Whistle player Michał Świątczak uploaded this beautiful rendition of my “Lullaby for Harp and Whistle” earlier today:
It really made my day to hear it. Many thanks to Michał! Check out his YouTube channel for more of his work.
Movies
Some thoughts on Wreck-It Ralph
Not a review, just some thoughts. A few SPOILERS below, so don’t read if you plan on watching the movie and don’t want spoilers.
I saw Disney’s latest animated feature Wreck-It Ralph today. I was expecting good things from all the positive reviews I had heard about it.
But…
Perhaps I’m overanalyzing it (a favorite pastime of mine), but I didn’t quite connect with the story. I suppose what didn’t quite work for me was that the “be who you are” theme didn’t quite fit the main character’s real problem. That is, the main character’s problem wasn’t about accepting “who he was”; rather, it was about other characters not realizing that he wasn’t the same person as his “game character.”
At the beginning of the film, the other characters in his game (“Fix-it Felix”) treat him like dirt. Why? I have no idea. My best guess is that they believe he really wants to wreck everything just because he’s the villain, when really he just wants what all the characters want: to be loved and accepted as an equal. He doesn’t wreck things after the game is over, after all. He doesn’t go around trying to kill people. Wrecking isn’t what he wants to do in and of itself; it’s what he has to do as part of the game.
So, to me, it seems like the problem of the story centers around the other characters in Ralph’s game not understanding that Ralph is actually a nice guy who is simply “playing” the villain for the sake of the game. And yet it’s Ralph who, as the main character, has to go on an adventure to learn… to learn what? To “accept” who he is? To learn who he is? But that was never really the problem to begin with! The problem was that other people were treating him like dirt.
And then, at the end of the film, they come to love him. Problem solved. Why do they love him at the end of the film? How did he prove himself? Why did he ever have to prove himself to begin with?
All that said, it was a fun movie. Wonderful animation, wonderful look and feel, wonderful use of 3D, wonderful references written in graffiti, and wonderful pixelations. I just had trouble understanding the overall theme.
Also, have you noticed that, similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Toy Story, Disney can somehow get a bunch of other franchises to participate in their movie, even while they’re actually just helping Disney build their own franchise, with Disney’s original characters at the center? Clever Disney.
Television
Stop-motion SpongeBob
Cartoon Brew’s Jerry Beck talks with some of the artists behind the upcoming stop-motion SpongeBob Christmas special… very interesting to see this style of animation!
Interesting finds
Hobbit house of balloons
I wonder how much this Hobbit house would cost… not counting for inflation! Oooh!
Movies Stupid things
Thoughts on Disney and Star Wars
I am a bit late to today’s news of geeks and I don’t really have anything interesting or intelligent to say. But I do have some boring mundane things to say.
1. I’m cautiously optimistic about more Star Wars movies. I don’t know why George Lucas didn’t make more movies sooner with how much money the prequel trilogy made. In middle school, I enjoyed reading some of the Star Wars novels (only have five still sitting on my bookshelf), so I imagined there were plenty of possibilities. It will be interesting to see Star Wars in the hands of different writers and directors, because, with the prequel trilogy, George Lucas proved to be rather lacking in certain areas.
2. It will be weird to see a Star Wars movie not scored by John Williams.
3. It would be awful to see a Star Wars poster with that childish curly Disney logo degrading the coolness of the rest of it. (I have no idea how they’re going to brand it.)
4. After buying Marvel not too long ago, it’s weird to see Disney gobble up another proven money-making franchise. It’s so fat.
5. With the deal, Disney owns LucasArts, which means they own Monkey Island. Ick. But seeing as how Monkey Island was inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, perhaps it’s strangely appropriate. Still, I don’t like the thought.
6. The Star Wars Holiday Special would fit right in with the rest of the Disney Channel’s programming! It even already has singers! Maybe just add a laugh track.
Interesting finds
Martin Gardner
I came across this blatant copyright infringement on YouTube this morning, an episode from the 90’s of The Nature of Things, an educational Canadian TV series, this one about the late Martin Gardner. (I don’t know why the video title says John Conway. While Conway’s in it, the show is about Gardner.)
Though I can’t claim to have a great stock of Gardner’s books, the ones I read had a great influence on me when I guess I was around 10 to 12 years old. He makes mathematics fun and fascinating in a way that no teacher who wants to give you a grade ever can. Whereas a teacher may say, “Learn these rules because the board of education has deemed them necessary,” Gardner’s approach is more exploratory, playful, and welcoming, as if to say, “Here’s an idea that’s interesting and peculiar, let’s see what we can do with it.” (If you’re a teacher and want to make any subject more fun, stop grading students for starters. Oh, you can’t do that? Then your methods will always fail, because your philosophy of education is wrong.)
With Gardner’s approach, it’s easy to see how mathematics naturally blends with so many other subjects, such as science, art, magic, and games. While this episode only touches the surface of many of the ideas Gardner helped popularize, it’s still a fun refresher.
Philosophy
Miscellaneous confusions
I find it curious to consider the nature of three-dimensional space as an experience of physical interaction more than some physical reality in and of itself. Spacial dimensions do not exist in the experience of thought, after all. If one thinks of a chicken, then thinks of a brick wall, one does not have to travel any sort of distance through other thoughts to get from one to the other. The change in the experience of the two thoughts is instantaneous. (We may even combine them to form the thought of a chicken in front of a brick wall.)
What concerns me, however, is: where is the chicken when I’m not thinking about it? From what do I create the thought of a chicken?
One may say: “Well, it’s in your memory.” But then from what do I create the mental instructions to fetch the memory?
I’m not asking why I desire to form the thought of a chicken, whether it’s because I saw the word “chicken” or because I was asked to think of an animal that goes “cluck-cluck” or because I’m hungry. It doesn’t matter why I’m persuaded to form the thought. I’m wondering how I have the ability to conjure the appropriate thought in the first place.
It’s a puzzling mystery to me.
Non-fiction books Philosophy Programming
In search of the best idea ever
Last month, or the month before (it’s all a bit of blur), I started programming what I thought could be a general purpose AI engine. And it works! It can find any pattern that is computational, and thus solve any computationally defined problem. But it’s unfortunately completely inefficient for most interesting tasks. If it wanted to learn to play chess, it would try to solve the entire game. While mathematically possible, it would take far too long to compute and take up way too much memory to be of any use, what with combinatorial explosions and all. And I don’t even know how to define a creative task, such as drawing or storytelling, in any computationally useful way. So I really didn’t achieve much.
But the seeds of obsession were planted. How does the human mind do it? What am I missing? There must be an answer, because humans do it. This is the “AGI problem” – AGI standing for “artificial general intelligence” – the elusive AI system that can do anything, not just model a solution to some specific traditionally-cognitive task (which is what most of the “AI field” focuses on).
While I knew nobody had the answer (at least not that they’re revealing, otherwise we’d be living in a very different world), a trip to the bookstore seemed like a good place to start. And there I found David Deutsch’s recent book: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
It’s a fascinating book, one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read really, even though it doesn’t give me any of the answers I’m looking for (Deutsch obviously makes no claim to have solved the AGI problem). At the heart of it, Deutsch argues that it’s our human ability to create explanations that gives us the ability to think about all the things we do and make the sort of progress we do. Of course, we’re still left with the question: how do we create explanations? How can we program computers to do the same?
To quote Deutsch from this also fascinating article:
AGI cannot possibly be defined purely behaviourally. In the classic ‘brain in a vat’ thought experiment, the brain, when temporarily disconnected from its input and output channels, is thinking, feeling, creating explanations — it has all the cognitive attributes of an AGI. So the relevant attributes of an AGI program do not consist only of the relationships between its inputs and outputs.
The upshot is that, unlike any functionality that has ever been programmed to date, this one can be achieved neither by a specification nor a test of the outputs. What is needed is nothing less than a breakthrough in philosophy, a new epistemological theory that explains how brains create explanatory knowledge and hence defines, in principle, without ever running them as programs, which algorithms possess that functionality and which do not.
…
Without understanding that the functionality of an AGI is qualitatively different from that of any other kind of computer program, one is working in an entirely different field. If one works towards programs whose ‘thinking’ is constitutionally incapable of violating predetermined constraints, one is trying to engineer away the defining attribute of an intelligent being, of a person: namely creativity.
Clearing this logjam will not, by itself, provide the answer. Yet the answer, conceived in those terms, cannot be all that difficult. For yet another consequence of understanding that the target ability is qualitatively different is that, since humans have it and apes do not, the information for how to achieve it must be encoded in the relatively tiny number of differences between the DNA of humans and that of chimpanzees. So in one respect I can agree with the AGI-is-imminent camp: it is plausible that just a single idea stands between us and the breakthrough. But it will have to be one of the best ideas ever.
So I’m in search of one of the best ideas ever.