Merriam-Webster defines it as:
an act, process, or methodology of making something (such as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible
I think (and I could be wrong) that optimisation might be the ultimate goal in life. One could say that humans are condemned to indulge in optimistation, it’s almost “natural”.
That was a bold claim from my side, that it could be the ultimate goal in life. How do I back it up? I would give the example of models from physics, physicists are working towards improving it. Or evolution, it wants to “optimise” how humans interact with nature. Many such examples can be found across different domains. There’s a natural bias towards “improvement” in almost every domain. It’s almost addictive, reminds me of the song Higher, better, faster, stronger by Daft Punk.
That is the reason for my initial claim.
For me optimisation is the art of making life easier to live. Naturally, that involves making things as effective as possible. Take typing as an example, I think that vim makes it way easier and hassle free, and is hence the symbol of optimisation in my mind. Or imagine a workflow where you talk to an agent which accomplishes mundane tasks for you, like a personal AI system, that too is optimisation. In my vision for optimisation, automation takes a central role. I think it’s a really effective way to carry out optimisation.
My goal in life should be to optimise as much as possible. It’s almost like a hedonistic treadmill, the similarities are too obvious for me to resist mentioning it. By optimise here I of course mean “make life easier to live”. That can be achieved in many different ways, ex. learning math to better visualise things, training a model on something so that you can refer it, or again, by automating stuff. I have occasionally written about Optimisation problems, it aims to solve the question of “what to optimise”.
How to optimise is a different beast, and I aim to tackle that in a separate note sometime later.