Turing & More

Reading: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" by Turing; "As We May Think" by Bush; and
"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Borges
from The New Media Reader

My first encounter with Turing was while reading Gibson's Neuromancer. I had picked up some of the references and (possibly with the help of a study guide) tried to identify more. I had picked up the idea somewhere of Neuromancer as post-modern and that one of the characteristics of a post-modern novel was intertextuality (like that wasn't a characteristic of a Renaissance piece, but I digress). So I looked up obscure references. Because I was the teacher. So I found out about Turing.

Oh. My. Gosh. He is an interesting man. He was so clever, but (oh, horror!) he was gay. So his government made him crazy. I still fail at wrapping my head around that.

Turing says "It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstance" (60). This caught my attention, because this inability to adequately catalog human behavior is what often trips up people with Asperger's Syndrome (like my son). Often bright, they can memorize all kinds of rules for behavior, but can never memorize all rules for behavior.

Enough about Turing.

Bush's article is interesting. In describing the future of information, he got many aspects right. Even if he missed on the actual methodology of the achievement, he identified many of the achievements that we have made in data storage and retrieval. And photography. "Often" he says, "it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately" (39). And it is very advantageous to look at the back of my digital camera to see whether the picture I hoped to see will appear. Or if I need to attempt to capture the image again.

In some ways, Bush's piece reads like 1950s Heinlein or Asimov-- the inventions are there, described in ways that fit with the current technology (punched cards seem awfully important, for example). But the concepts seem somehow right.

My favorite line from Bush, though, is that "truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential" (37). He was referring to the work of Gregor Mendel. My current research project (and this is related, promise) is on dual credit/concurrent enrollment and composition. There is a lot of information about education, and a lot of propaganda about concurrent enrollment. But most of it quotes the same studies, without showing the methodology. So instead of a lot of good information about a topic I am interested in, I get the same information channeled again and again. (I have found some good data, but the most cited data is not reported well).

The last article that I want to talk about is the Borges piece. It is actually a story. And in some ways, it reminds me of a videogame. A friend of mine teaches a class in interactive fiction, actually. Of course, the piece is not really interactive. The labyrinth by the narrator's ancestor is interactive, in that all possible choices continue to exist. In essence, I can "travel both" and "be one traveler" in this construct.

This does remind me of Sarte, though, in the randomness way the coincidences play out. The narrator obviously did not intend the fate of the man who validated his ancestor's work-- yet the fate still occurred.

What do the pieces have in common? They are all precursors to new media-- branched storytelling, information storage and retrieval (libraries on our desks!), and machines that can (or not) think.