Dan the Moon Man

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Dan the Moon Man - Issue 5

Written by Imogen Neale

Computer scientist, actor, youth group leader and university tutor, Daniel Playne is a busy 20 year old with a PHD in his sights, and an AIMES award for Information Technology, Science and Innovation in his pocket. Imogen Neale spent a bit of time interviewing the lad and reported back to us....

Helium-3 (or He-3) is a very potent isotope of helium. Other than having a cool shorthand elemental name, He-3 is supposedly the super-fuelled fusion future of nuclear power generation. It’s comparatively safe, environmentally friendly and non-radioactive. What’s more, it’s more than 3 times more efficient than current methods of nuclear power generation.

Thing is, to mine He-3 you’ve got to pay a visit to the moon. Once you’ve done that though, say three or four times, and brought back a space shuttle load each time, you’ll have enough to meet the earth’s energy supply for more than 8,000 years.

This is what happens when you hang-out with a scientist, you learn fascinating stuff about stuff.

Daniel Playne, all of 20 years-old, and something of a polymath (someone with a lot of knowledge about a lot of things), is the recent winner of the AIMES Information Technology, Science and Innovation award. A computer scientist with a BSc Honours degree almost tucked into his breast pocket and a PhD in sight, Daniel is also an actor (who contends you can perform Hamlet in 1 minute), a University tutor, a youth group leader at Windsor Park Baptist church and, until recently part of a guitar-focused band that once played alongside Jordan Luck at a charity gig. He’s also the one who introduced me to He-3 and the notion we might one day mine the moon for energy.

At 15-years-old, when for many of us “science” meant creating the perfect rocket-fuel, Daniel decided he wanted to be a nuclear physicist (because it “appeared to be the most interesting subject”). This decision was swiftly followed by the realisation he didn’t want anything to do with being the first year of students to sit NCEA.

“I pretty much decided I didn’t want to get stuck in NCEA so I did Bursary two years early and skipped ahead. I did it with the correspondence school because that’s the only way you could do the ‘official’ course. My parents didn’t really want me to do it but apparently I went around and just told everyone ‘I’m doing Bursary next year’.”

After a year at university Daniel realised it wasn’t really possible to become a nuclear physicist New Zealand; the opportunities for learning and employment were just too small. Sure, he could have moved overseas but a: he was too young and b: he strongly believed, indeed still believes, New Zealand is the best place in the world to live.

“When I first started Massey University I was 16 years-old so I was no way ready to go to university overseas plus it’s a really limited field to go into. You could go to the US, Canada, the UK and South Africa. But it’s really limited what they’ll teach someone from overseas.” So the next best thing? To become a computer scientist that specialised in nuclear physics.

He says in his first year at university, when he was a fresh faced 16 years-old, the age gap between him and his peers was noticeable. It wasn’t that he felt excluded but more that there were some fundamental age related factors he couldn’t do anything about – such as not being allowed into the pub for Friday drinks.

However, by second year Daniel says there was such a diverse range of people and ages in his classes the three-year-gap was no longer significant. One of his BSc undergraduate projects involved writing a new robot soccer vision system for an existing robot soccer team. The soccer ‘field’ is a 3 meter board with cameras mounted above it. The cameras monitor the robots, the ball and which robot kicks what where. The game, the robots and their responses are all computer controlled; all us humans have to do is sit and watch.

While the game had been around for awhile Daniel found there was certainly room for improvement. “Each camera has to recognise what colour each pixel is. So say it will look for yellow on a robot but [to do that] it has to have a way of defining what the colour yellow is. And the problem is, if you take the system here (outside), where there is lots of natural light compared to inside, yellow looks different.” The solution? They wrote a “little” algorithm that taught the programme the many colours of yellow.

Daniel co-wrote a paper on what they’d achieved then, with thanks to his “no-strings attached” AIMES award, he and his co-author (a Professor at Massey University) presented it at the International Conference on Neural Information Processing in Kitakyyushu, Japan. “There were several thousands of people there. Our work was well received and people gave us some ideas about how to turn it into a commercial programme but we don’t really have the time for it at the moment.” After the conference Daniel flew to Shenzhen, China to visit his girlfriend who was working in China at the time. He found the bigness of the city, with its 25 million people and its forest of towering apartment blocks, “mind-boggling”.

It’s a curious word for Daniel to use, ‘mind-boggling’, given that he’s planning to do his PhD on simulations of complex numbers which other’s have found so mind-boggling they’ve left the area well alone. Having said that though, Daniel says he’s extremely lucky to be working with alongside a Massey University Professor considered to be one of the best in the field.

Even with all this complex science and computer technology in his life, Daniel is not your archetypal geek. For while he did enjoy taking computers apart and putting them back together again as a kid, he doesn’t wear thick glasses, he doesn’t spend countless hours playing World of Warcraft and he doesn’t talk a compu-geek language I don’t understand (although admittedly I did have to get him to spell a few things for me). What’s more he has a girlfriend. And no, she’s not one of the robot soccer players, she’s a real person and she’s studying speech and language therapy at Massey University’s Albany campus. “She talks about the anatomy of people’s throats and I say ‘oh, yeah….’”

Daniel says his department is also socially proactive which helps. Once or twice a week all the PhD students and a few of the lecturers get together over a coffee to talk about ideas, books and research papers. “It’s a really good way to spread information and make use of everyone’s expertise. One of the first things one of the lectures said when I started was ‘go to all your lectures, study hard, but make sure you have a life.’ He said, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best programmer in the world, if you can’t work with people and you’re not an interesting person, no one will want to work with you… see if you want to write a big piece of software you’ll never write it on your own, you’ll always work with a group of say 10 people. So if you don’t work well with other people you’ll never get anywhere. It’s the same with lecturing; you have to be good at communicating.”

Daniel tells the story of a Korean genetics researcher who worked alone for 20 years without telling anyone, or publishing anything, about his work. When he retired he finally published his work which “changed everybody’s view of genetics.” “But” says Daniel “if he’d actually told people about what he was doing as he went, we’d be so much further ahead.” But aren’t scientists highly competitive? Don’t they want to keep everything they’re doing a secret from everyone? Not so says Daniel. The lines are pretty clearly drawn; if you discover or publish something it’s yours. If someone then develops or explores some tangent of that idea then that’s theirs. Simple.

As with the soccer playing robots, another project with commercial potential is the programme Daniel wrote to solve “fiendishly hard” Sudoku puzzles in 0.01 of a second. Of course now that he’s identified all Sudoku’s logic rules he’s no longer interested. “Once you work out what the rule is it just becomes a matter of applying the rule… and that’s boring.”

Hopefully nuclear fusion, moon mining and simulations of complex numbers will prove a little harder to solve. Otherwise he may just find himself taking a greater interest in the anatomy of people’s throats.

“I hope to make a meaningful contribution to New Zealand and science in general. I’d also like to promote the interesting and exciting side of science so it inspires more New Zealanders to have a go at it. Plus I enjoy research and love the idea of discovering something nobody on Earth has ever known before; I want to share that with other people.”