System-level IC design and the Taiwanese dancing master
Sometimes entertainment can be more informative than education. Earlier this week I was a guest of the Fabless Semiconductor Association at a dinner in Taipei. The evening’s speaker, intended as a change of pace from the day’s technical lectures, was Lin Hwai-min, leader and choreographer for Taiwan’s Cloud Gate dance company.
Lin is a gentle and remarkable man. He related the story of how he came to his calling and how he helped define a unique style for modern dance in Taiwan. Lin’s affair with dance began early, when he first saw the film The Red Shoes. But like most long-lasting affairs, this one had an inflection point between infatuation and commitment. For Lin, it happened as he was leaving the theater after watching his first ballet. The audience was walking and chatting about how beautiful this rather foreign art-form was. Lin overheard one woman comment “Yes, but we could never do that. Our legs are too short.” The comment seared so deeply into Lin’s memory that he still repeats them in English as a quotation.
The choreographer continued his story of a quest materializing around this memory—his own study of classical ballet, and his realization that in a way the woman was right: Western dance does depend on long, vertical lines. Women on toe, men leaping and lifting women as if to suspend for an instant the rule of gravity, and, yes, the vertical lines of long arms and legs—all are key to the visual experience of ballet.
But for Lin, this raised a question. If that was dance in the West, what should dance be in the East? There was certainly a tradition of dance in China—the ribbon dance, the stylized grace of Beijing Opera, the choreographed aggression of Kung-Fu or Tai Chi. Lin realized, he said, that Chinese motion, like Chinese calligraphy and architecture, rested on circular motion, not vertical line.
This thinking led Lin to totally reorganize the training of his company. Away with the ballet drills, leaps and lifts. The new study was meditation, Kung-Fu, Beijing Opera. Movement would be layered, horizontal, circular, cursive. Stillness, and the open space between motions, would be as much a part of the vocabulary as would dancer and movement. It was horrible, Lin said, for his dancers, who had to turn their backs on everything to which they had been taught to strive: long graceful lines, vertical movement, and height. It was just as hard, he said, for the new instructors he brought in: meditation instructors trying to teach dancers to sit still, Kung-Fu teachers and Beijing Opera masters who saw their ancient traditions being molded into something quite different.
But the change succeeded. Lin’s company has become a cultural representative of the Republic. His art, not a fusion of East and West but an evolution of Chinese culture into the 21st century, is distinct.
This would have been a fascinating and heart-warming story in any context. But coming at the end of a day of chip-design talk, it begs to become metaphor.
The way we express systems today is, like the ballet, bound to Western linear thinking—to the sequential, analytical unfolding of a syntax of lines. The notion is as deeply embedded in our thinking about systems as it is built into our written language.
Is there, I wonder, somewhere in the Chinese culture another Master Lin—a visionary who sees Western, C-bound thinking as being a foreign influence, an instance to be observed rather than a necessity to be emulated? And on what cultural treasures might this master base a new way of expressing systems? Could it be classical Chinese poetry? Standard written Mandarin? Chinese musical structure?
Most important, would such a development merely create a novel way of looking at systems behavior and structure—an elegant restatement of what we already know—or would it at last give us leverage over the crushing load of complexity that has slowed system-level design to a crawl? We do not know, beyond the simple observation that today, to bear the weight of that immense complexity our legs are far too long.
