What
Are You Up To?
En
Que Es?
NKS?
Oracle by Ed Binkowski
Taking a Chance on Aleatory Art/Daring Hanta During the Junta
In
the desert. In the mountains.
Near (but not in) the Marine base at 29 Palms: be one of the few, the
proud.
Why
NKS?
Stephen
Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science posits that all patterns can be
generated by—are somehow implicit in—a single (type of) cellular automaton:
the infamous Rule 110.
For
the alien visitor, or the incurably curious, it’s easiest to think of a
cellular automaton as a set of black (“alive”) and white (“dead”)
squares on an infinite checkerboard. Each
turn the squares turn color, depending on the condition of their neighbors the
previous turn. For example, a rule
could be, “if all of your neighbors are alive, you become alive!” Many such rules will produce nothing. A few will “live” for a few turns, then die completely
(Class 1). A very few will reproduce a pattern in an infinite, ever-growing
cycle (Class 2, an example just above) or simple chaos (Class 3). And at least one, Rule 110, appears to just keep on going,
unpredictable, ever fertile, ever new—what he terms “Class 4 behavior”.
Wolfram’s
view of “all patterns” is not a diffident one.
“All” means all: mathematical, biological, chemical, social patterns.
If he is right—if his “Principle of Computational Equivalence” is
true—then “A New Kind of Science” is not hyperbole but understatement.
His results on the mathematical front are unassailable.
In biology they represent a light-year’s jump in the understanding of
evolution. Just how far does their
reach go?
Why
Artists?
Is
the authentic vision created or discovered?
Does the insight come from axiom and craft, or from the renunciation of
them? What are the inherent limits
of algorithmic/aleatory/computer art? Does
Wolfram offer a way out of the dilemma? Tilt
a little bit this way, and get sterile flatness; tilt a little the other way,
and get random debris. Only on the
infinitesimal dividing line can something useful be born.
How can the injunction to “make
it new” make sense? Wallace
Stevens had one version of a response.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said to him, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
The Way of the Affirmation
of Images vs. The Way of the Negation of Images. Immanence vs. Emanence.
Horace said that sublime art can come about in only two ways: Concordia
discors or discordia concors-- a satisfactory joining of images that don't fit, or a
rupture of harmonious expectations.
The whole point of Class 4 systems that we SEE patterns
after the fact but cannot ANTICIPATE the patterns? Shouldn't this be what all art is trying for: novel, but
inevitable? Structured but
unpredictable?
At
least we don't consciously anticipate the patterns.
Are we responding at some deeper level?
Decades before "what fires together is wired together" became a
mantra, Alfred Korzybski in Science and Sanity claimed that the reason we
see mathematical regularities everywhere is simply because that's how our
nervous systems work. You can no
more expect us to observe other patterns that you can expect us to see infrared.
If Wolfram is right are these patterns not just compulsion but
obligation?
The
real reason: not only is art too important to leave to the scientists; even the
science is too important to leave to the scientists.
The
real real reason: to clinch his arguments, Wolfram, for all his millions
of dollars, for all the tens of thousands of references and many hundreds of
pages of notes, with all of these for support, from the very first he replies
primarily on his images, his—dare I say it?—artwork.
The eyes have it.
Because “the mills of the
gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small”.
Because there is
“the universe in a grain of sand”, and Wolfram has proved it.
And this is where all the sand is.
Because all religions start
in the desert, cellular automata among them.
The field did not spring full-blown from Wolfram’s forehead, his
posturing to the contrary. Most
researchers attribute earlier insights to John (“The Game of Life”) Conway,
pining (yucca-ing?) away in the sands of Santa Fe. Almost none now remember that the real origins of the work
began in the desert at Los Alamos shortly after World War II.
Stan Ulam, with John Von Neumann the co-inventor of Monte Carlo methods,
first noticed the not quite predictable features of some of these simple rules
once the Manhattan Project’s primitive computer was no longer running day and
night on bomb development work. And
among those present at Los Alamos was a young Richard Feynman, much later to be
the mentor of the prodigy Wolfram.
Because AUTM (Art: the
Universal Turing Machine) is the only time to go to the desert.
Because we can.
Because we must.
Because for all his
brilliance Wolfram is profoundly pessimistic about the implications of his work.
He is wrong: the door on creativity has not been closed but opened.
Because his great
teacher, whose creativity was best expressed in Feynman diagrams,
was both more optimistic and more accurate when he said:
…we have seen that the complexities of things can so easily and dramatically escape the simplicity of the equations that describe them… Yet, all of these are really in the equations; we just haven’t found a way to get them out… The next great awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. (Lectures in Physics II, 41-12)
Postscript:
ABCD (Autonomous Brooklyn Cellular Ducks) Prepare for the Mojave
You
Can Call Me Al(Gorithm)
A cell goes down the board
He says why am I white in the middle now
Why am I white in the middle now
When all around me is black
I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at exemption
Don't want to end up a Class 1
In a Class 1 graveyard
Go figure, go figure
Piles of output
Stacked all over my unseen floor
Mr. Classicist, Classicist,
Get these models away from me
You know I don't find this stuff amusing anymore
If you'll be my Bête Noire
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Stephen
And Stephen when you call me
You can call me Al
A cell goes down the board
He says why I’ve got a short little cycle
Got a short little period of cycle
When my life is so long
Where's my branches and neighbors
What if I die here
Who'll be my role-model
Now that my role-model is
Gone Gone
He converged back down the algorithm
Into some roly-poly little white-faced grid
All along, along
There were incidents and accidents
There were hints and allegations
If you'll be my Bête Noire
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Stephen
And Stephen when you call me
You can call me Al
Call me Al
(Wild flourish of horns)