Transmission 009 : On game protocol

Random Lissajous Webs
By the generative artist Keith Peters

We are exposing here some thoughts on the protocol of use of the interface, basically the rules of the navigation in the “game”.
At first, the user/ expert is presented with a complete image of the problem he will be called to solve. This is the general question and does not concern the specific, sub-categories of questions involved in solving it.
Ex: An expert in mine-seeking would be presented with something like “How to find all the mines in a field with the minimum of casualties”.
This is the objective-goal, the optimum outcome from the game and also the boundaries of the space-form on the interface.

Thus, he has a specific end-exit point (mines exterminated w/ minimum casualties) and a number of possible entry points depending on his proper way of organizing the process of problem solving (general conditions info, specific context info, techniques info, prevention info etc…)

There is already a pre-existing form of organization of data on the interface. This would be something like a false, non-perfect or incomplete proposition on how to proceed.
That way, the expert starts correcting, re-organizing, adding elements, teaching the system somehow how to evolve its original form.
Also, this original form is a way of rephrasing questions as answers (even if wrong) and permitting the expert to enrich the scenario by inputing new questions (ex. Extra geographical, climatic, historical specifications needed to proceed)

As the user re-shapes the form, the system creates new connections based on its internal protocol of organization, dynamically, with laws of gravity, magnetism, forces of attraction and repulsion, deformation etc. (See Transmission 007).

In case multiple experts of the same field will be consecutively proceeding in the game, the initial form is always enriched but the previous person.

Space Time
By the generative artist Keith Peters

Transmission 008 : Gestalt psychology

We were interested in this approach in psychology because it proposes an alternative way of combining elements in order to produce a result – argument. Gestalt psychology is connected to the rules of human perception of an image (problem or question) and in the different ways the brain can decompose it in.

Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different from the sum of its parts.

The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses (the word Gestalt in German literally means "shape" or "figure"), particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.

Traditional scientific methodology assumed that by dividing an object of study into a set of elements and analyzing them separately one could reduce the complexity of the object and treat more easily.
The example of diagram or arborescence more or less refers to a visualization of a problem through its decomposition in families, groups, entities, hierarchies and connections between them.
Ex. A dog is made of a body on to which connect four legs, a head and a tail. The head is comprised of ears, eyes, a mouth etc.
Taking all these elements and combining them in the right order should give us the image of a dog.

The school of Gestalt appears as an opposition and alternative way of dealing with a complex problem proving that the human mind can recognize a form regardless of the absence of its components, regardless of parts of it missing, as long as the entity remains accessible as a hint.
Ex. The Dalmatian dog in the picture is not recognized by first identifying its parts (feet, ears, nose, tail, etc.), and then inferring the dog from those component parts. Instead, the dog is perceived as a whole, all at once. However, this is a description of what occurs in vision and not an explanation. Gestalt theory does not explain how the percept of a dog emerges.

Gestalt theory can bring two important things to our interface. The first one is the use of selecting informations to create emergences. In the same way the dots of the Dalmatian is put at the same level of the leaves. It is a way to maximilise and minimalize informations in a same process in the order to lighten special features, to create analogies, to build bridges.

The Second aspect is the way gestalt theory is able to disguise a shape: a rabbit will become a duck, to allow a knocking over the perception that we have of it, to organize its hybridization.

Transmission 007 : GRAMMAR 1.0

The form of the knowledge and its continuous transformations will be ruled by parameters. Those parameters are related to the way the knowledge is structured (by successive conditions), to the way it is constructed (by the expert during the session) and to the nature of the knowledge itself (this nature has nothing to do with any idea of ‘truth’, it’s linked to the history of the knowledge and the corpus of problematics that it deals with).

We actually distributed those parameters in three big families (We are currently working on this classification, some boundaries remaining quite porous and not well defined, no word seems actually enough accurate to define completely the field of knowledge that it’s supposed to cover). The first one are parameters related to conditions, i.e: find the tool, open the valve; the second one contains parameters related to deformation, i.e: use the tool to cut the wire, let the air get out of the valve; the last family will be the ones of parameters of translations, i.e, the wire is cut correctly, the air completely filled the room.

Each form could be shaped by several parameters of different types. The interference between some of those parameters will lead in some case to contradictory transformations, unexpected deformations and emergences.

What we tried to do with this first grammar what to define series of (simple) deformations applied to a circle, make a first classification of the shapes produced by families of distortion and then link them to parameters.

Transmission 006 : Action of Particles on a sphere

Extract from a particles simulation. The particles are trapped in a sphere and pushing its boundaries / mo Y09

If we consider a simulation based on the progressive placement and displacement of data, the first think that we should think about is to create what will be the coordinates of the world.
Those points having no materiality, no “flesh”, containing no more information than a word, a definition, a number or a value, will be the backbone, partly visible, partly hidden, of the interface.
When the expert will start to construct is own ‘system’ on/in the ‘existing system’, those points could be used as triggers, entries, first tools, foundations for the system to come.
Most of those points will be at the beginning of the construction part of the ‘semantic cloud’ associated to the field of knowledge of the expert.
Each new entry of the expert creates new points; those points being the forces, coordinated or antagonistic, transforming the shape of the world. The materiality of the interface will be the result of those forces.

Transmission 005

The image shows half the cerebral hemisphere of a macaque monkey. Made with technique called Diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI). Author(s): Van Wedeen, Patric Hagmann, et al Institution: Massachusetts General Hospital, Vanderbilt University, EPFL, et al Year: 2008 URL: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21175/

00_Problematic
We are supposing that both human and system possess knowledge and intelligence.
We are supposing that the actual systems of exchange between them are not able to use the full potential of both of these ends due to communication gaps.
We are placing our project in this context; we will try to make an interface between Human and System not specifying for the time being where exactly it will be used.
We will try to design a strategy of communication so that the uses remain multiple.

01_Proposition context
We proceed in an interpretation of what we call “potential of user, potential of system” through the dipole Knowledge / Intelligence. Explaining:
Human knowledge: The substance, data, information, expertise that a person can bring.
Human intelligence: The subjective, complex methods, skills and strategies that each person applies when facing a problem, the hierarchies, abstractions, organisations, decisions, combination of the materials at hand to propose solutions, the creative, cognitive processes.
We are assuming that current systems are not able to learn from those and we think it’s worth trying at least to render these legible, readable in terms of code, whether it can be treated by newer generations of systems or integrated in the current ones.
System knowledge: The system is capable of recognising patterns, language patterns, word patterns, semantic fields when those appear in a syntax that connects to its arborescence of code. Therefore, it is able to store the input information.
System intelligence: The system’s computational and calculating capacities. The system can recombine the data connections real-time to produce the new form of the interface based on the changes by the user. (if not clear, proceed to 02_proposition description).

02_Proposition description
The user-system exchange takes place in the form of an interaction game. Action-reaction
In the beginning the user has to choose from a number (3,4) basic forms / bodies of organisation the one that is most suited to his mind frame and expertise. (for “form” details, proceed to 03_form description).
Using multiple forms to choose from is a method extracted from computer games.
Each character to choose from has a certain number of specificities, properties.
The initial form proposed has two functions:
a) to introduce the user to the rules/ language/ connection types, generally the environment in which he will have to adjust the way he is emitting information
b) to present the typologies, families of questions – knowledge expected from him.
Then the user starts entering his input by filling up empty spaces within the form.
The user chooses where to start from.
The user chooses the size of the space he needs for his input.
The user chooses the connections between his input and other pre-existing elements within the form.
The user can create more empty space where there isn’t enough.
The user can zoom in a particular territory and discover its sub layers, its details.
Basically, within the duration of the interaction the user discovers gradually that he has the ability to radically change the form in order to create a construct that is rational to him and expressing best the relations between his inputs.
While at the beginning the system proposes a form to stick to, in time the control of the organisation of data is taken by the user- expert while the system follows closely.
The system monitors the changes he is making and changes accordingly the matrix where the input is stored.
Therefore, it reacts real-time to the changes induced by the user by re-organising the form
There are two outputs from this process:
a) The data, inputs of the user, interconnected in the way that he has judged as necessary.
b) The monitoring, documentation of the process revealing how the human mind decomposes and recomposes – also adding- elements in order to solve a problem.

03_Form description
The form will be at the same time the representation of the knowledge and the memory of its construction. The shape will be the hybridization between patterns of language, sharable, understandable by all; the way each field of knowledge is structured, the system knowing forehand the few hundred words being the backbone of this knowledge; and at last the way the expert is constructing and enunciating the knowledge he has, with his own logic and experience. Those three concentric circles, going from the most common to the least, could be used as parameters to shape the form.

We’ve been thinking and studying the past week about three possible way of shaping the form. The first one was by the way the human body is made, by successive folds of skins, by their intertwining. This form allow easily Boolean operations, a part of the knowledge could be adjacent to another and not the same. It would also allow, by processes of folding/unfolding, to define the level of complexity required and to understand easily the way it is structured. It could be tri-dimensional, the folds superposing themselves.

The second one was an analogy with the way a textile is made, with the process of woven. We were considering that each fibre could be like a small DNA helix, containing one instruction (IF IS THEN), a thread being an association of instructions. Nodes, irregularities in the woven, densities of threads used to structure the knowledge. The system being able to recognize pattern of language in fibre and recombining them more easily, owing to the fact that those threads have no physicality, they are just lines.

The last one we were thinking using was the infinite fold, the way it was used by the Baroque. The image of the fold is coming from Leibniz and the monad. The monad is the smallest unity containing one possibility (“Caesar is crossing the Rubicon” and in another one “Caesar is not crossing the Rubicon”); both action being possible at the same time. The outside of the monad is completely smooth, when the inside is made of this infinite fold. This way of structuring the knowledge will allow “digging” as far as necessary if needed, the surface being theoretically infinite. It would also permit a lot data to be concentrated in a small place and unfolded if necessary. The protocol to enter the knowledge in the system could be at the same time quite elaborated and simple.

We find actually the first way of structuring the knowledge as the most promising, because of its simplicity of making, use and reading. But we are still searching and talking about them, some of the characteristics of the last two possibly being integratable in the first one.

Transmission 000

This is the first transmission on behalf of Mo Y. We are making a fisrt attempt of articulating the
project and exposing the various connections that we are perceiving. The diagram refers to the following transmissions as links.

Transmission 001

Analogy of constitution of body and language in René Thom









These images show the 2-fold eversion in an early "gastrula" stage, at a stage between the creation of the first and second double curves, and finally almost at the halfway stage.
Images extracted from a video by John M. Sullivan, George Francis and Stuart Levy / Copyright 1998, University of Illinois

The embryo of most of animals belongs to the triploblastic type, made from three fundamental “leafs”: ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. At the beginning of the life of the embryo, after 5-7 days, blastula is constituted by endoderm on its inner surface, ectoderm on its outer surface and mesoderm in between. By successive invaginations of the blastula, the three derms will shape the body. The ectoderm will become the skin (not all of it), sensorial organs, and the nervous system; the mesoderm will produce the bones muscles, blood, heart, vascular system, excretion organs and a part of the skin; the endoderm, intestinal mucous and varied digestive glands like the liver. This construction of the body (at the opposite of the insects, shut up in their shells made of endoderm) gives a predisposition for the sensibility to the exterior. René Thom is even talking of alienation to the outer world: “Intelligence is the ability to identify to something else, to others. The human nervous system is an organ of alienation. It allows to be something else than oneself.*”
According to R. Thom, this ternary constitution of the body has to be linked to the ternary constitution of the language itself: the endoderm becoming the subject (S), the mesoderm the verb (V), and the ectoderm the object (O).
“SVO like in the sentence: “The cat eats the mouse”. Like the mesoderm built the bones and the muscles, its identification with the grammatical category of the verb is plain. On the other hand, a certain ambiguity remains about the correspondence between subject-object and ectoderm-endoderm. In the sentence “The cat eats the mouse”, we must, by understanding all action like a predation, make of the endoderm the subject: because at the end the intestinal mucous, of endodermic origin, will assimilate the prey after the digestion. The assimilation objet (prey)-ectoderm, justifies itself by the fact that the ectoderm (…) builds the nervous tissue; and the nervous system, for the vertebrate, is an organ that simulates the state of the exterior world and who contains, at the states of engrams, the shapes of the preys.*”

*Extracts from morphogenèse and imaginaire, René Thom, 1978, CIRCE

Transmission 002

On prototype theory and family ressemblance

Consider for example the proceedings that we call 'games'. I mean board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don't say, "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games'"--but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! Look for example at board games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all 'amusing'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations 66, 1953
from the article Prototype theory on wikipedia

Transmission 003

Fuzzy logic










images extrated from mathworks site

Fuzzy logic allows to build logic system on approximations. In this project, it could help us to reintroduce subjectivity in the way knowledge is understood and used.

The first scheme show how a nonfuzzy logic produces a flat result based on a complex function and how a fuzzy logic reasoning produces a smoother result based on a simplier function.

Fuzzy logic main expressions are IF for the variable, IS for the property and THEN for the action. The difference with statistic probablilist system is that there is no use of ELSE (0 or 1).

AND, OR and NOT are used in Fuzzy logic systems to define minimum, maximum and complement in order to allow boolean operations.

Transmission 004

The failure of Artificial Intelligence

From a philosophical standpoint, artificial intelligence as originally conceived was the height of the Enlightenment project: the definition of all of intelligence as pure rationality, and mechanized as pure logic (Dreyfus, 1972). Understanding human thought required investigation into symbolic knowledge representation and its constraints in space-time. Planning algorithms were developed, AI programs made for everything from vision to reading, and progress seemed unlimited. The search for artificial intelligence internationalized, and soon Americans were even terrified that they would be economically overcome by Japanese industry controlled by “Fifth Generation” AI computers. Companies were founded to commercialize such expert systems (systems that formalize human knowledge and transfer it to machines), and the entire artificial intelligence industry appeared to take off.

All was not well for the artificial intelligentsia, as predicted by the Heideggerian philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, employed by RAND to determine if AI was truly a good investment (Dreyfus, 1973). While in limited and highly formal domains such as mathematical proof-proving and fairly immobile factory robotics, AI made great strides forward. On simple problems, such as getting a machine to walk across a cluttered floor, AI failed miserably. AI failed because it could not unify the concrete intuitive and kinesthetic skills with its abstract formal rationality, or in other words, because it was a mind without a body (Dreyfus, 1973). Results at machine translation came back as failures, and knowledge representation languages became so powerful they could not reliably draw inferences.

abstract of the article " Digital Sovereignty. The immaterial aristocracy of the World Wide Web" by Harry Halpin
http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/halpinpaper2006.html

SIXTHSENSE

Some input from a little freaky MIT project on a human enhancement interface... Could we imagine our cosmonauts carrying a similar, quite user-friendly appliance, getting used to it gradually, as a member of their body?

http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/index.htm#VIDEOS