I Think I Can

One of the other things we talked about at dinner the other night, was Boxer and K's film, which I had seen at that conference thingy. I can't really do it justice, but my most constructive criticism consisted of "Needs more car chases. Also explosions".

Anyway, that film, wonderful as it was, is not the subject of today's post. Today's post is about the most amazing seventeen minutes in recent (non-documentary) cinematography. I'm referring, as if you didn't know, to the transcendent Madame Tutli-Putli, an existential allegory in stunning stop-motion animation.

I know, you never thought you'd hear "stunning" and "stop-motion" in the same sentence again. Not after the art reached it's zenith with those melting Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Well I'm going to go out on a limb here: in terms of stop motion bad-assery, Tutli has set the bar even higher. That's right, Madame Tutli-Putli is the new "melting Nazis".

You have heard of this film, but you know next to nothing about it. Perhaps you know that it was nominated for an Oscar. Besides the NFB's aggressive pursuit of total suppression of all of their work from the public consciousness (seriously, try to find their movies in any theater), the reason you don't know anything about this film is because it's pretty much next to impossible to describe.

Taking, once again, the example of Raiders, you could say something like "Yeah, it's an adventure film about a magical box, and it's got a bunch of melting Nazis and there's some pyramids. Pretty awesome".

My point being that there's a story there, a narrative that you can summarize. If I tried to summarize Tutli, it would come out sounding like: "One woman's metaphysical voyage into self-discovery as she battles Demons, shadows, and Jungian Archetypes. A journey we all must make in one form or another, but are rarely privileged to observe. Also, there is a train involved."

Utterly incomprehensible, mostly because my voice would come out muffled, by virtue of my head being buried up my ass. And so it joins the ranks of those films and books and games and dinner parties that cannot be described, but must be experienced, subjects that cannot be taught, only learned.

Those are my favorite types of things, because then you can ask someone "Do you have kids?", or "Were you in 'Nam?", or "Hey did you see those melty Nazis?", and if they say yes, then you instantly have that shared experience. It doesn't matter, in this context, that that experience may have been utterly the most abominable thing they've ever been through ("Hey, you're a recovering alcoholic too?"), what makes the concept of this unconveyable gestalt interesting to me is that anyone who hasn't been there cannot possibly understand no matter how you explain it (viz: most of this blog).

And since, as you may have guessed, I'm a lazy fucker who doesn't like to explain things anyway, that's just fine with me.

The Shroud of Turing

Oh. My. God. Info-theorists and hacker-philosophers alike are creaming their jeans today at the news that a proof exists for the universality of the 2,3 Turing machine!!

A Turing machine, named for Alan Turing, the prehistoric proto-geek who came up with it, is basically an abstract symbol-manipulation device (This makes you horny. I can tell).

In concept, the Turing Machine theory states that a theoretical device can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer that could possibly be constructed. Turing machines are an abstract definition of an algorithm, or 'mechanical procedure'.

But wait! There's more! Further down the rabbit hole, a Universal Turing machine is a Turing machine than can simulate other Turing machines.

If your mind is still intact after that last shocking psychedelic blast, keep reading. A UTM, as the hip kids refer to it, can "run" any arbitrary, but well-formed, sequence of instructions, applying them to a set of data. Anyhoo, it's all very complicated and annoying to explain. Go read Wikipedia. I'll wait.

Stephen Wolfram is a crackpot idiot-savant mathematician with a brain the size of a planet. He is monomaniacally obsessed with Cellular Automata, "emergent behavior", and "randomness". To the point that he sequestered himself in Hermit-like seclusion for ten years to write a book that he claims revolutionizes ALL OF SCIENCE.

I have read this book, and while it's not complete bunk, it's far from the next Principia Mathematica. Which is not to say that Wolfram isn't a genius. He's just a misunderstood genius. Specifically, he is misunderstood by me.

The super-secret, no-girls-allowed elite class of Turing Machines referred to as "Universal", are usually described by referring to the number of possible states of the machine, and the number of symbols recognized by the machine (it's alphabet).

A Turing machine has a finite number of states and is in exactly one of these states at any given time. Depending on the current state, and an input value (the symbol), the machine will perform some action, possibly modifying it's state.

Anyhoo, since the mid-60s, and until recently, the simplest proven -- mathematically proven, that is, since scientists rarely lower themselves to the level of actually constructing a physical proof -- Universal Turing Machine was a 7,4 machine. This means that, theoretically, a machine could be constructed using only seven states and an alphabet of four possible symbols that, given sufficient time, could simulate the execution of any algorithm.

FYI: The "simplicity" of a given UTM model is given by multiplying the number of states of the machine by the number of symbols.

Wolfram, the hermit crackpot math weenie, posited the existence of a still-simpler model, a 2,5 UTM, the existence of which was proven by one of his research assistants. According to Wolfram other, smaller UTMs should exist, and he proposed a 2,3 machine as a candidate.

Today, that daring dream, that inspirational flight of fancy has become a breathtaking, flabbergasting reality! The universality of the 2,3 machine has been proven by Alex Smith, an undergrad Electrical Engineering doofus at U. of Birmingham in the UK.

Smith did it for the money, of course (as if there's any better reason). Wolfram's offering a $25,000 prize (my schadenfreude makes me want to make a joke about the exchange rate and failing US currency, but I shall resist).

Being an engineering student, you know he'll spend it all on beer. And to what nobler cause could the funds be put, than to destroy those very brain cells responsible for this amazing contribution to the eternal information-theorist "My UTM is smaller than yours" contest?

Really, what are they compensating for?

Wow, that was possibly my most boring (for people who are not me) post ever. If you managed to make it all the way through, congratulations. Have some boobs: