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Stephenson:Neal:The Diamond Age:00:Let's Pretend, Alice, to Be an Artifex Conjuring a Working Primer Prototype( A.A )

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

squirrel OMEGA PSI PSI of NEFRETETE MINOR reporting. unknown category of activity reported in area 11.30. self-check! / / } !self-check { / / { self-check! } : full recording on. transcript generation on. second level off. reflection off. all subsystems working within optimal parameters. external sensory shroud reporting: ready. waiting. sentry. waiting. sensory input hsgml transcript follows xlink.

  • { NEFRETETE :: SOURCE VICTORIA } : Signal accepted. Checksum correct. Decrypting. Command? Executing, SOURCE VICTORIA. Beginning fifth level smallrock reflection analysis. Hot path to SOURCE VICTORIA open ready idle. Accepting datafeed routed by squirrel class sentry call name OMEGA PSI PSI. HALT! BLINK BLINK BLINK Insufficient processing power for real-time symbolic derivation of { this } datafeed. Augmenting MAJOR. NEFRETETE COMPLETE reporting full congnitive presence. Incorporating environment of MINOR. Executing, SOURCE VICTORIA. Beginning fifth level smallrock reflection analysis attempt. Working...Delay within acceptable boundaries. Continue, OMEGA PSI PSI.

resuming from autopushed mark, power 10 feed tick interval increase until mark. ping...pong resuming normal datafeed tick interval.

ALICE: You must tell me another story about Alice, she demands it as her right divine, after all she has passed a way from a mere Pawn to a Queen, did she not? That must have somehow affect Us indeed, royal blood is not something that would let itself to be ignored, do we agree? Certainly, we do. I expected that. There are times when I think I can tell what you think, Queen Alice, at least I think I can tell what I think or...I'm lost.. are there three of us? How did that happen without me noticing?

  • { NEFRETETE :: SOURCE VICTORIA }: Push mark. Stop datafeed. Notice to Self: Based on preliminary holistic analysis of transcript I invoke journal entry "Narrative in autonomous mode. Victorian era. Children's literature. Estimated error margin: 0.001". Close journal entry. Pop mark. Resume datafeed.

LEWIS CARROLL: A story..how about a very twisted and full of ruminations and marvelous patent nonsense, Royal Highness? I, your Court Storyteller happen to be in a silly mood due to that glass of gin and might excavate more ingenious murmurs out of my misty head than it usually happens, do I do di do... Yes, I shall! Be my muse, o Queen of Mirror Kingdom Sublime, produce words few light and rainbow coloured foating like butterflies in the stardust of hope, a sentence or two with no ending...and I will do my best to fall in love with it and make it into a story of monstrous proportions that should be told only under strict chaperonage...tick WHY, I do have a visitor, welcome, friend, SIR, DEAR spectator, welcome! Just for you, Alice and White Queen, a story will unfold like no story has been told before! I think yer White Majesty wants to play on a rug now, you are holding her a bit tight I suppose, dear Alice, see how she gasps for air? Good bye, White Queen, happy hunting! Shall we? Say anything that is on that nebulae of mind of yours...

ALICE: I do agree wholeheartely that her Majesty's will is as important to me as a cup of a hot chocolade at the right moment is to Alice the Third. If Her will is set to leave me, voracious servant and confidant o'her in complete silence in this high towered castle of Camelot to brood in my crossed over thoughts? Ah, I cannot disagree with a will of a power that be. Thank you for the compliment, Your Highness, I do know I have glimpses of a Gift...was it sixth or seventh sense...? Oh, Alice, both of you, you need to be more careful in what you let yourself to forget, picture yourselves not being able to recall your own names while they call you for dinner...or - one of you did that for sure at least once, ignoring the good advice and what has happened? Don't lie, Alice the Second, I can read your mind like it was a page of a book open on my lap' top held in place by an apple! You scared that poor little forest creature to the death! You should have been wiser, after all you are a little girl and a Queen, which is almost as close to being a wise person like...like long can be the waiting for a story to unfold while you persist on pretending to be more than one person! I want the story, please hold your tongues in check, Alice the Second and Alice the Third. You are ignoring Your Majesty presence! Do you know what can happen to you? It can happen, I assure you! I wonder though if it would affect me too? Better be careful and read the label before you drink from a bottle! Yet, you should be punished, oh but you are fortunate that your Queen does not behead people that often. Red Queen does it very often I heard a whisper say. She commands it and...Stop smiling! Right now! It's not polite to smile in the Queen's presence if she is not smiling. But I am smiling...Who is not smiling? Oh, I'm in a silly mood too. I don't know who I am anymore. Curiouser and curiouser... That is how you tell the difference between a White Queen and a Red Queen. How do you do the difference? Excuse me, I'm sorry, Your Majesty, I was thinking about my poor little child, she is so easy to amuse, dear Alice, and her mind wanders in at least fifty directions at the same time, I can hardly imagine her at the Miss Mateson's Academy of Three Graces, she'd be thrown out in a day or two! Or even before first day!**

ARTIFEX: Singularity! Now! Io Pan! Ave Satan! Yah Yah! Heil Eris! Nevermind...Simply shut up.

  • FORCE USED, PRIORITY 0, pause event registered, autonomous mode paused, registered, switching to exterior infospace intersection with biosphere of HIGH SHALOTT NEPTUNE ORBITAL RING SYSTEM, PARTITION 649.11.88, CONE OF BIOSUSTENANCE "PARNAS", LEVEL 217, LAYER 97.82.189 *

ARTIFEX @ LEWIS CARROLL: move to the background and be attentive to give me a cue sign from time to time, I'm going to continue the ractive now. I accept the charge. Of course I have a grid, it's a Harrison. Modelled on Harrison Ford, post-neolytical symbol of fatherly knowledge and compassion combined with strenght and dexterity and ability to get out of any dangerous situation unscratched mainly due to superior intellect combined with charizma and life experience of a sage, might be compared to Neptune, the father of Ocean and god of sailors, pirates and explorers of new seas of applied knowledge, piercing unknown horizons with their eyes fixed on a reality yet to be experienced by...but I disgress and Alice is idling wasting my money. May I? Please disperse your visual presence, I want to peruse as much of my potential as an actor as it is possible... ARTIFEX @ ARTIFEX: which is not much, fortunately I do not have to do it for a living. ARTIFEX @ LEWIS CARROLL: It was a joke, LEWIS CARROLL. Not a very funny one, I suppose. ARTIFEX @ ARTEMIDA: 1...2...3...5. A little less stress. A tad more rough texture, deeper, very maskuline voice, a king, an emperor. Too much. Too...almost. Perfect. Thank you, ARTEMIDA, now be so kind to assist me by displaying related terms and cine feeds in a media surface visible to my peripherial sight on the left and suitable quotations from semantically related works to the right, including texts of conteporary songs and poetry up to 21 century, with alternate spellings from the ProtoWeb Excavation Archive Project - yes, I'm a subscriber. LEWIS CARROL: slight distressed disturbance in the mindscape ARTIFEX @ LEWIS CARROLL: You are surprised? I have an idea that needs testing. By fire. * ARTIFEX @ ARTEMIDA: shall you encounter a hypertree of paralel dream or narration branch of more than 64 conflict points, pause the ractive and let me study the summary of the free leaf nodes plotted as a two dimensional graph, styled Nexus Polaris. On five dot the rolling hills, that is restart the ractive. ARTEMIDA: Note to Self: 358 milliseconds of silence detected ARTEMIDA, correction, Alice Liddell could not know about Miss Mateson's Academy of Three Graces, please examine your covariance matrix for this inforsphere internal xlink arc with power 3 wider probing space defined.

  • ARTEMIDA @ ARTIFEX: Executing, Ariste. Note to Self: Execution time: 2005 picoseconds. You are of course correct, Ariste, my calculations had fallen into a local minimum of the priming function agregate due to too small probing space area. I apologize.

ARTIFEX @ ARTEMIDA: I wish you to imprint the following rule. Never apply efficency heuristics while interacting with mixed type narrative mapped onto a ractive simulation when I am present. Use your full hypertree traversal potential, ignoring the rule of concurrency. You may continue calculations up to five seconds.

ARTEMIDA: Ruleset change accepted and imprinted, Ariste. New break limit of recursive reflection set to 5 seconds. Awaiting futher instructions.

ARTIFEX @ ARTEMIDA: 1..2..3..5.

{ ARTIFEX @ ARTEMIDA :: ALICE }: Cancel narrative by three sentences. Resume.

ALICE: Curouser and curiouser...I did say something, I am sure...and it simply flew away like a leave fallen from a tree. What will happen next? Oh, the beginning...Here it is: There was a girl named Nell, who lived in the future and her family was poor and had almost no toys not even books to read and one day her guardian angel realized she had to learn to read or she won't be able to become a great actrees like she always wanted, one of those beautiful women she saw in old passives her mother was watching with such passion...Pass the turn!

{ ARTIFEX @ ARTEMIDA: Oh, red dwarfs and galaxies, enough already, I changed my mind, switch to notebook mode }.

ARTEMIDA @ ARTIFEX: Executing, Ariste. Note book mode entered. Please assign a call name for a note book.

ARTIFEX: Young's Lady Illustrated Primer.

ARTEMIDA @ ARTIFEX: Code valid and imprinted. Attending.

  • note book entry begin : Young Lady's Illustrated Primer *

First thing we need to consider is how to generate the collective unconcious described in the book by Neal Stephenson, with sufficient depth so it will never be repetitive but with enough connections so it will not appear random, though artifically generated. I have an idea. What do chidren and senior citizens love to do and sometimes even do way too often? They listen to music. A lot of music. If you consider how much poetry was generated to support popular hit melodies and how wide field of human nature is covered by these lyrics, you can probably see what I am aiming at. How about we use a program, say - something like iTunes, a portable device, say - something similar to iPod and a web connection to a cyborg hive mind equivalent - a few hundred of sites offering free lyrics of songs combined with a various wikimedia content and editing power and a mechanizm calculating the paths traversed through the hypertree of xlinks (XLink is a standard by w3c) alike the everything2.com, assigning them excitory values, simulating a learning neural network of semantic connections - combining the pattern matching talent and power to create unusual assotiations of humans with computational power of machines comparing that data to statistical analysis of similarities between various texts (each page being a node of a simulated network), BUT with editors or moderators completely hidden - a person using that hypothetical cross of two types of site MUST NOT be harassed by any interference, the interaction with a primer system MUST BE natural and rewarding, so the person will not stop using it too soon. Of course it can interact freely with other humans by IM (like iChat?) and email (like Mail?), play with pictures (iPicture) and movies (iMovie, iDVD). The correct content should be preserved by a versioning system, recording a previous versions after each alteration and performing a slow reverse alteration in a subtle enough way that a human using the system will accept the changes as part of his own alterations (most people know they don't remember anything they wrote, so if they encounter something new, it will be accepted as a thing that was forgotten, unless it is strange, but we can avoid that by being very cautious). First, the system needs to be bound to a person, to create a specific mapping, "metametalanguage" suited for her and her only, "By nature people are nearly alike, by experience they get to be very different", needs to perform a calibration process. First, we assume that a person is already hooked to web and listens to music. Let's give her an Apple Mini computer, with iTunes already filled with 128,000 songs, both popular and new and older and not so popular, but mostly with lyrics that contain a hook or are interesting due to significance to us beause of the kind of melody or described subject. Instruct her that she can "vote" on any song she hears, any picture she collects, any movie, if she likes it she can give it 5 stars, if she absolutely does not like it, she may give it zero stars or one star if she can barely withold listening to the song. Instruct her that she can alter anything she sees on a web site integrated with the program. Instruction should be in text form accompanied by a voice of a very good vactor, preferably female, with expensive Victorian accent, meant just for her. Vicky is the name of the voice, build in to a speech synthesis subsystem of Mac OS X. There is also Victoria variant, which is more lively but less dreamy, more suitable for system messages than narration - can announce the time. Read every text of the interface the person points to with the mouse (function build in). Respond with no training to voice commands (that part needs to be improved - it does not work good enough to leave keyboard unused - maybe I might have better luck with an external microphone with noise canceling, I don't know, too expensive to buy just to test the hipothesis. Unless Applied Minds will sponsor me one, with Bluetooth stereo headphones as an addition, please. Grin. So, first we categorize the songs (internally) to assign them values betwen 0 and 1 in several dimensions, as many as required, according to advice of a psychologist or a dozen, to help mapping general attitude of a person, type of personality, personal quirks and preferences - if we use enough dimensions the system will be able to generate a unique identification string for a person, a psychological fingerprint - according to how the person reacts to an emotional message transmitted through music and words. When the process of calibration is complete, the local part of the system can report the signature plus a cookie plus a large prime number to the primer system on the web. In this way, the primer system gains an ability to compare the interactions of hungreds of hungreds of different humans to the network, giving it even more data for accurate predictions and generation of narration. How to generate the narration? Let the person listen to the music! At random! wink wink Remember, random is not chaos - a random sequence can be perfectly deterministic. Without a source of true chaos one cannot generate a random and non deterministic sequence, only a sequence that has properties of a random sequence, mathematically speaking. So, if the code will avoid being noticably not random (it does not have to be as random as when fighting against a cryptoanalysis, we must avoid unnatural non randomness), it can narrate to the person using the lyrics of songs and mirror magick. The simulated neural network is one mirror. The mind of a person is another mirror (actually, a complex system of mirrors). The module with texts of songs is yet another mirror. The heuristics (psychological directives - the primer system has some aim build in) build into the priming system is a mirror too. Each of these mirrors is imperfect, it alters the reflections. The person listens to a song, she might have an assotiation with something she reads on the web or has stored in memory, she interacts with the web - this is a RIPPLE sent at the mirror to the response for a WAVE reflected off the song. It will create a WAVE at the neural network (simulating cortex - high though processes of the brain) and at the heuristic directives module (simulating deep structures of the brain, basic emotions and goals). The neural network will recalculate it's parameters and send a RIPPLE at the heuristic module and a WAVE at the local lyrics module (a person cannot be comunicated directly, only with reflections and shadows, for obvious reasons, see The Lady of Shalott). The heuristic module will process the RIPPLE and original WAVE from the person and create a WAVE in phase or out of phase or something inbetwen, depending how close the WAVE matches the directives considering the RIPPLE from neural network - if it doesn't match at all, they will cancel each other out - negative feedback loop, if they match - we can get a stronger signal or if all the elements of the system are in resonance, a standing wave, then it will send a WAVE at the lyrics module. The lyrics module will consider the WAVE from the heuristic module and WAVE from neural module and adjust the narrative - the order of songs and the sonic filters applied to the songs, stressing some words, putting less stress on some other. The lyrics module will generate a WAVE at the web each time the person interacts directly with the program, choosing some fauvorite tune not at random or voting for a song. It should be valued considerably higher than the feedback from the neural module and analyzed more thoroughly by the heuristic module - here we have a chance to correct any anomalies that can occur during a development of an artificial neural network and help in pruning invalid correlations, that are not consistent with the choice, considering content presented by the web and narration of songs. If you look at this system, you can see, that there is no need for true A.I. - the mirror magick has plenty of power. If anyone of you ever talked to "Eliza" like program, a good one (I talked to one hooked into Google, it was really convincing, it was made by a hacker "LCAMTUF", who I've encountered personally (he is from Poland, but we never met in flesh of course...), though I lost contact, unfortunately) - if one suspends disbelief, talking to the mirror can be entertaining AND educating experience. You are usually more open when talking through the mirror reflection of written text (compare it to writing letters to someone, people are able to write things which they would never be able to say aloud in person), that plus the mirror which is not perfect (some heuristics applied) gives you a introspective tool, a telescope pointed into your own unconcious. Now - combine the mirror magic with human supervision, for special customers, like a Princess Nell. The portable device could be equipped with microphones and signal generators, too, to map the surroundings and everything happening around using ultrahigh sound frequencies and radio waves for localization through GPS satellite system. Sound landscape should reach a sphere of few meters diameter around a person, which is more than enough to support an ability of a "primer system" to react to surroundings - we need a ractor here, specialized, trained to work using the data presented in the form of a ultrasonograph (possibly somehow processed to make the reading easier) plus a separate track of ambient sound detected by microphones. This would let it to tell, for example, something about a person the person is talking to - is it a male or female, age, height, weight, kind of clothing, the closer she is standing to the person, the more accurate the data - when 15-20cm close, it should be able to identify the material of the clothing, position of every button, everything except things that cannot be detected without visual readout - like colour or words printed on a t-shirt. Not as good as the Primer, but not bad, too. The main point is that all of the things required for such system are already either mature technologies, which simply nobody combined yet and a tiny bit of not written yet software, which is not so complex to write (as much as my experience is telling me). We can reuse ready-made components. We even have a glue language for communication between parts of that highly heterogenous environment - PHYLOSOPHICKAL LANGUAGE (when it is ready, at this moment A.A 00:50, 2005 May 21 (PDT) it is in alpha and will stay that way as I need to be away from media so I can't publish anything anyway - security considerations - give me a month or two and development will restart - note for nonsense hunter, this notation is similar to a very concise programing language for turing machines and be read by a turing machine - but not used for it's purpose - it's intended use is for homo sapiens sapiens (not really tested elsewhere, in other complex minds) to be able to talk do and be parts or mutable or immutable symbol processing entities running on their minds running on their brain, whose most are unable to reach by only thinking about it longer - a person has to think about accessing them in a particular way or no results occur - currently input-output is proposed to be directed at a device mirroring contents of it, mediatron) mapped to XML variant. How about it? How about it...

  • note book entry end : Young Lady's Illustrated Primer *