The Protean Machine

M E D I A C U LT U R E S I I : T H E P R O T E A N M A C H I N E

1S H I R A L E E . S A U L @ R M I T. E D U . A U

THE PROTEAN MACHINEhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVTo4y5e08k&feature=player_embedded



“The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped

and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first

meta-medium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before

encountered and as yet barely investigated.”

Alan Kay, 1984



Fijuu by Julian Oliver.

fijuu is a 3D, audio/visual

installation/instrument. Using a

PlayStation-style gamepad, the

player(s) of fijuu dynamically

manipulate 3D instruments to

make improvised music.

http://fijuu.com || http://vimeo.

com/8013684



Augmented reality: Urban Camouflage

Kazutoshi Obana’s gray hooded coat doesn’t

just keep him dry in a downpour. It can also

make him seem invisible. azutoshi Obana’s

gray hooded coat doesn’t just keep him dry

in a downpour. It can also make him seem

invisible.

http://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=1cGIwQfYWyw



levelHead -- spatial memory game by Julian Oliver.

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic

cube as its only interface. On-screen it

appears each face of the cube contains

a little room, each of which are logically

connected by doors.

In one of these rooms is a character.

By tilting the cube the player directs

this character from room to room in an

effort to find the exit.

http://julianoliver.com/levelhead ||

http://vimeo.com/1320756



Giant Robots attack Montevideo

Uruguayan film maker Fede Alvarez has created a five minute short in which giant, alien robots destroy the city of

Montevideo. The short, entitled “Ataque de panico!” (Panic Attack), has some very impressive special effects, but cost

about five hundred dollars to make.Sam Raimi, the director of the Spiderman series as well as Xena Warrior Princess was

so impressed that he has signed a deal with Fede Alvarez to create a full length feature based on the short. This is the

way that South African Neill Blomkamp got to make District Nine out of his short, thanks to the involvement of

Peter Jackson.

http://www.youtube.

com/watch?v=wOv_



Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital

information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.



Known to have first existed in Mesopotamia and China, in-•

vented sometime between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE.

The first abacus was almost certainly based on a flat stone •

covered with sand or dust, later they generally appeared as a

wooden frame with beads sliding on wires.

In use centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu-Ar-•

abic numeral system and is still widely used by merchants and

clerks in China, Japan, Africa and elsewhere.

Starting points:THE ABACUS

Russian Abacus: The abacus is considered by some to be one of the world’s first computers.

http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/art-83564



Starting points:ALGORITHM

825 CE

Mukhammad ibn Musa Al’Khowarizmi, a Tashkent cleric,

developed the concept of a written process to be followed to

achieve a goal. He published a book on the subject that gave

the technique its modern name -- algorithm.

This book synthesized Greek and Hindu knowledge and also

contained his own fundamental contribution to mathematics

and science including an explanation of the use of zero.

It was only centuries later, in the 12th century, that the

Arabic numeral system was introduced to the Western world

through Latin translations of his Arithmetic.



Zero plays a central role in mathematics as the additive

identity of the integers, real numbers, and many other algebraic

structures.

The oldest known text to use a decimal place-value

system, including a zero, is the Jain text from India entitled the

Lokavibhâga, dated 458 AD. This text uses Sanskrit numeral

words for the digits, with words such as the Sanskrit word for

void for zero.

The Hindu-Arabic numerals and the positional number

system were introduced around 500 AD, and it was

introduced by Persian scientist, Al-Khwarizmi.

.0Starting points:

ZERO



Starting points: LIBER ABACI202 Leonardo of Pisa, known later by his nickname Fibonacci published Liber

Abaci, a book on arithmetic.

Its title has two common translations, The Book of the Abacus or The Book

of Calculation.

In this work, Fibonacci introduced the Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe. This

is the major element of our decimal system, which he had learned by studying

with Arabs while living in North Africa.

He is also remembered for the Fibonacci sequence

In the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, each number is the sum of the

previous two numbers, starting with 0 and 1. Thus the sequence begins 0, 1, 1,

2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610 etc.

The higher up in the sequence, the closer two consecutive “Fibonacci

numbers” of the sequence divided by each other will approach the golden

ratio (approximately 1 : 1.618 or 0.618 : 1). The golden ratio was used widely

in the Renaissance in paintings.

“There, following my introduction, as a

consequence of marvelous instruction in

the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the

knowledge of the art very much

appealed to me before all others, and for it I

realized that all its aspects were

studied in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and

Provence, with their varying

methods; and at these places thereafter, while

on business.

The nine Indian figures are:

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 ...

any number may be written.”



Starting points: PASCAL (1623-62)

Pascal helped create two major new areas of research.

He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at • the age of sixteen and corresponded with Pierre de Fermat from 1654

Probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern • economics and social science.

In 1641, at age eighteen, Pascal constructed

a mechanical

calculator capable of addition and

subtraction, called Pascal’s

calculator or the Pascaline, to help his father

with this work. Though these machines are

early forerunners to computer engineering,

the calculator failed to be a great

commercial

success. Pascal continued to make

improvements to his design through the

next decade and built fifty

machines in total.



Charles Babbage developed a calculator, the Difference Engine, which he thought

of as a precursor to a universal computational machine -- the Universal Analytical

Engine. This would use loops of Jacquard’s punched cards to control a mechanical

calculator, which could formulate results based on the results of preceding

computations. It was intended to employ several features subsequently used

in modern computers, including sequential control, branching, and looping, and

would have been the first mechanical device to be Turing-complete.

In computability theory, a collection of data-manipulation rules (an instruction

set, programming language, or cellular automaton) is said to be Turing Complete

when the rules followed in sequence on arbitrary data can produce the result of

any calculation. A device with a Turing complete instruction set is the definition

of a universal computer. To be Turing complete, it is enough to have conditional

branching (an “if” and “goto” statement), and the ability to change memory.

Starting points: 1823 The Difference Engine



Babbage’s collaborator was an impressive

mathematician and one of the few people who fully

understood his ideas.

She created a program for the Analytical Engine based on the

idea of program cards which she

borrowed from the Jacquard Loom.

Had the Analytical Engine ever actually been built, her

program would have been able to calculate a

numerical sequence known as the Bernoulli

numbers.

Based on this work, Ada is now widely credited as the first

computer programmer

Starting points: Lady Ada Lovelace & software



Jacquard Loom



Konrad Zuse is generally credited as creating the first modern computer, producing his Z2 during 1936

using electromagnetic relays, similar to those used in telephone exchanges.

Z3 was a program controlled machine which gained the support of the German government and was

used to help design V2 rockets as well as aircraft development.

1936 The first modern computer



1946 ENIAC

ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory, but its first use was in calculations for the hydrogen bomb. When ENIAC was announced in 1946 it was heralded in the press as a “Giant Brain”.

The ENIAC’s design and construction were financed by the United States Army during World War II. It cost almost $500,000 (nearly $6 m in 2008, adjusted for inflation).



The ENIAC was completed 5 years after the Z3. •

ENIAC used vacuum tubes to implement switches, Z3 used relays (a request for federal •

funding for an electronic successor was denied as “strategically unimportant”).

ENIAC was decimal, Z3 was binary. •

Until 1948, to program ENIAC actually meant to rewire it; while the Z3 read programs off •

a tape (actually a punched film).

Today’s computers are based on transistors instead of tubes or relays; their basic •

architecture, however, is much more similar to Z3’s than to ENIAC’s.

Z3 needed an external tape to store its program. •

The Manchester Baby of 1948 and the EDSAC of 1949 were the world’s first •

computers with internally stored programs, implementing a concept frequently

attributed to a 1945 paper by John von Neumann and colleagues.

A patent application of Konrad Zuse, however, mentioned this concept almost a decade •

earlier in 1936, although the patent was rejected.

ENIAC v. Z3



Alan Turing is often considered to

be the father of modern computer

science.

Provided an influential formalisation of the concept •

of the algorithm and computation with the ‘Turing

machine’.

With the Turing test, he made a significant and •

characteristically provocative contribution to the

debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether

it will ever be possible to say that a machine is

conscious and can think.

Invented the Bombe, an electromechanical •

machine that could find settings for the

Enigma machine, as his contribution to

deciphering the Enigma code.

WW2 Enigma and the Turing Test



Cellular automata are self-replicating software machines.

Building on Turing’s insights into self-programming machines in constructing the concept of the ‘Turing machine’.

In the 1970s a two-state, two-dimensional cellular automaton named Game of Life became very widely known, particularly among the early computing community. Invented by John Conway.

http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata

The Hacker Emblem is derived from Conway’s Game of Life.

1940s John von Neumann & cellular automata



In “A Mathematical Model of Information,’’ Claude Shannon showed

that “any message can be transmitted with as high a reliability as one

wishes, by devising the right code. The limit imposed by nature is

concerned only with the limit of the communications channel.”

Applications include ZIP files (lossless data compression), MP3s

(lossy data compression), and DSL (channel coding). The field is at

the crossroads of mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics,

neurobiology, and electrical engineering. Its impact has been crucial to

success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the CD,

the feasibility of mobile phones, the development of the Internet, the

study of linguistics and of human perception, the understanding of black

holes, and numerous other fields.

Key Concepts

Information Entropy•

Redundancy•

1948 Information Theory



“The key to life itself proved to be information theory . . . information- and communication-based models have proved enormously useful to the sciences because so many important phenomena can be seen in terms of messages. Human bodies can best be understood as complex communications networks than as clock-like machines ”

Howard Rheingold

Information Theory



MEMEX 1945

1945 Vennevar Bush’s ‘As we may think’ published in the Atlantic Review.

SELECTION BY ASSOCIATION

Bush realised that contemporary indexing techniques were imposing artificial constraints on the retrieval of information, forcing researchers to trace their requirements by following rigid alphabetical or numerical classifications.

“ The human mind does not work that way. It oper-ates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.”



MEMEXThe essence of the Memex system was the associative indexing: the ability to link the microfilm information together in ways which were meaningful to the user.



1948 Cybernetics

Norbert Weiner popularised the study of feedback and control mechanisms; he names it cybernetics.

Cybernetics is the study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organisations.

It has led to the growth of related fields such as: adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, complexity theory, control systems, decision support systems, dynamical systems, information theory, learning organizations, mathematical systems theory, operations research, simulation, and systems engineering.



1950s Department of Defense began to extensively fund both applied and basic work in the computer field. The development of greater interactivity was given priority because the ability to have a dialogue between user and computer increased the user’s productivity and facilitated the development of ever more sophisticated machines and software.

The Cold War



1964 ELIZAJoseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA at MIT. The ELIZA program is the ur-chatbot from which A.L.I.C.E. and nearly all other chatbot programs are descended.

ELIZA introduced the concepts of stimulus-response, pattern matching, and pronoun transformation to natural language processing.

Weizenbaum was reportedly “shocked” that MIT students and staff anthropomorphised the simple program. They revealed personal information to the bot in online chats. In response, Weizenbaum spent much of the rest of his career as a critic of computer science in general, and artificial intelligence in particular.



Douglas Engelbart, Stanford Institute, developed the idea of the

mouse and windows, the GUI, electronic mail and

teleconferencing during the 1950s and 60s. All these

components formed part of Engelbart’s “Augmentation”

project - a project that provided much of the framework for both

the development of the personal computer and for hypermedia.

“When I first heard about computers I understood from my radar

experience during the war that if these machines can show you

information on printouts, they could show that information on a

screen. When I saw the connection between a television-like screen.

an information processor. and a medium for representing symbols to

a person it all tumbled together in about half an hour. I went home

and sketched a system in which computers would draw symbols on

the screen and I could steer through different information spaces

with knobs and levers and look at words and data and graphics n

different ways. I imagined ways you could expand it to a theatre-like

environment where you could sit with colleagues and exchange

information on many levels simultaneously.”

Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo - 1 of 9 http://www.youtube.com/watc

h?v=X4kp9Ciy1nE&feature=player_embedded

Augmenting intelligence:

Engelbart invents the UI



Kay’s Dynabook1968Alan Kay concocted the netbook while at the Xerox Palo

Alto Research Center, only he termed it the “DynaBook”

(no relation to Toshiba’s DynaBook). In a paper he

published in 1972, he described a cheap, portable PC

aimed primarily at children, the DynaBook had both touch-

screen and keyboard, and could be used as an e-book

reader, word processor and games console – complete

with graphical user interface (something else that Kay had

invented earlier at Xerox).

“[That’s when I realized that] the computer was like

paper, except with extensions into time and into other

dimensions. Paper can hold the same kinds of marks that

computers can. But it’s hard to have a piece of paper

that can look at the marks and do what they say. All the

newness of the computer comes from its dynamic qualities

- that’s why I called it the Dynabook.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”



In 1965 coined the term ‘hypertext’ to describe non-sequential

interlinked writing: “text that branches and allows choices to

the reader”. Hypertext is text which contains links to other

texts. Hypermedia is hypertext which also contains other

media, such as graphics, sound, and video.

In a series of seminal articles and books, including Computer

Lib and Dream Machines, Nelson develops the idea of :

“fantics” (the “showmanship of ideas”), •

“thinkertoys”(computer systems for helping to visualise •

“complex alternatives”), and

“supervirtualities” (the conceptual space of hypermedia).•

1970s Ted Nelson

& Hypermedia

‘’To see tomorrow’s computer systems, go to the videogame parlors!

Go to the military flight simulators! Look there to see true responsiveness,

true interaction.”

Documents

The Protean Machine