess Celestia on it and actually say's Princess Celestia. What the haybales is that!

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Does perfection even exist ? There will always be something that could look, or work, or anything whatsoever better if you'd make it another way. You can't define perfection either, as every humain being doesn't have the same conception of the perfection. IMO, perfection will never be achieved.

 

I apologize if I made some mistakes as my english isn't perfect (lel :okiedokielokie: )

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First off, no. nothing can be truly perfect. Their will always be ways to improve a design. My second thing to say is that picture thing at the bottom of your post? for example, KelGrym has one that has Princess Celestia on it and actually say's Princess Celestia. What the haybales is that!

 

It's called a signature...beyond that, I am thoroughly confused.

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The human body is a pretty near perfect machine maybe :o

Except for the fact that it can die :lol: 

 

But anyway, I think that while almost nothing is perfect, there has to be something.  

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It's called a signature...beyond that, I am thoroughly confused.

First off thank you, but shortly after asking this I looked at my settings and found the signature option. Second of all, more shiny things may be better,  but I think it should be made of chocolate before it can be perfect. except chocolate, for That is the only perfect thing in this world. 

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(edited)

It's actually a signal of transcendence that we would expect perfection to be something that exists, yet we've already rationalized and physically proven with a degree of certainty by virtue of history that we cannot attain perfection.

 

Engineering is the discipline of applying knowledge to solve problems.

Industrial design is the art form of increasing the aesthetic value of said solved (or solvable) problems.

Saying that a specific design is "perfect" I would think doesn't mean 'can't be improved' as much as it does 'fully satisfies the expectations of everyone everywhere'; in a sense "objectively beautiful", rather than being aesthetically pleasing to some who can appreciate it. Since taste varies, this would be something impossible to attain.

 

Designs can always be improved if one is willing to bend the scope for which the problem-solution was initially created. Example:

vw-beetle.jpg

The VW Beetle: designed in 1938 to be an ideal car: one which an average four-person family could afford after saving up for 2 years, could travel at 100kph, carry four persons and some luggage, and could have any part replaced or maintained within one hour by one person. Also remarkably elegant, easily customizable, rugged, and cheap to manufacture. A classic example of good engineering and industrial design: so much so that it's become an icon for the German mindset of ingenuity and practicality.

But is it perfect? No, if you change the scope of its problem-solution to include comparison to cars made more recently. Or to extend the example farther, it's not perfect as a racing car or a limousine. A given specific specimen of an original VW-Beetle could be customized to be both a perfect example of a Beetle and a racing car and a limousine, but then that custom Beetle would be a terrible model in comparison to an amphibious Beetle, or any given flying car if you changed the scope to encompass avionic automobiles.

 

SaturnV.jpg

The Saturn V still today remains a titanic landmark in engineering. For nearly 50 years its held records for heaviest rocket payload system, largest rocket ever launched, most powerful single vehicle ever operated, fasted manned vehicle, and many others. (When all five of the F-1 Engines were tested together for the first time in 1965, their thrust increased the American National Energy output by 5% for the two minutes they were firing.) The Saturn V is not buoyant, so it would make a terrible boat. It's also extremely fragile to lateral acceleration loads, so it can't do much of anything without suffering damage, apart from standing upright.

 

A perfect anything really has to be examined according to the context for which it's created. The Saturn V is a brilliant and fantastic spacecraft, and the VW Beetle is wonderful little people's car. But if they lose their context, they lose their brilliance.

 

There is no such thing as a timeless perfection for a design. Things which seem timeless in their design now probably will go by the wayside given a year, a decade, or a century.

 

Another example, fonts.

post-642-0-52409400-1399335590.png

Blackletter and Roman were the words of the day a few hundred years ago.

post-642-0-19722500-1399335603.png

Bodoni and Italics rose to prominence between the 1800s and 1900s.

post-642-0-20331500-1399335598.png

Since the 1900s, geometric faces like Futura, Helvetica and Gotham have been popular since.

You can be pretty certain that tastes will change in the future.

 

A thing can be seen as beautiful for many people at many different times, and that description can apply to aesthetics, or problem solving. (It is for that reason that mathematics is also considered an art.) But a timeless perfection, I don't think that's humanly attainable. The best description you can hope for is "perfect for now".

Edited by Blue
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Evedything has it's own issues. You fix one thing about a design, and something else may suffer from the redesign. Perfection is a level that is impossible to achieve unless man itself has created the idea that one design will "be as perfect as it gets".

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I was wondering, seeing as engineering works to make improvements towards a product for maximum convenience and price and such, is there a perfect design that just can't be improved anymore? Say an airplane that somehow has no drag, maximum fuel efficiency from is fuel, etc. what do you think?

One of the interesting things to learn is that imperfection is an inherent part of the design of this universe. Its not readily possible to ever be perfect, in fact, the most perfect designs anypony has ever built in the real world inherently account for the fact that they're wrong. It's not really possible to make anything perfect in application, or to be perfect, just as its impossible to truly know anything; even laws are sometimes overturned when new scientific evidence is put forward, just as Einstein era theories overturned Newton physics. Imperfection, not being perfect is the most perfect you can ever be.

 

Perfection's boring. Perfection is one of the worst things we can have.

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(edited)

Once upon a time I had a friend who loved computer programming as much as I did, and we had an informal competition between the two of us about improving one's programs. We wrote our programs in assembly (that is, as closest to the machine code as possible). When he wrote his program, I took that program and tried to modify it to make it work several milliseconds faster, or save some more bytes of memory. Those days, computers were still very limited with resources and memory (64 kB is not much when compared to today's computers, is it?), so it was very important to make them fast and low memory footprint. And when I had improved his program, he took it again and tried to improve it even further after me.

 

We were both surprised that it was always possible to find some more optimizations if one made enough effort to find them. Sometimes it was a matter of changing one instruction into another, which produces the same observable result, but is 1..2 bytes shorter or a couple of processor cycles faster. Tricks like changing division by a power of 2 into bit shifts, or XORing a register with itself instead of moving 0 in there, or changing the algorithm altogether to something which runs more clever (and faster in result). Sometimes it was hard to find a better solution, but I cannot remember any single one where it would be impossible.

 

This is a lost skill with today programmers, because they think, and they are being taught, that there's no need for optimizing their programs anymore, because modern computers have so much free resources to waste, and that modern compilers are so smart that they won't never outperform them by optimizing by hand. This is not only false, but it is also the very reason why our current software is so much bloated. Can you believe that one can fit a whole operating system with windowed graphical user interface, a bunch of useful programs, USB support, TCP/IP networking stack, a web browser and a media player on a single floppy disk? Then check this out. This is the power of optimization.

Edited by SasQ
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The way I see it nothing is perfect, it dosn't matter what it is, who created it, or how perfect the creator thinks it is, there is always going to be some sort of flaw in it.

 

Just linke nothing can be perfectly round, nothing can be perfect in every way possible either.

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Everyone's already said it, countless times over by now. That probably means I get to say it too! :-D

 

There are two kinds of perfect. There's functional perfect, where as long as it works the way you want it to, it's sufficient and needn't be changed, and then there's infinite perfection, where even if something has reached the previous definition of perfection, it can still be improved ad-infinitum.

 

Ever added a gatling gun to a plastic fork? That's somebody's more perfect plastic fork. ... ... uh, or somebody's more perfect gatling gun. Now I am unsure.

 

In any case, I am reminded of the old PSAT question about the frog who crosses the bridge.

 

"A frog needs to cross a bridge. He is at one end of the bridge. He can only leap to cross the bridge. Every leap he takes will cross exactly half of the remaining distance remaining to the other side. Will the frog ever reach the other side?"

 

There are two trains of thoughts here. One group will say "No, he will not, because any number being perpetually divided by two will never be zero." The other group will say that eventually the frog will be so close to the bridge that all it needs to do is extend a single finger, or simply fall over, and it will have effectively crossed the bridge.

 

The second definition there is that first meaning of "perfection," while the former group pertaining to the infinite is in the latter definition of perfection given.

 

Of course, this hypothesis is far from perfect...

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