thinking about this trimester... what topics are of interest to you? Roll your own google

Eliza & Eternity

http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych101/Eliza.htm (this one??)

Natalie Jeremijenko/Danny Hillis: The Clock of the Long Now

AUDIO: falloutcd_track12_firefly_oscillators.mp4

From "Fallout"

Clocks & Oscillation

Phase locking, The mutual synchronization of coupled oscillators

The "materiality" of time
Danny Hillis, Clock of the Long Now
Radio Lab: Time
Time as a purely abstract (asocial, apolitical) construct
Clocks as a social contract
Conditioned social blindness

David Cronenburg: Professor O'Blivion

Joseph Weizenbaum: ELIZA

I chose the name ELIZA for the language analysis program, because, like the Eliza of Pygmalion fame, it could be taught to "speak" increasingly well. Because conversations must be about something, that is, because they must take place within some context, the program was constructed in a two-tier arrangement, the first tier consisting o fthe language analyzer and the second of a script. The script is a set of rules rather like those that might be given to an actor who is to use them to improvise around a certain theme. Thus ELIZA could be given a script to enable it to maintain a conversation about cooking eggs or about managing a bank checking account, and so on. Each specific script thus enabled ELIZA to play a specific conversational role.

Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, From Judgment to Calculation, p. 3

Murray's Four Essential Properties of Digital Environments

Procedural
Participatory
Spatial
Encyclopedic

Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Chapter 3

Eliza: The Procedure

Processing consists of the following steps.

First the sentence broken down into words, separated by spaces. All further

processing takes place on these words as a whole, not on the individual characters in them.

Second, a set of pre-substitutions takes place.
Third, Eliza takes all the words in the sentence and makes a list of all

keywords it finds. It sorts this keyword list in descending weight. It process these keywords until it produces an output.

Fourth, for the given keyword, a list of decomposition patterns is searched.

The first one that matches is selected. If no match is found, the next keyword is selected instead.

Fifth, for the matching decomposition pattern, a reassembly pattern is

selected. There may be several reassembly patterns, but only one is used for a given sentence. If a subsequent sentence selects the same decomposition pattern, the next reassembly pattern in sequence is used, until they have all been used, at which point Eliza starts over with the first reassembly pattern.

Sixth, a set of post-substitutions takes place.
Finally, the resulting sentence is displayed as output.

Prototyping 9 April 2013

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