Author: admin

Late last night I had a very inspiring conversation with a colleague, after which I excitedly wrote down a note to myself. I was sure this would be a wonderful subject for a blog post.

When I looked at the note sometime later, I saw that it simply said “Bartender == Film Editor”. That’s it, just three words and an equals sign.

I’ve tried to reconstruct in my mind what this could possibly have meant. I vaguely recall that it had something to do with the way a good bartender can seem to read peoples’ minds. A talented and perceptive bartender can tell whether you are happy or blue, and knows at a glance whether you are in need of a stiff drink or just someone to talk to.

Presumably, at the time, I saw how all of this tied together with the art of film editing. But I must admit, the connection now eludes me entirely.

And so, alas, the brilliant and pithy hypothetical blog post I might have written on the subject is not to be. I shall not be expounding today on the subtle yet powerful connection between the talents of bartenders and the talents of film editors.

Yet all is not lost. For it seems that I have indeed found a topic for today’s post.

It occurred to me today that it would be an interesting programming challenge to generate alien speech. I mean the kind of speech you hear spoken by extraterrestrials in science fiction films.

You wouldn’t need to generate actual functioning speech, just the feeling of it. In other words, when an ET opens up its mouth (or functionally equivalent bodily organ) to speak, what comes out conveys to the audience not only the sense of intelligent speech, but also some sort of coherent culture.

This effect was created very well, of course, for Klingon. But in that case, an actual language was designed. I’m suggesting something much less than that, but in a way also more. Our program could simply generate faux speech, as was done for The Sims. But it would need to be plausible and self-consistent faux speech.

For example, we may have an alien race with particular characteristics. Say, tall and thin, argumentative yet pacifist, aerially winged, living in a low gravity planet with a thin atmosphere, etc. We should be able to dial those characteristics into our speech generation software.

Then the software can proceed to generate plausible speech for such a creature. I am envisioning a process somewhat akin to generation of procedural texture — something we now see in movies all the time.

The alien speech generator should handle prosody, an impression of vocabulary, a kind of sound that suggests a particular biological equivalent to throat, breath and vocal cords, and generally something that maps recognizably into nuanced emotion.

If nothing else, this sounds like a really fun programming project.

I am sitting in Penn Station, NY, NY, waiting for a train that will take me to the airport. And I am realizing that there is something about Penn Station which is both fascinating and disturbing.

Nobody is here because they want to be — everyone here is just passing through on their way to somewhere else. So there is an odd sort of energy, a kind of pervasive restless feeling.

It’s different from, say, Grand Central Station, which is an actual destination in its own right. Over there, people stop and look around, draw in a deep breath, spend some time taking in the magnificent vaulted ceiling, luxuriate in the sense of spacious grandeur.

Here it hasn’t been that way since 1963. Once one of the most magnificent buildings in the world, this place is now cramped and soulless, a place nobody wants to be.

But it’s a place that lots of people need to pass through, while waiting to get to somewhere else. So if nothing else, it’s a really awesome place for people watching.

I was telling a colleague yesterday about the oddest coincidence. You see, I have lots of friends who have had experience with contractors. Maybe they needed their roof fixed, or their kitchen redone. I also have some other friends who are contractors, who have had various experiences with clients.

As you probably know, before a contractor starts to work, a contract is written up. It says exactly what work will be done, with an estimate of how much it will cost. Just so there will be no surprises.

Yet it happens that every person I know who has worked with a contractor has horror stories to tell. The contractor didn’t actually do the work, or did the wrong work, or ended up needing to fix something that shouldn’t have needed fixing, and everything ended up costing vastly more than the estimate.

It also happens that every person I know who has worked as a contractor has their own horror stories to tell. The customer changed their minds in the middle, or complained about some phantom problem with the work, or refused to pay what they had agreed to pay.

So here is the amazing coincidence: Every person I know who has worked with a contractor turns out to be an honest person who was taken in by an unscrupulous contractor. Yet every person I know who is a contractor turns out to be an honest person who was taken in by an unscrupulous customer.

I ask you, what are the odds?

If we lost the Web,
Twitter, Facebook, would we learn
About the old ways?

Once you start playing with 4D puzzles, it’s difficult to stop. They are highly addicting.

After thinking about the 2x2x2x2 puzzle for a while, I started wondering how many ways there were to build a kind of 4D Soma puzzle. That is, little pieces all fitting together perfectly to create the 2x2x2x2 hypercube.

There are endless variations on such a puzzle, so I narrowed it down a bit. Consider that there are a total of 16 little hypercubes in a 2x2x2x2 hypercube. Suppose we only consider puzzles where each “piece” consists of exactly 4 little hypercubes.

It will take four such pieces to build the 2x2x2x2 hypercube (since 4×4 = 16). Suppose we restrict things even further: All four of those pieces need to be the same shape.

How many different 4D puzzles can we make, if we follow those rules? More tomorrow.

In some 4D world
Someone’s solving a puzzle
In five dimensions

Now that you’ve seen what it looks like to rotate a 2×2 block inside a three dimensional cube, let’s see what happens when we rotate a 2×2 block inside a four dimensional hypercube. It turns out that there are at least six different ways you can rotate the same 2×2 block within a 2x2x2x2 hypercube:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f	0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f	0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f	0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f	0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f

All six of the above cases represent the same 2×2 shape embedded in a 2x2x2x2 hypercube. The only difference is how they are rotated differently (in four dimensions, of course). The good news is that all those rotations provide lots of opportunities to make really interesting puzzles.

One problem with trying to answer the question “What would I create if I really had Holodeck?” is that the question is woefully broad. The Holodeck is not a genre. It may not even be a medium.

Which means that there isn’t one thing or another that it particularly suggests — it suggests everything. It’s sort of like asking the question “What should a book be about?”

In fact, the analogy with a book is fairly good. The possibilities attainable in written language are vastly greater than the possibilities attainable in cinema. If you doubt that, just go back and reread Gogol’s The Nose.

Similarly, the very power of the Holodeck can make it difficult to narrow down creative choices. But I can think of various interesting directions.

Storytelling, games, construction toys, music (anything from enjoying a musical performance to creating original music, to creating original musical instruments), visits to exotic places, both possible and impossible, these are just a few of the possibilities.

Then there are the serious uses: Architecture, medicine, art, science, literary analysis, financial models, the list goes on and on.

In each case, the Holodeck manifests itself differently. To compare one Holodeck experience to another might be as futile as comparing a romantic farce to a Shakespearean tragedy.

I suspect that the Holodeck, if we ever manage to make it a reality, will not turn out to be a medium at all. Like the computer, it will more likely be akin to the computer — a “meta-medium”. That is, a vastly protean substrate through which new media are continually discovered and developed.

Let us, for the moment, take our leave of the sunny shores of the fourth dimension. We now pay a visit to the twentyfourth century.

It is the year 2364. Captain Picard has just kindly taken you on a tour of the Holodeck. You are aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise because StarFleet Command has decided that you have a high aptitude for storytelling. Should you win, your prize is to author a Holodeck experience to be staged on the real thing.

But what single experience will you choose for this? After all, on the Holodeck anything is possible.

In particular, suppose you could describe only one scenario? What would it be?