MIT School of Engineering retreat (mid-1980s)

The point of that is: you never have all the pieces. You have to figure out what pattern explains the most pieces of your puzzle. That's part of what engineering is. In the mid-'80s I went to a retreat down on the Cape with the School of Engineering, and they tried to define what engineering is. They came up with a definition, which is probably still in the records over there. An engineer deals with complexity and ambiguity and solving problems.