First, let me take a moment to “chuckle” at the pun and response to the pun in Simula’s post.

I don’t quite know how I feel about distant reading. The majority of me is of the opinion that “yes, this is totally a valid way to analyze literature and is amazingly useful in conjunction with familiar close reading.” The other part of me is looking at the Agate tutorials and cookbooks and is wordlessly expressing confusion and doubt. Maybe the fact that the tutorial is working with something inherently more quantifiable than literature makes me wary of how well my experiment will work in tomorrow’s workshop.

I’m very uncertain about my queries. First, I tried to search for “frock,” and the results compiled very quickly. Then I searched for “dress.” The results were also quick, which makes me nervous. I wish I could think of something like “queer world making” or another delightfully specific phrase. I would believe in the results of such a query. As it stands, I’ll be interested in seeing if my results even form a table tomorrow.

Mateas and Monfort explicitly state that they are not looking into obfuscated code that is created for commercial protection. Instead, they focus on obfuscation done mostly for the sake of play, with a little bit of art thrown in. However, their discussion of “bilingual” phrases or programming language got me thinking about another reason people might want to obfuscate their code, and what it could do.

In thinking about obfuscation in code and code as literary, I couldn’t help thinking of Russian and Soviet writers using Aespoian language to potentially, maybe, in-a-way-that-could-always-reasonably-be-denied, communicate subversive messages to audiences without breaking the rigid rules of socialist realism or getting targeted by the censors.

Here, the process of obfuscating language/stories often through the use of metaphors and symbols that were fairly open to interpretation clearly served both a political purpose and an artistic one. (However, it is entirely possible that some writers used Aesopian language to subvert only the art-limiting rules of socialist realism without saying anything antagonistic towards the state that instituted the system.)

Still, what can obfuscated code do?

Mateas and Monfort maintain that “to be worth anyone’s attention [obfuscated programs] must actually do something and have a machine meaning as well as a human one” (10). This “something” is full of so many possibilities. Perhaps obfuscated code can allow cheating in the spirit of the Volkswagon emissions violations. Certainly, that has to be on someone’s mind. Perhaps obfuscated code can be used to convey secret messages to humans in the form of INTERCAL’s “forgiving compiler” that simply skips code it doesn’t understand, thereby letting code look-a-likes to carry messages only visible to humans that the machine simply ignores. These hidden comments could then be deciphered by a key that the intended human recipients have in their possession. (And this could easily be modified to a more advanced version of cryptography, but that’s beyond me.)

Now, let’s bring in music into the discussion. But first, let’s talk about these super-weird, totally fascinating thing called numbers stations.

From Wikipedia:

A numbers station is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by unusual broadcasts, reading out lists of numbers or incomprehensible coded messages.^[1] The voices are often created by speech synthesis and are transmitted in a wide variety of languages. The voices are usually female, although sometimes men’s or children’s voices are used. Some voices are synthesized and created by machines; however, some stations used to have live readers.^[2] Many numbers stations went off the air due to the end of the Cold War in 1989, but many still operate and some have even continued operations but changed schedules and operators.

As excellent as that description is, it really doesn’t convey how terrifying and strange these stations are. In order to really demonstrate this, you really have to hear one of these. I kept trying to embed a broadcast here in this post, but that process has been giving me problems today. Here’s a link. (Start listening at 0:50 if you don’t want to listen to the whole  thing.)

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********PLEASE LISTEN TO THE LINK*****************************

*******************THIS IS HERE TO MAKE SURE YOU DON’T MISS IT*****************

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These things are amazing. What this strange, esoteric recording on Youtube loses (outside of any mp3 or mp4 ghosts as JUMP talks about them), though, is context. These broadcasts are actively being transmitted to someone(?) in theory but to everyone in practice. You can listen to them as they occur with a simple AM radio. (Can you imagine finding one of these broadcasts by accident?)

Now, let’s bring music into the discussion. Think about what could possibly be done now with computer generated music. Perhaps there would be absolutely no messages hidden in the code for a music generator at all. Perhaps the generated sounds of this program would then be used as input for another program that then converts the generated music into human-legible messages. What if it wasn’t human-legible at all, but machine-legible. A music generator would output a strand or a song or whatever, and then another machine would use that as input to run its own code/functions/algorithms. Maybe it would use the musical output as the seed to write its own code to be executed. Perhaps it would be another song, and computers could sing to one another in a responsive, dynamic way using a method both humans and machines could hear.

What if everyone working on computer generated music set up their own radio stations. If you want to talk about a musical intelligence Turing test, like the article on Donya Quick‘s Kulitta, this could be a fantastic test. Would radio stations run by music generating code work and have listeners? If numbers stations have listeners (and they actually have avid ones), doesn’t that mean any noise-maker would have an audience? Well, no, I don’t think so.

Part of the appeal of the numbers stations is that they are mysterious, but their broadcasts seem like a breakdown of the normal expectations of radio stations. Some of these stations just have alpha-numeric messages, but some, like the one linked above, play music. In theory, if you’re just casually surfing channels on your AM radio, you could be fooled by the numbers station’s obfuscation/music and surf on without knowing you stumbled on something very strange…

I always feel a bit odd because I don’t really have a proper attention span for playing games. I care about narratives, but I seem to have no desire to be a participant in the narrative. Whenever I pick up a game, I lose interest in it extremely fast. Probably my favorite game franchise is Pokemon, which is very linear, and I’ve only managed to finish one of the titles. I just stop caring, even when there are guides and obvious goals dictating my path. Even with the Sims, I mostly just make characters and build their houses. The actual gameplay is never as fun.

That brings me to sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress. I can’t stand them. Being plopped in the middle of a world with no directions is both dull and daunting. However, I did my best to engage with it. I watched two Youtube videos about how to get started with the game and how to work basic, basic controls. I had my boyfriend play with me for an hour while we tried to figure out where a good spot for our dwarves would be and begin to dig out a cave. I built beds for my dwarves and made a dormitory room. Now, it’s summer. I’m sure my dwarves will go hungry soon.

In an attempt to care more about my little critters, I tried to enter legends mode. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be an option once you’ve started playing with your dwarves. So, I decided to create a new world with a “Very Long” history. It took 50 minutes to generate, so here are some unedited screen shots from that process. (I shudder to think of the person JUMP mentioned who let their world creation run for 10,000 years.)

About every 100 years, the region would change. I did my best to not formulate any stories based on the names of the regions because I wanted to be able to judge the story generation ability of this nonsensically alpha game.

Once finally created, I hopped into legends mode. Did anyone else try and explore the lore of their worlds? Apparently, you can play in a world you’ve explored in legends mode, but not the other way around.

When I explored the lore of the regions, a lot were like this. Lots of people moved through or settled in them.

However, one of the regions that appeared twice during world generation, the Spike of Constructs, was huge.

There were multiple events entered for each of the 1050 years of world generation. It was crazy! Lots of people were struck down or defeated. Lots of people challenged various beasts in the area. When I went and explored the historical figures, I found a roc that had featured prominently in the tales of murder of the region and read his biography. In it, several of the battles I read about were mentioned again. He had a long and bloody history, since he existed before the region even began and was one of the first rocs in my generated world.

The generated stories reminded me a lot of the excerpts from Tale Spin’s stories we read. It made me wonder what exactly was happening behind the scenes and how Dwarf Fortress was generating these stories. One thing that made me pause was that in looking at the various historical people (lots of humans, dwarves, goblins, etc.), all the ones I looked at were of unknown parentage. Even those born in 1036 were of unknown parentage. That seemed like such a shame. I wish that Dwarf Fortress’s systems incorporated a sort of Universe aspect that made relationships between the characters more mandatory.

I did find a dead female goblin who rose to power in a religious group who had a husband and an only son, but that seemed too-little-too-late. In my exploration of regions, there were no records of births or marriages. It seems as though the systems privilege new figure-place encounters and antagonistic figure-figure encounters and their results. I found one story of a region being razed, but then that did not seem to impact the actors settling back in it immediately after. I found no stories of allegiances being made. Even the female goblin did not have “stories” about her marriage and her son. They were listed at the end of her biography as “related,” just like her religious society.

The exploration of the legends was really interesting, but since it was all centered on a world in which my dwarves don’t actually live, I’m still left with the issue that there’s just nowhere I want them to go. There’s too much black sand and silty clay in their environment and too much sand in my sandbox. I guess I’ll try and settle my very old world for next week and see if I can get the new dwarves to set up a cult around the Lionshell roc in the Spike of Constructs.

I recently finished chapter seven of Expressive Processing, so I have yet to read anything about the “Sim City Effect” or the conclusion to Wardrin-Fruip’s argument. However, the discussions of Brutus really started me thinking about authoring systems. I was in a small group last class that specifically talked about whether or not computers or machines could potentially be authors, so I’ve been thinking about this topic the past couple of days. Last class, my response to the general question of computer programs being authors was that I thought “in terms of copyright, the program’s creator would be considered the author,” which continues to strike me as a strange response to the question. Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Foucault lately…

However, my other two group members’ ideas were much more fascinating to me. One was adamant that computers would never be able to truly embody creativity and have authorship of their outputs. The other group member was perfectly willing to accept that AI would one day be capable of creative authoring, but that the processes used to do that would no longer fall under the umbrella of computation.

In response to the first position, I’d like to think more about Brutus. First, I was astounded when I read the “Dave Striver loved the university” story because it seemed so literary (245). There was nuance in the syntax and drama in the structure. I tried to imagine a very complicated underlying structure that somehow was able to create a story from isolated or hierarchical fragments, potentially using a question-input system like Tale-Spin and Terminal Time. As I read on, I saw that the system was a more elaborate love letter generator. Then, I was struck that Wardrip-Fruin continued his discussion and analysis of Brutus as an authoring system. It was so clear to me, personally, that its creators were the authors of the stories it output since they authored both the sentence components and the system for selecting those components. It takes until the section “Author of Brutus‘s Stories” for Wardrip-Fruin to give a hint as to why he participated in this illusion/game for several pages, the reason being that he suspects that even the creators were drawn into the illusion (258). I think that is super fascinating, but I don’t have anything concrete to say about it. Tale-Spin and Minstrel seem more like proto-authoring systems, but their tendency to break down when exposed to larger sets of possibilities is so opposite from how human authors are supposed to write, that is they’re supposed to become better with each scrap of knowledge they get, and I don’t want to be too generous when thinking about their potential. Universe and Brutus for me are authored works with the potential for varied outcomes, and in this way I think of them as being similar to Terminal Time in actuality, even if that is not how they’re conceived or perceived by the public. I guess that there still is no computer system I’ve come across that I would consider as serving as an author. Perhaps we really will never see that happen. Universe, Brutus, and Terminal Time all seem like procedural translators of authored texts at most.

In response to the second position, that a creative, autonomous, authoring machine would cease to be computational, I’m stuck. Perhaps I am just resistant to that idea because I’ve spent all this time and energy into learning some code, expanding my knowledge of computation, and understanding computers as procedural. I think I prefer to think about this as a blending of computation and creativity. From my limited understanding of this discipline, a good example of the two coming together is mathematics. Math we are taught as children is purely computational stuff (2+2=4), and later we are taught that computational math has some intersection with usefulness (namely money calculations and statistical biology, from my own experience). Personally, this is where I am with code; I see it as a tool that can let me arrive at a solution to a pre-conceived problem.

However, higher-level math and mathematical research is super creative.At a certain point, you stop using real numbers at all and work exclusively with concepts. Maybe this is why the idea that you need to be great at math to be really good at code, something we all came across in the Paul Ford piece at least, is so pervasive. Thinking about code as writing is easy, but actually writing code may have more in common with the way mathematicians creatively think of problem-solving than it does with how fiction writers creatively think of problem-solving. Perhaps, then, it would indeed be possible to have a computer that authored ideas, if not linguistically sound stories, and the solution to this problem lies in the path math walks between computation and creativity.

Hello, all,

It’s been nice to read how people are feeling more confident with their coding and how they feel like they’re making progress. While it was also cool to understand how the code was working on Thursday, even if I don’t quite get what APIs are yet, I generally feel like I’m having an imaginative crisis when it comes to code. This latest section of the Python Codecademy tutorials (Practice Makes Perfect)  is taking me much, much longer to complete now that I have to come up with solutions on my own. That should be expected, but I find myself just staring at Codecademy for an unproductive while before turning to Google to look at how other people have solved the problems (and I don’t like that).

Also, I was hopelessly blank in the workshop. I wanted to push the code and do something interesting and provocative. Instead, I just tweaked the code to tweet out an incomplete first chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I would have felt better about that if I could have written code that reformatted the plain text into lines of 140 characters, but I just tweeted the first 130 characters of a line/paragraph from Notepad. Maybe I’m just having an extended personal moment, but it feels like I’m lagging behind now when I felt that all of us mostly started on the same footing at the beginning of the semester.

I know that code can do cool things, but I’m worried that I can’t do those cool things.

I did the Python tutorials in two batches: one that took me 40 minutes, and one that took an hour and 20 minutes. There shouldn’t be any significance in this split, except that I felt my hands cramp up after the first 40 minutes. In my regular usage of the internet and word processing programs, I hardly ever touch the alternate characters of the number line. If procedural literacy has been thought of as a “requirement and right of an educated populace… for over 40 years,” then I am astounded that our keyboards do not allow for ease of programming (Mateas 111). In particular, I am confused that there is a specific number pad off on the right of every one of the Pitt computer lab keyboards but that there is no alternative for the awkward “Shift+ ” sort of input that is required to program. If the number pad is useful because it enables computers to more easily be used for business or number-crunching purposes, why is there not a keyboard layout that enables an easier way to type code? It strikes me as odd that the infrastructure available does not seem to comply with the general stated goals of programming literacy.As far as I can see, computational literacy is of great use to the study of English and the humanities in general. For me, it’s easier to see the necessity of computational literacy for research interests and pedagogical concerns that deal with the contemporary and the future. If one cannot understand procedure, then one will never look at code. However, even within the Python teaching module, there were many, numerous comments hidden within # lines and triple quotation marks. I think that these markers of human making can be as fruitful to study as earlier drafts of poems, diary entries, marginalia. (Even some computational literacy will give context to those comments.) Even in published video games produced by Nintendo and other major corporations, there are packets of unused code that contain clues about the direction that a game might have gone, at one point. This is amazing and incredible, but how relevant is computational literacy to something like Victorian literature? Well, besides being able to use computation as a tool in general research, I also think that literacy will let me (and others) analyze and interact with our current moment’s interaction with and reproduction of our collective (mis)remembering of the Victorian period. That might be Neo-Victorian studies, but that is a whole other area that I find super interesting.