Local Information and Global View

The “Blind Men and an Elephant” is an old Indian story about a group of blind men who encounter an elephant and do not know what it is. This story describes the difficulties in capturing and understanding a large concept or global view based on only local information. Today, modern technologies enable us to easily get and retain local information. At the same time, simply collecting local information does not give us a global view, as evident in this old story. We give a concrete example to theoretically and mathematically discuss this old story and analyze what we can know based on the collected local information.