Fashionable Noise: Learning the Algorithm January 22, 2008
Posted by bstefans in : Fashionable Noise , trackbackAfter trying to apply this typology to the game Dark Castle, Aarseth concludess that “Andersen’s typology of computer-based signs is both too elastic and too arbitrary to be really useful.” Furthermore, he decides that one cannot determine a computer semiology based entirely on what has been represented on the screen – the heroes, the castles, the trap-doors, etc. – but must take into consideration the “internal, coded level”:
[What] goes on at the external level can only be fully understood only in light of the internal. Both are equally intrinsic, as opposed to the extrinsic status of the performance of a play vis-à-vis the play script. To complicate matters, two different code objects might produce virtually the same expression object, and two different expression objects might result from the same code object under virtually identical circumstances. The possibilities for unique or unintentional sign behavior are endless, which must be bad news for typologists. (p. 40)
It goes without saying that this is also bad news for the reader of a CP who hopes to put a final interpretation on the poem, as much as the hermeneutic enterprise may (and should) beckon (see footnote 3). Since the CP is premised on the reader’s willingness to learn the rules of interaction with the poem, which is to say to explore the reader/writer contract the poem proposes, the variability that the demon creates could put the deduction of these rules mostly out of reach. The ambiguity of language itself, which enterprises such as Chomsky’s “generative grammar” seek to render predictable and put true AI nearly out of reach, makes it even harder to identify the contours of the demon by attempting to read the output alone.
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