Feb 24, 2006

Chess links

Principles of chess development.
(via Daniel Stoddart)

Birth of the chess queen.

Game complexity and the Shannon number.

Feb 17, 2006

'Why had he thought so earnestly about inane questions like this in the past?' - BRUTUS.1, a story generating computer

Bad news: I recieved a rejection notice from the University of Emory today. Still waiting to hear from the other three schools.

Good news: My thesis, laying out a proposal for a linguistic solution to the mind-body problem, is finished, coming in at 33 1/2 pages, with 92 footnotes and 28 works cited. Part 1 explores what exactly the question is, and how philosophy of mind is at an impasse. Part 2 sets out my proposal for Linguistic Parallelism, or how to think about the mind-body problem without dualism or materialism. Part 3 considers the Turing Test, some attempts to build Artificial Intelligence, and proposes a position between Strong and Weak AI.

I am, however, going to hold off posting it on the paper's page until I get some feedback from my advisor, the philosophy honorary, and the examining board.

left
Deep Blue, the chess-playing supercomputer that could calculate 200 million piece positions per second and beat world champion Garry Kasporov in 1997.

Feb 15, 2006

A boy, a bear, and a myth

There ought to be a bear story, but there isn't. There's always a bear story, where the bear represents the primal or the uncontrollable or the ancient. Where the boy fights the bear and it takes years maybe, both of them growing stronger and meeting again and again through the years and there's a symmetry between them and they identify more with each other than with any thing else and finally one or both of them dies and it marks a change. But, as I said, there's no such story.

There was a bear though. He smashed into our chicken coop one night when we were away, leaving a jagged hole in the plywood and a few feathers and one chicken leg he'd somehow lost in the grass. A few days later Dad told one of the forest rangers we knew and the ranger said a farmer farther down the mountain had lost all his sheep the same week.

Dry weather, the ranger said. Brings 'em down.

We talked about getting the bear, my brother and my dad and me. My brother called it a Grizzly but Dad said there weren't Grizzlies anymore, in California. We talked about how big of a gun we'd need and how far Dad's breach-break shotgun would shoot if we loaded it with slugs and how you would skin a bear and if a bear tooth necklace would be something you could wear to town. We turned off the outside lights at night so we wouldn't scare him away and at night my brother made me promise through the dark to wake him up if the bear came. Going to sleep I imagined the bear story, imagined the story so I'd be the archetypal boy fighting the archetypal bear and I thought about the bear so he was old, and brown, and huge.

Our neighbor came down later that week to talk. He had 10 thousand acres that surrounded our 10 and he lived up the road by the gate. Pretty much he never talked to us, except the one time some visiting friends forgot to lock the gate and he called us to yell and scream that he'd see that we would be responsible for any cows that escaped. Besides that he'd just wave, driving by in his jeep when me and my brother were out cutting wood or shooting cans or throwing rocks. In the fall and the winter he was a hunting guide. People from LA and Hollywood would come up to hunt deer and he'd take them out in his jeep and he'd find the animals and they'd set up their gear, scopes and tripods and camouflage, and they'd get the feeling for what the wild wilderness was like and they'd pay him and then when the weekend was over they'd go home.

We heard him driving down the road, that day, heard the enginee coming over the potholes and the gravel, and he stopped by the fence and we said hello and he got out and dad came out of the garage and he started talking to dad about the bear. Dad told him what the ranger said and the neighbor told us that was true and what he'd heard. He seemed to expect we'd be afraid the bear would eat one of the younger kids and said that's why he'd come by. Dad laughed, just a heh so it was only a little exhale escape of air. The neighbor seemed disappointed.

Well, he said, sort of coming to the point, if you do see it don't shoot it. It'd be out of season and that's illegal and the fur'd be bad. It wouldn't be worth nothing - it's just a cub, you know, probably a yearold. The older ones know to stay away from civilization. He waved at the mountain and the woods and our house, which was the only house you could see from there, except for the two that sometimes caught the sunset in their windows on the mountain across the valley.

Yeah, Dad said, and the neighbor started telling us he was thinking he could get James Cameron who directed the Titanic to come up again this year and pay to hunt for a weekend and he bet Cameron'd really pay to hunt a bear.

That was the last I ever heard of it.

Feb 12, 2006

Samuel Koster, who helped to liberate a Nazi death camp in WWII, who was the highest ranking military officer to be charged with the massacre of South Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, and who countermanded the order to count the My Lai dead, died of cancer on January 23 at the age of 86.

May he rest in peace.

Feb 9, 2006


Drawing crooked lines

Feb 7, 2006

Looking at weeds

Mom was a gardener and Dad was a Gardener. Every spring Dad'd be gone mowing and edging and trimming until way past dark and all summer he'd smell of grass and gas and the lines in his hands would stain dark green. Mom grew sunflowers along the back fence and black-eyed Susans by the front porch and she'd spend the spring and the summer walking up and down garden rows, her bare feet leaving toe prints in the soft dirt. Every fall the tomatoes would stop turning red and the frost would fall and we'd pick zucchinis.

There's a picture of me somewhere, from the spring I was 12, wrestling a rototiller down rows. Wearing blue flannel and a baseball cap and fighting the last frost and the rocks, I'd cut out the sod and the crab grass with a maddox and a shovel and gas and oil up the rototiller and bang out the air filter and pull on the pull cord knotted into the coughing clogged up engine. When it wouldn't start I'd step up on the edge of the rototiller and throw myself back, heels pulling at the dirt until the engine rolled over. The exhaust would puff and choke out the front and the blades would turn and I'd hold the handles, pulling back, fighting to hold it still and it'd turn and bite into the ground, spewing up the roots and the rocks and the dirt in a circle. It'd dig down and down until the engine was sinking into the overturned dirt and then I'd let it go climbing up out of its fresh-dug hole and up onto the frosted top again and then again I'd fight to hold it. It was a fight the whole way down and up, but in the end I'd let the tiller turn out into the grass and look back at the turned up lot. Finished. Accomplished. I'd walk out over the dirt with a rake, breaking up dirt clods and looking for worms and watching the birds come down to scratch and pick after grubs.

It must of been the next spring or the spring after, when after all the tilling and weeding, watering and harvesting had given me the taste for it, when I'd smelled the furrowed dirt and the rotting leaves, the sun-turned basil and the frost-black vines, that I decided to grow something for myself. I decided to grow lettuce. A plot of lettuce to sell at a farmers market or fair or to friends. I tilled a plot, a brown dirt square, and raked it over and over. Threw out rocks and pulled up crab grass roots. Dad and I went down to the seed store and bought a whole sale pack of lettuce seeds. Little seeds, pointy at one end and the smallest I'd ever seen, and when the long-bearded overhauled clerk heard I was growing a whole plot and gonna sell them he cut me a deal. I set out rows, drawing little lines and passing out clumps of seeds in rows. I covered them over and watered them down and waited.

Every day I'd stand to the side with my thumb over the hose letting the morning-cold water spray in a fan sprinkling down leaving little droplets in the dirt. Each morning, after I'd fed the chickens and watered the family garden and the flower garden, I'd stand there and watch and wait. For a week I watered and waited and hoped, looking at dirt. Then the weeds came up, little green leaves popping up through the surface and I kneeled down looking to see if some of them were growing in lines. I looked closely to see if some of those leaves were lettuce. Weeds, I figured, too early for anything but weeds but still I looked. And I waited. And hoped. And worried, wondering if something had maybe gone wrong. If all I'd see was fresh sprung weeds.

The weeds grew I still couldn't see any lines. I tried to connect the dots but could only see zigged zags and wild swirls and disorder growing and crowding out the dirt. I thought about it, squatting and looking every way, every angle, and wondering if maybe this could somehow still be my lettuce. Maybe my lettuce somehow slipped, sloshed out of line, and maybe somehow I'd only have to wait some more. But the weeds grew stronger, and harder, and wilder and I never saw any lettuce.

There was no moment of revelation, no point of realization, just the slow rehardening of the soil and spiraling out of the weeds, growing in prickles and twining vines and snarling in yellow grasses. There was no moment when I realized it'd failed, that the weeds had won, that the soil had swallowed the seeds and they'd rotted away. It was just a slow sinking, a silence as I said nothing, could say nothing against the weeds, and one day I just stopped watering.

One day I turned off the hose and stood up and just looked and admitted I'd failed.

Feb 1, 2006

Jesus Chirst and Josey Wales:
Reimagining the Christic 'Sacrifice' through the American Western

My outline for a future Fairfield Society presentation on the Westen hero-gunslinger as a metaphor explaining redemption.

Jan 31, 2006

Writing folded fortunes

He read all the signs on the way home on the subway. Watching for 10-word sentences. He tried to clear his mind, he inhaled, and started to cycle through the catagories the way he had them listed in the word document at work: Love, Luck, Riches, Success, Power, Wisdom.

He tried to focus, then unfocus, then focus, the way you when you're too tired to see anymore, and he rubbed his eyes. They hadn't hired him because he was a poet. They hadn't hired him for insight, for having some knack for simple sentences or for knowing anything special about Love or Luck or any of those. He was, after all, an accountant. Before this he'd been shipping lumber from Oregon and Washington to China and before that he'd worked in a bank then he just got this job. At the fortune cookie factory.

He worked here for a year, and then for a second year and then in the third year he noticed all the fortunes. Focused on them, the little stips of paper with lotto numbers and fortunes, folded up inside the cookies. Even when people didn't eat the cookie, when they just cracked it open and left the shattered shell sitting next to the silverware and chop sticks, they read the fortune. People eating alone would read them, maybe smile, and maybe put them in their pockets. People eating in groups would read them aloud, compare them, and pass them around. They made four million fortune cookies a day and each cookie had a fortune folded inside. Sometime soon after he noticed this he read a subway sign that read Beware of odors from unfamiliar sources, and he smiled and thought it would make a good fortune.

That day he asked. No one had ever thought to ask before but he asked. First he found the president and then a manager and then the guy in shipping and recieving on the floor. Where do the fortune's come from? he said. Who writes them? The president said he didn't know but the manager might, and the manager said he didn't know but called over the guy from the back. The guy from the back was behind the boxes, when they called him, working through a shipment of dough and sugar. He had a pen tucked up in his NY ball cap and a box cutter between his lips. When he heard them he stood up, his head coming over the stack. He took the box cutter out of his lips and he said Same fortunes we've always used. Old Chinese sayings or something. Come in from the printer on Tuesdays.

That was 15 years back, when they gave him the job. They gave it to him because he asked about it. Not about the job but about the fortunes. As soon as he asked, too, everybody wondered. Later though, he would say they picked him because a fortune cookie fortune writer must have a simple mind. They knew, he would say, that I could only think one sentence at a time.

He did think in straightforward sentences, these days, but that came after he started writing fortunes. His thinking pattern seemed to slow, as he wrote, to narrow into single-phrased sentences. First he filled up one note book and then a second one and then in the middle of the third he started thinking that way, in insights and forsights and without ever thinking a paragraph or an extra clause. He wrote fortunes at night and between spread sheets and on the subway and at lunch and sometimes he'd walk around the floor between the rattle of the machines and the heat of the ovens. People tried to help him, at first, come up with submissions. But after a while they stopped or he asked them to stop and eventually people just forgot. When someone asked him what he did, too, he would say what he'd always said ever since he'd graduated, he'd say accountant. He didn't know why but there was something shy about it, like he was afraid the whole thing was a really silly affair. So he never said anything about it but it had changed the way he thought, the way he walked down the street, the way he always carried a notebook and was looking for a sentence to say something about Love, Luck, Riches, Success, Power, or Wisdom.

He began to wonder too if he'd find a single sentence, if that's what he was looking for really, in this secret obsession. Some sort of perfect sentence, a sentence that would stand out or sum up or capture fortune whole. In mid flight, like a bird grabbed out of the air.

That was 15 years. It was a little ecentricity and an obsession. For 15 years he filled notebook after notebook with fortune after fortune and then today it had stopped. It took him two subway stops to think of the phrase writers block and by then he was so tired he stopped. He put the notebook away. He took his glasses off. Folded them into his pocket and watched the graffiti on the walls without focusing, just seeing the colors.

On the way walking home he stopped at the Chinese resturant at the intersection and ordered just the won ton soup and he sat there watching people, waiting for them crack their cookies, waiting for that moment when they read it silently and then say hey look. He just sat there, sipping soup and sipping tea and watching to see people read their fortunes.

Jan 30, 2006

3 news stories I don't understand,
or, how we are all too cynical and yet, also somehow, all too naive

1. 3rd Wave Feminist Naomi Wolf "finds Jesus."
(Why is everyone so snide?)

2. James Frey's memoir is work of fiction.
(Is it only worth reading if it's true?)

3. Google is censoring China's searches.
(Is Tiananmen Square @ google.com, any less filtered and any less biased that Tiananmen Square @ google.cn? (Via Matthew Bartlett.))


"'Let the facts speak for themselves' is perhaps the arch statement of ideology - the point being, precisely, that facts never 'speak for themselves', but are always made to speak."
          - Slovoj Zizek
Nellie Y. McKay, who co-authored the first and definitive anthology of black American literature, who championed black women writers and who introduced America to the idea of African-American studies, died of cancer last Sunday.

May she rest in peace.