The Turing Sest

On my way to see The Imitation Game I vaccinated my expectations with a healthy dose of skepticism for a movie on a math hero, but this turned out to be too cautious.
The feature was no disappointment. Like most movies about science and math, this one, too, is more about
human relationships than the presumed subject matter. A poignant Alan Turing, troubled by his creative demons and his Aspergarian relational style sticks to your memory's ribs.

Some mild disappointment dawned on me after I realized (not without a modicum of research) the road the film indicated but did not take, a path that, if artfully pursued, could have turned this into a masterpiece.

Most of the movie narration appears to be a Turing test, where Alan
challenges a detective eager to prove he was a Soviet spy into playing
"the imitation game."
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Imitation_Game
this was the test that Turing proposed in two versions in his 1950
paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and not the
movie's namesake.
While this sleight of extreme self-referentiality is brilliant, an
actual "imitation game" would have required three players and a judge,
all secluded from each other. If the detective was the judge, he
should not have faced the other player(s), for the goal of the game
was to tell them apart from machines.
This makes me only half-heartedly sold on this conceipt.

Let me mention the motifs that struck me:

Intolerance of diversity, especially exemplified by the aforementioned
bullying at the boarding school Alan attended as well as the injustice
of the British facade of decency.

The genius leaning on the shoulders of his collaborators and not only
his giant predecessors: Alan did not work in a vacuum, even his proud
and grand ego was compelled to accept the support of his former
rivals.

The forlorn adolescent love incarnating into The Machine: Poe's (and
Nabokov's!) Annabelle Lee meets Dr. Frankestein.
This is probably the most original facet of this feature.

The supreme historical irony that not only Hitler would be defeated
(also) by the hand of a gay man, but that the key step in breaking
Enigma would be the constant conclusion of certain messages with "heil
Hitler!"
Incidentally, this is the most math you will get from this movie: the
combinatorial fact that if you fix a subpattern into a universe of
patterns you cut the dimensions proportionally to the length of the
subpattern. 


Perhaps precisely because this wasn't to be a documentary on Enigma or
Turing machines, but rather a biopic set against a difficult societal background 
I think this film missed big time on the main subtext of the
original imitation game.
This stems from an all too human party game where a judge strives
to make out the gender of two unknown and invisible human players of
opposite sex. A machine then substitutes one of the players, but the
roles and aim stay the same.
I can't help thinking Turing, the historical Alan, was sublimating
his own predicament
when he formulated this poignant metaphor of gender identification and
of the moral obtuseness of society facing it!

Happy Bard-Day!

To be or not to be 

 450!

Trailers that Lead

The force of brevity Poe found in the 100 lines poem {The Philosophy of Composition) has many descendants in today's ADHD-icted World.
My favorite are (Movie) Trailers. And what a misnomers, by the way! They often are the best part of the show. Just like the commercials on TV, especially the Super Bawl-grade ones. Think about the message and appeal they compact in a minute or two. I can't remember a trailer that disappointed me, while most movies do. And how many movies I do go see because of a trailer! (Of course there is some survivorship bias of sorts here: I do not go see certain movies because of the negative expectation their trailer sets, those movies might have turned positive surprises.)
Some trailers do rise above the mass. And I am not the only one to appreciate these ultra-short features akin to very short stories, but actually a feat of editing. I remember hearing of people going to the movies just to see the trailer of one of the "Star Wars" episodes (probably a precursor to this one).
One of my all-time favorites is the original "Cloverfield" trailer, which started as abruptly as ever, haphazard and raw just like the hand-held camera video it purports to be.
I also enjoy crescendo-trailers, like the first version of "The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" or "After Earth," which is playing in theaters as I write. The latter is also a crescendo in elocution and delivery. I took it as a hybrid between FDR's "fear of fear" and Scientology anti-psychiatry.
Who's trailing here?

robo/Poe/t

In Race Against the Machine Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee find another compelling explanation for the Great Joblessness we are currently navigating. Rather than in a deeply cyclical or deeply structural (loss of competitive edge leading to a Great Stagnation) quagmire, the US (and other developed economies) are facing a Great Restructuring: technological innovation is accelerating so fast that it has become increasingly hard for the workforce to keep up with machines. In the wake of the Great Recession, employers bought more machines, but did not rehire people. As a result, a whole swath of the traditional labor force is facing chronic unemployment. As the frontier of automation and artificial intelligence expands to absorbe occupations previously believed the prerogative of human hands and minds, acquisition of complex skills seems the only winning strategy. The authors are fundamentally techno-optimists and believe the "tools [of digital technology] are greatly improving our world and our lives, and will continue to do so. We are strong digital optimists, and we want to convince you to be one, too." In interviews, they point to areas where human creativity thrives.

Poetry, that exquisite form of human creation (even etymologically!), immediately comes to mind. Curiously, in 1846, Edgar Allan Poe published The Philosophy of Composition. A veritable recipe, qualitative and quantitative, as to the creation of a successful poem. Poe purports this to be a faithful description of his composition of The Raven. At times it reads like an algorithm, from the choice of topic, to length, to diction, "with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem." One would think it easy to code these prescriptions into a poetry-processor! And indeed automatic text generation was one of the first milestones of artificial intelligence (think ELIZA).
Not so fast! The subtext of this essay and of Poe's entire career left many of his contemporaries and modern literati perplex as to whether this was serious or one more hoax in the author's remarkable and inimitable repertoire. Poe as humbug, or Poe as reflexive and calculating poet?
No job for a roboPoeT!

Sartrian Motion

One of the most fascinating achievements in contemporary philosophical thought is Sartre's "rehabilitation" of Nothingness. Since Parmenides, Nothingness had been dismissed as ... nothing. But here in the XX century it enters the stage as a main actor of existence.

Sartre thinks in terms of consciousness (Being and Nothingness). But what if we get physical and apply this dichotomy between Being and Nothingness to everything? Can the Universe be explained with a hyper-frequent dialectics of Being and Nothingness? The physical history of the Universe points to the emergence of everything out of very simple states of existence, extreme complexity out of simplicity.
A beautiful constructs of mathematics serves as metaphor of this dynamics, Brownian Motion. This can be constructed as the as limit of more and more frequent random walks. From exquisitely dichotomous motion---up or down---we can construct the prototypical model of random and continuous motion.

I often criticize people who see the world in black and white. But what if the world can be explained as a mind-boggling number of vibrations between blacks and whites? Quantity and Time makes for the possibility of new Qualities. The application I am using to write these words is another embodiment of the potentials of this dichotomy (dialectics?): it is ultimately based on bits, zeros and ones, Nothingness and Being.

The Die is Last!

In a recent post, Tim Johnson learnedly portrays the Occupy movement(s) as a rejection of the positive role that gambling and speculation play in society. This appears to be based mostly on a discussion of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

While I do not dispute, Dr. Johnson's appraisal of Graeber's monograph, I beg to disagree with his interpretation of the principles of the Occupy movements. Rather than blaming gambling and speculation and, more generally, the entire financial industry for the economic morass in which developed societies find themselves, these movements protest the barriers to equal opportunities that with time have been erected. Indeed, at the core of the American dream as well as of most other democracies is the belief that if one puts enough efforts and dedication, barring misfortunes, one ought to be able to succeed. I am not knowledgeable of other countries' recent histories, but I can say that the economic policies of the last 30 years (since the onset of trickle down economics) have increasingly burdened the great majority of Americans, and made it increasingly arduous to gain access to opportunities and upward social mobility. Nothing exemplifies this better than the ballooning cost of education and the ensuing student loan crisis. In short the divide between the 1% and the 99% is not just access to ``smart investment'' for smart money, but rather the barriers that make these and many other such opportunities almost surely impossible. Before the Occupy movements, at least in the US the sense that income and wealth and the consequent opportunities were still distributed consistently with the feasibility of the American dream was widespread. This is well exemplified by the study of Norton and Ariely. The Occupy movements radically changed that perception.

Arguably, the most significant parable on the role of randomness in Humanity is the lottery in Plato's myth of Er. The order in which the souls to be reincarnated can select their new lives is random, the choices are their own. A poignant conceit of the blend of chance and choice that beginning at birth takes place in our lives. While much randomness is beyond our control, perhaps as much arises from societal intercourse, and we can call this gambling. I think that most would agree that a society is fair when gambling is a fair game. The point of the Occupy movements is that this is no longer the case, and the practices of the industry of speculation not speculation per se is one of the most egregious examples of such fundamental unfaireness. Wall St. (and the 1%) is the dealer, it's gotten better than even chances, or, to use quantitative finance, the 99%'s gains in this game follow a supermartingale. And how could it be a fair game when gains are privatized and losses are billed to the tax payer?

The Humanverse

With a chiaroscuro of feelings, a heavy heart and an accepting smile, I heard of Wislawa Szymborska's passage earlier this week.
Literature is thaumaturgic, it conjures miracles out of a distillation of the ordinary and the extraordinary that teems in the wholly human realm of language. Elias Canetti believed that Literature can heal.
I experienced that. Swann's seemingly unending agony in pursuit of Odette  ushered me to the end of a harrowing year of unrequited love, and suddenly kicked me out of that gulch of gloom with this surprising denouement:

Dire que j'ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j'ai voulu mourir, que j'ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n'était pas mon genre!

Szymborska does it over and over.
Her lines, her astonishing endings, reach deep down our layers of humanity and cast a ray of Caravaggio's light unto the darkness. And that ray is as mighty as God striking Saul on the road to Damascus and yet as gentle as a mother stroking her baby.
Thus, the "life goes on" of Reality Demands placed my experience of September 11th within the sweeping cycles of history, portraying the forlorn quest for meanings foreshortened against the the wheel of impermanence. And yesterday she struck again, with the final awe of Nothing is a gift. At the end of the day, all we are left with is the soul. Perhaps, her soul is the grains of sand that make her wisdom and truth and beauty, that support our steps like singing sands, that make you realize in the beginning there is the Word, and the World, our World, whirls out of that Word.
Thank you, Wislawa!