April 2022 – No Bigons

The cookies are the monster

As is the case with our parents, there invariably comes a moment when a teacher reveals themselves to be utterly, fallibly human. Rather than being a reliable source of knowledge, with one stray remark they reveal themselves to being as prone to misconceptions and ignorance as the rest of us. We learn that whatever instruction they offer should be treated provisionally.

One such moment from my own youth: sixth form, in morning assembly — a venue for our teachers to share wonderfully secular homilies. The teacher taking the assembly that morning explained that when he was himself in school he witnessed the first computer arrive in the classroom. At that time it wasn’t clear what function this intimidating new appliance should serve. “For some reason,” he told us, “they decided to send it to the mathematics department.”

Sitting there I understood quite intuitively that the maths department would have been the obvious and appropriate place to send the computer. After all, what is a computer except a machine for performing a long sequence of mathematical operations? The teacher seemed to believe computers were elaborate typewriters with the additional capabilities of playing a game of solitaire or selling you something.

I will add that this was the same teacher who I had heard, from a reliable and highly placed source (another teacher), that perhaps the maths department should start offering an “applied math” course, stripped of all the impractical and superfluous “pure math”. You know, only the math a good worker would actually need. As if maths teachers were some kind of freaks who insisted on inflicting abstract suffering on on students before grudgingly teaching them useful stuff: statistics.

In retrospect, sat in that school assembly, we were living through a significant moment. Broadband had arrived along with youtube. Facebook was only the latest in a string of social media platforms. I got a gmail account, with its bottomless inbox. Teachers were beginning to be drilled on the importance of making use of online resources. Certain educators dictated long and complicated urls to us that we had to copy down carefully so that we could make use of them later. I’m not talking about the home page of a site — we were sent to pages deep within the site-map; urls trailing all kind of database tokens and php residue that we would someday learn was susceptible to the unpleasant sounding “link rot”. This is the future, those educators presumably thought to themselves as they had unhappily transcribed those web-addresses. No doubt they were far from convinced that any of this would ever be convenient.

Only a decade later and we would enjoy boomers falling into candy crush addiction. And computers became even less recognizable as machines of mathematics.

As part of a professional realignment, I have been learning the ropes of cyber security. The past month was dedicated to mastering low level memory exploits. Or at least the low level memory exploits of twenty years ago. Real zeros and ones stuff. Well, hexadecimal stuff really. Staring at (virtual) memory locations. Format string exploits. Messing around with debuggers. You might think that would have brought me to the mathematical heart of our digital engines. But no. I have instead had an almost gnostic revelation about the true nature of the Matrix.

Certainly, there is a lot of deep mathematics playing a fundamental role in the workings of all the code. To take a particularly central example: the existence of one-way-functions is the underpinning assumption of almost all cybersecurity. The cryptographic protection we enjoy (whether you realize it or not), is provisioned on the understanding that an adversary does not have the ability to reverse certain mathematical operations with reasonable efficiency. This assumption may well hold up. Quite likely P does not equal NP, and it is entirely possible that quantum computers are a physical impossibility. I may not live long to see such profound questions resolved.

But there is another side to our PC world. From where I am sitting, they are simply huge bureaucracies. Mathematical bureaucracies to be sure, but bureaucracies nonetheless. There are replete with elaborate filing and organizing systems, protocols with carefully written standards, and all the input and output amounts to a certain kind of paperwork. From this perspective most security breaches are the product of improper filing, out of date standards, and old fashioned mail fraud.

There is no undoing all the bureaucracy either. The further we get from the golden age of pre-broadband the more the bureaucracy swells; not only to deal with the non-tech-savvy hoi-polloi, but to integrate the hoi-polloi into the very system itself. The age of nerds noodling around with open source code and experimenting with new kinds of hardware has given away to a world of corporations and start-ups where every other college grad needs to get their “workflow” in-sync with their fellow internaut.

As with parents and teachers, the original architects of the cyberspace have revealed themselves to be shortsighted and ideologically blinkered human beings with their own unique set of foibles. It took us too long to see it. That teacher who revealed his digital ignorance to our year group happened to teach economics. I never took a class with him, but if he knew anything of economic history then there was a chance that he might have been able to teach us certain truths about technological advancement that we had overlooked.

April 15, 2022

The Punchline is Redundant

In graduate school, I was friends with a young man of a particularly restless disposition — a mathematician of the waggish inclination, given to a certain kind of tomfoolery. Often his antics would take the form of games of such banal simplicity that they felt like elaborate, conceptual pranks.

One game he set a number of us playing, during a longueur in one evening together with friends, sticks in my mind. Having first had each of us commit solemnly to absolute honesty, we each chose a number, greater than or equal to zero, which we would then one-after-the-other reveal (committed as we were to honesty), and whoever had chosen the lowest number that no one else had chosen was the winner. Several rounds were played, and while everyone wrestled with the question of whether to choose zero, or maybe one, trying to second guess each other, I refused to join in, offended by the very nature of the game.

A second game stays with me as well: pulling a mathematics journal from the shelf in the math department common room, my friend began reading aloud random sentences from various articles, pausing before the final word, inviting another friend, to guess the final word. He did pretty well, as I recall.

There was something powerful about these games. The first game, being stripped of all the usual frivolity, ritual, adornment, and pretense that usually accompanies games, revealed the essential nature of what a game is. That is to say a “game” in the sense that the mathematician John von Neumann formulated it. To von Neumann’s way of thinking Chess was not game in the sense he cared about: perfectly rational players would know the perfect set of moves to play and thus they would play those moves. He was more interested in Poker, where players have incomplete information (the cards in their hand and on the table), are left to compute the probabilities, and devise strategies.

Good poker players do not simply play the odds. They take into account the conclusions other players will draw from their actions, and sometimes try to deceive the other players. It was von Neumann’s genius to see that this devious was of playing was both rational and amenable to rigorous analysis.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma — William Poundstone

I recently discovered that my friend was not the true inventor of the second game either. Reading The Information by James Gleick, I learned that Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, played a variation with his wife, as a kind of illustrative experiment.

He pulled a book from the shelf (it was a Raymond Chandler detective novel, Pickup on Noon Street), put his finger on a short passage at random, and asked Betty to start guessing the letter, then the next letter, then the next. The more text she saw, of course, the better her chances of guessing right. After “A SMAAL OBLONG READING LAMP ON THE” she got the next letter wrong. But once she knew it was D, she had not trouble guessing the next three letters. Shannon observed, “The errors, as would be expected, occur more frequently at the beginning of words and syllables where the line of thought had more possibility of branching out.”
The Information — James Gleick, page 230

Shannon’s counter-intuitive insight was to consider “information” through a notion he called entropy, which quantitatively captured the amount of new, novel, and surprising content in a message. Thus, the meaningful sentences of a novel, or indeed a math paper, contain all kinds of redundancy, while in contrast a random sequence of letters will always be surprising from one letter to the next, so therefore contains more of this stuff he referred to as “information”.

Von Neumann’s ideas about games would go on to shape the technocratic world view that was ascendant in the 20th century. Beyond mathematics the kind of games he defined could be found out in the fields of economics, social policy, geopolitics, and most infamously: the exchange of nuclear weapons.

Shannon’s ideas would have their greatest successes in science, and not only in the field of communication, where error correcting codes and encryption are the direct and intended applications of such thinking. But also in biology when DNA was discovered and life itself appeared to be reducible to a finite sequence of of four letters, and Physics via thermodynamics and later in quantum mechanics as information became a fundamental notion.

There is a variation on Shannon’s game that is a well established tradition around the Christmas dinner table: reading Christmas cracker jokes. (Popular within the former Commonwealth, but maybe less well known in the US). Having pulled the crackers and set the crepe party hats upon our heads, each of us will in turn read the set up of our joke, leaving the rest of the table to guess the punchline. The meta-joke being that while punchlines are supposed to be surprising, and thus amusing, Christmas cracker jokes are typically so bad that in their puns are quite predictable. Thus, somehow, in their perverse predictability, the jokes are funny all over again. But does that make them low entropy? Only if you allow for the mind to be addled enough that the punchline becomes predictable.

This is an important point. The ultimate arbiters of the question of assumed knowledge that Gleick offers are hypothetical aliens receiving our radio signals from across the galaxy, or the very real computers that we program here on earth. They do not share any of our cultural baggage and thus could be considered the most accurate yard sticks for “information”. When Gleick’s book was written, over a decade ago now, we had very different ideas about what computers and their algorithms should look like or be capable of doing. That has all changed in the intervening decade with the arrival of powerful artificial intelligence that gives the kind of output that we once could only have hoped for. The notions that Gleick covers were defined precisely and mathematically, but our intuition for these concepts, even to lay person, are dramatically shifting. Not that it would be the first time our expectations and intuition have shifted. We should recognize ourselves in Gleick’s description of the amusing misunderstandings that the new-fangled telegraph technology created upon its arrival.

In this time of conceptual change, mental readjustments were needed to understand the telegraph itself. Confusion inspired anecdotes, which often turned on awkward new meanings of familiar terms: innocent words like send, and heavily laden ones, like message. There was a woman who brought a dish of sauerkraut into the telegraph office in Karlsruhe to be “sent” to her son in Rastatt. She had heard of soldiers being “sent” to the front by telegraph. There was the man who brought a “message” into the telegraph office in Bangor, Maine. The operator manipulated the telegraph key and then placed the paper on the hook. The customer complained that the message had not been sent, because he could still see it hanging on the hook.

More mysterious still is the way information persists once it has arrived. Black Holes provided a thorny problem for physicists, but my own waggish friend poses his own set of questions. Assuming that he had not taken a course in information theory, or read of Shannon (which he may well have), that leaves the possibility that when he concocted his games he was subconsciously tapping into some kind of collective or ambient understanding. It is one things for the theory to be taught and for students to study the equations. It is quite another thing when ideas pervade our collective thinking in ways that cannot be easily accounted for. Information theory works when we can point to the individual bits and bytes. Things become much more tricky when not only can we not find the bits and bytes, but when the information is thoroughly not discrete, not even analogue, just out there in some way we don’t yet know how to think about.

April 9, 2022

Unfortunately, there was a booksale.

Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me in the UK, I thought I would do a PhD in Montreal, and see a little of the Francophone world. Perhaps there was some element of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Learning French at an Anglophone university was trickier than I would have liked. I did however persevere with the language while obtaining mon doctorat, and eventually I could read, with dictionary assistance, a contemporary novel or comic. The latter, I discovered, had a rich tradition and active culture in France, and as a consequence a serious presence in the neighborhood bibliothèque.

When I left the Francosphere behind, and eventually arrived back in the Anglosphere, the French language fell out of sight and out of mind. There was an abundance of English prose I badly wanted to read, so my habit of reading in French all but disappeared. That is until very recently, when I was inspired by a blog post I stumbled upon. The author of the The Untranslated reflects on five years of running his quite wonderful blog reviewing untranslated books. A great deal of it concerns the practice of learning new languages with the aim of reading specific works. Which makes a refreshing contrast to the usually proffered motivate for language aquisition: being able to order food or ask for directions like a local. So inspired, I set about throwing myself once again into French literary waters.

My first port of call was my go-to French webcomic, Bouletcorp. Started in 2004, it is a veteran of the scene. A typical comic depicts incidents from the author Boulet’s life, alongside ruminations and observations on everything from the quotidian irritations of modern life to lazy tropes in TV and movies. To my rather fanciful way of reading them, these are visual essays in the tradition of Montaigne’s essays. A more suitable reference point is Calvin and Hobbes, in the way Boulet frequently lets his imagination run in fanciful and speculative directions, rendering scenes reminiscent of Waterson’s Sunday strips, filled with all the dinosaurs, alien landscapes, and monsters that populated Calvin’s imagination. One situation that Boulet returns to more that once are encounters with obnoxious members of the public attending his in-person signings at conventions. In one such strip Boulet anonymizes the offending individual by drawing them in various forms: an ape, a cockerel, and finally a grim looking salad bowl of merde. Boulet is an artist with incredible versatility, belonging to the European tradition of Moebius. I grew up in the UK reading the frankly impoverished offerings of the Dandy and Beano, and picking through the debauched excesses of American superhero comics. So I feel like I missed out on the sophisticated the French tradition of bande dessinée. At least I had the adventures of Asterix & Obelix, and Tintin.

Reading my way through the Bouletcorp back catalogue I found one comic in particular that I responded to deeply. Created for the 2017 Frankfurt book fair website it is a reminiscence of youth. A tweenage Boulet is torn form his ordinateur and obliged to do his required reading for school. Disinclined towards his duty, he picks the shortest story in the collection, and finds himself drawn in, captivated, and horrified by the gothic power of Prosper Merimee’s La Venus d’Ille. Understanding that he wanted more of whatever that was he discovers, with the help of the school library, Poe, King, Asimov, and all kinds of fantastical fiction.

As readers we do not get to consume our art communally. Theater lovers go to watch actors tread the boards; film fans get to attend screenings; music fans flock to gigs; football fans sing together in their home stadiums. The solitude of reading has many benefits, to be sure. Frequently the best books we read have a strange power that is hard to assess, and merits might only become clear on second or third readings. But no doubt you have known a friend who has thrust a book into your hands that they can’t stop thinking about, telling you: “You have to read this.” So once you too have read it they can finally talk about it.

In much the same way I enjoy returning to a beloved book, I enjoy being reminded of the revelation that is reading. Of discovering the stories that suspend my disbelief and subvert my expectation. The books which captivated Boulet have some overlap with the books I read as a teenager, but it his experience that resonates so strongly.

That is why, of all the many podcasts that have devoted themselves to the works of the late Gene Wolfe, it is the reader interviews of the Rereading Wolfe podcast that I remain most excited about. The careful chapter by chapter analysis that all the Gene Wolfe podcasts offer are fine and good and wonderful. But there is something reaffirming about people discussing their responses to the work. In one utterly remarkable episode, a reader describes discovering The Book of the New Sun as she grew up in a cult — she had to read fantasy books smuggled in secret from the library. Among all the books she read, she understood at once that BotNS was on an entirely different level. I do not like to ascribe utility to art, but such stories allow me to believe in the vitality of art.

Part of the reason I aspire to become a proficient reader of the la langue française is so that I can return to that state of youthful discovery. I can become like a teenager again, seeing with fresh eyes what the culture offers, all over again. I can be liberated from the weight of expectation and reputation. I can be surprised all over again.

What does a dog want? To go for a walk? Or just to be outside?

April 2, 2022