Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow net-art-games (3)
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Jim Andrews/Ruth Catlow net-art-games(3)
RC:... Yoko Ono's 'Play it by Trust', in which the board and the pieces are all white, was very much in my mind when I started this project. In my correspondence with chess players I have not heard a positive word spoken about this art work. It is treated as heretical. (Yoko's feminine subversiveness often seems to invoke this "witch!" response).
JA:
a little odd in that you'd think chess players would be interested to see what yoko had to say bout/with their game, given yoko's popularity. i didn't know yoko was into chess. googled yoko chess and got quite a bit of information. often, the fact that yoko enjoys chess is quoted as a kind of 'not just geeks play chess' thing. and that she gave a high school chess team in new york $2500 to go to a tournament. i saw a few graphics of her "play it by trust". it seems that it's had many manifestations over many years, which is interesting. the white board and pieces shows up in all sorts of different ways in her work, i gather.
RC...I find it ironic to be hacking a game that has been universally known and played for centuries by people of all ages and classes, just as it seems to be slipping out of popular culture.
JA:
hmm. perhaps it is slipping; i'm not sure. when i played the most chess was when i was living at a youth hostel during a winter in edmonton alberta. lots of people, not much money, so chess in the evenings was popular with some people. cheap and a little more cerebral than most of the other games like cribbage or whatever. met some fine folks from montreal this way. do you think chess is losing ground? could be, i guess. it seems there are so many more games these days. lots of computer games, that's for sure. but there's so much more of so many forms of entertainment and art, it seems. as though everything is less numerous by dint of overall diversity. kind of an explosion through various media. computers. the net. about ten years ago i wrote a ditty called 'the impossibility of the mere existence of the great works of the late twentieth century'. not that people aren't doing 'great'
work. but there's very little widespread awareness of any of it. and when awareness is widespread, it's about shania twain or some such corporate wanker. the more interesting work, well, there are pockets of awareness about it. corporate culture is very centralized and high profile, but a lot of the more interesting stuff is very decentralized, sort of like the net, erm, maybe more or less exactly like the net.
when i type 'free chess' into google i get a whole subculture (or something) back.
RC: What is your position relative to the culture of asteroids?
JA: ha, 'culture of asteroids'. it's a wasteland/black void i tell ya. when i was a kid, i enjoyed the arcade games, from pinball and other non-digital stuff to pong, space invaders, asteroids, tanks, and so on. and board games like risk, monopoly, yahtzee, battling tops, and especially table hockey (with the twist players). all of these are fun but philosophically and artistically somewhat thin.
RC: Adrian (who did the Flash programming for the game) and I did discuss making an AI version of 3 Player Chess but it was beyond the scope of what was possible at the time. If I was really serious about hacking the chess community on a grand scale, to activate cooperative strategising, I think that this would be the route that we would need to take. It would allow players to practice and devise strategies on their own, and get good at the game, before playing with others in a public arena, in order to avoid public humiliation. The one player game
http://www.low-fi.org.uk/rethinkingwargames/server/single.html does allow you to play against yourself, to get the hang of the new rules, but this isn't the same as honing your skills against a brighter than bright computer.
JA:i'm not sure the computer would have to be really well-programmed for a 1.0 of your 3 player chess. the game is sufficiently new to people that there are no expectations about level of play.
i would say the algorithm would be like so:
when computer moves, it examines each of its possible moves. if it can capture, it makes that move and stops examining possibilities. the game's over. if it can't capture at all, then how does it decide what move to make? the best moves are such that when computer moves, no matter how the human subsequently moves, there's a computer move that leads to capture. a configurable depth of recursive look ahead. good but not great moves are such that when the computer moves, most of the responses the human can make nevertheless lead to capture...so you develop a way to 'score' a move. it doesn't have to be really good. but it has to leave room for being improved upon, in the programming, down the road. so it just needs to be really modular in construction and capable of configurable depth of recursive look ahead. chess brings computers to grinding halts unless the look ahead is done fairly cleverly if there's going to be look ahead deeper than a few moves. but you wouldn't have to worry about trimming the tree in 1.0; just don't do much look ahead.
i programmed a game of tic-tac-toe once. this is a 'classic' game to program in that the look ahead is pretty simple and you can look ahead completely (ie, examine all the moves) without having to trim the tree cause it doesn't have the combinatorial oomph of a game like chess wherein you must trim the tree or you end up with as many possibilities as there are atoms in the universe sort of thing. it's very recursive programming. which is zen of coding or something. whenever the coding gets into trees, it gets recursive. and here we have decision trees.
anyway that's my hot air about the programming.
RC:
regarding 'the response from the writers has been mixed, like the response from most other groups that have responded in one way or another. some like the directions it takes poetry in (the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness); others see it as negatively destructive of good things in literary realms.'
What were the 'good' things that they were referring to? the words as concrete objects?
JA:
readability of the text, for instance. they sometimes don't like the way it turns from readable to unreadable as you increase the level in game mode or, in play mode, increase the level or velocity or density. or they feel threatened by this. it is disconcerting for some writers to feel it slipping away from poetry to video game beneath their fingers. as though writing on the net was about email and blogs. that's part of it, of course, but these are generally quite printy.
also, poetry is not a game somebody wins. or is it? it *does* have that appearance and even that reality in certain ways, but there is a certain level at which poetry is antithetical to simple notions of winning and losing. things like poetry competitions and awards and even the list communications paradigms of the 'knockout punch' eryk mentioned on empyre recently about lists...there's so much either overt or covert competition going on in art matters, quite a lot of rhetoric and competition. so that it would be funny to make some arteroids texts that dramatized this aspect of poetical culture. like the green text could be the names of poets from one 'camp'/'school', the blue text could be their critical buzzwords, and the identity could be a different 'camp'/or school with which the first camp 'wars'. Or an individual's name. or some publication...
or, erm, the green text could consist of the names of a few lists and the names of people on the green lists; the blue text could consist of the names of a few other lists and names of people on those lists; and the id entity could be some concept assailed by both the blue and the green...
>> I find this kind of literalism (or is it religiosity?) funny and a bit
>> scary. It reminds me of an email I got about Rethinking Wargames from a
>> maths professor in the States who said 'War is not a game Ruth'
ha. right, war isn't a game, but it is a game in all too many senses for all too many people not getting shot. a computer game or a political game for dickheads like bush...in fact war is the fundamental sort of conflict usually involved in competitive games. poetry is not a game either. but it is a game in so many ways, also.
RC:
...What I like about Arteroids is that it invites the player to activate their own poetic sensibility in a way that is separate from a self-conscious fetishisation of the 'Poet'.
JA:
yeah, you gotta be willing to take a drubbing by words gone wild. like email on a crazy list. or a literalization of the figurative observation that, when writing, you struggle with words, they have 'minds of their own'.
thread from NetBehaviour
RC:... Yoko Ono's 'Play it by Trust', in which the board and the pieces are all white, was very much in my mind when I started this project. In my correspondence with chess players I have not heard a positive word spoken about this art work. It is treated as heretical. (Yoko's feminine subversiveness often seems to invoke this "witch!" response).
JA:
a little odd in that you'd think chess players would be interested to see what yoko had to say bout/with their game, given yoko's popularity. i didn't know yoko was into chess. googled yoko chess and got quite a bit of information. often, the fact that yoko enjoys chess is quoted as a kind of 'not just geeks play chess' thing. and that she gave a high school chess team in new york $2500 to go to a tournament. i saw a few graphics of her "play it by trust". it seems that it's had many manifestations over many years, which is interesting. the white board and pieces shows up in all sorts of different ways in her work, i gather.
RC...I find it ironic to be hacking a game that has been universally known and played for centuries by people of all ages and classes, just as it seems to be slipping out of popular culture.
JA:
hmm. perhaps it is slipping; i'm not sure. when i played the most chess was when i was living at a youth hostel during a winter in edmonton alberta. lots of people, not much money, so chess in the evenings was popular with some people. cheap and a little more cerebral than most of the other games like cribbage or whatever. met some fine folks from montreal this way. do you think chess is losing ground? could be, i guess. it seems there are so many more games these days. lots of computer games, that's for sure. but there's so much more of so many forms of entertainment and art, it seems. as though everything is less numerous by dint of overall diversity. kind of an explosion through various media. computers. the net. about ten years ago i wrote a ditty called 'the impossibility of the mere existence of the great works of the late twentieth century'. not that people aren't doing 'great'
work. but there's very little widespread awareness of any of it. and when awareness is widespread, it's about shania twain or some such corporate wanker. the more interesting work, well, there are pockets of awareness about it. corporate culture is very centralized and high profile, but a lot of the more interesting stuff is very decentralized, sort of like the net, erm, maybe more or less exactly like the net.
when i type 'free chess' into google i get a whole subculture (or something) back.
RC: What is your position relative to the culture of asteroids?
JA: ha, 'culture of asteroids'. it's a wasteland/black void i tell ya. when i was a kid, i enjoyed the arcade games, from pinball and other non-digital stuff to pong, space invaders, asteroids, tanks, and so on. and board games like risk, monopoly, yahtzee, battling tops, and especially table hockey (with the twist players). all of these are fun but philosophically and artistically somewhat thin.
RC: Adrian (who did the Flash programming for the game) and I did discuss making an AI version of 3 Player Chess but it was beyond the scope of what was possible at the time. If I was really serious about hacking the chess community on a grand scale, to activate cooperative strategising, I think that this would be the route that we would need to take. It would allow players to practice and devise strategies on their own, and get good at the game, before playing with others in a public arena, in order to avoid public humiliation. The one player game
http://www.low-fi.org.uk/rethinkingwargames/server/single.html does allow you to play against yourself, to get the hang of the new rules, but this isn't the same as honing your skills against a brighter than bright computer.
JA:i'm not sure the computer would have to be really well-programmed for a 1.0 of your 3 player chess. the game is sufficiently new to people that there are no expectations about level of play.
i would say the algorithm would be like so:
when computer moves, it examines each of its possible moves. if it can capture, it makes that move and stops examining possibilities. the game's over. if it can't capture at all, then how does it decide what move to make? the best moves are such that when computer moves, no matter how the human subsequently moves, there's a computer move that leads to capture. a configurable depth of recursive look ahead. good but not great moves are such that when the computer moves, most of the responses the human can make nevertheless lead to capture...so you develop a way to 'score' a move. it doesn't have to be really good. but it has to leave room for being improved upon, in the programming, down the road. so it just needs to be really modular in construction and capable of configurable depth of recursive look ahead. chess brings computers to grinding halts unless the look ahead is done fairly cleverly if there's going to be look ahead deeper than a few moves. but you wouldn't have to worry about trimming the tree in 1.0; just don't do much look ahead.
i programmed a game of tic-tac-toe once. this is a 'classic' game to program in that the look ahead is pretty simple and you can look ahead completely (ie, examine all the moves) without having to trim the tree cause it doesn't have the combinatorial oomph of a game like chess wherein you must trim the tree or you end up with as many possibilities as there are atoms in the universe sort of thing. it's very recursive programming. which is zen of coding or something. whenever the coding gets into trees, it gets recursive. and here we have decision trees.
anyway that's my hot air about the programming.
RC:
regarding 'the response from the writers has been mixed, like the response from most other groups that have responded in one way or another. some like the directions it takes poetry in (the battle of poetry against itself and the forces of dullness); others see it as negatively destructive of good things in literary realms.'
What were the 'good' things that they were referring to? the words as concrete objects?
JA:
readability of the text, for instance. they sometimes don't like the way it turns from readable to unreadable as you increase the level in game mode or, in play mode, increase the level or velocity or density. or they feel threatened by this. it is disconcerting for some writers to feel it slipping away from poetry to video game beneath their fingers. as though writing on the net was about email and blogs. that's part of it, of course, but these are generally quite printy.
also, poetry is not a game somebody wins. or is it? it *does* have that appearance and even that reality in certain ways, but there is a certain level at which poetry is antithetical to simple notions of winning and losing. things like poetry competitions and awards and even the list communications paradigms of the 'knockout punch' eryk mentioned on empyre recently about lists...there's so much either overt or covert competition going on in art matters, quite a lot of rhetoric and competition. so that it would be funny to make some arteroids texts that dramatized this aspect of poetical culture. like the green text could be the names of poets from one 'camp'/'school', the blue text could be their critical buzzwords, and the identity could be a different 'camp'/or school with which the first camp 'wars'. Or an individual's name. or some publication...
or, erm, the green text could consist of the names of a few lists and the names of people on the green lists; the blue text could consist of the names of a few other lists and names of people on those lists; and the id entity could be some concept assailed by both the blue and the green...
>> I find this kind of literalism (or is it religiosity?) funny and a bit
>> scary. It reminds me of an email I got about Rethinking Wargames from a
>> maths professor in the States who said 'War is not a game Ruth'
ha. right, war isn't a game, but it is a game in all too many senses for all too many people not getting shot. a computer game or a political game for dickheads like bush...in fact war is the fundamental sort of conflict usually involved in competitive games. poetry is not a game either. but it is a game in so many ways, also.
RC:
...What I like about Arteroids is that it invites the player to activate their own poetic sensibility in a way that is separate from a self-conscious fetishisation of the 'Poet'.
JA:
yeah, you gotta be willing to take a drubbing by words gone wild. like email on a crazy list. or a literalization of the figurative observation that, when writing, you struggle with words, they have 'minds of their own'.
thread from NetBehaviour
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