Chapter 4, Nomic

The first three chapters were fun. They got my head going around in circles chasing the demonic logic of sentence structure. Chapter 4 was viral though. It made me want to go out and get other people involved.

Chapter 4 revolves around a game called Nomic, conceived by a professor at Earlham College by the name of Peter Suber. The game in its original form was presented in appendix to his book The Paradox of Self-Amendment.

At its heart, the game of Nomic is based around the concept of Constitutional law and how the properties of self-amendment and reflexivity interact. For more information about nomic, you can get some details at the following locations:

http://www.nomic.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/nomic.htm

The game starts off with a base set of rules. Much akin to Calvin Ball (and the law in general), these initial rules form a mutable foundation upon which players propose new rules, modify existing rules, or nullify existing rules. The last of the above links contains the starting rules as originally laid out by Suber. The starting rule set includes a mechanism for determining a winner. The rule as stated is:

112. The state of affairs that constitutes winning may not be altered from achieving n points to any other state of affairs. The magnitude of n and the means of earning points may be changed, and rules that establish a winner when play cannot continue may be enacted and (while they are mutable) be amended or repealed.

As a note on this, while the rule itself states that "the state of affairs that constitute winning may not be altered...", it is in itself a rule. The initial starting state lays out that there are two tiers of rules, those designated with a number in the 100s and those with a number in the 200s. The starting rules designate that rules in the 100s are immutable, while those in the 200s are mutable. One of the immutable rules indicates that rules that are immutable can be made mutable by unanimous vote of the players. Once a rule is mutable, all bets are off.

And by the end of reading the chapter, I wanted to gather a group together and get a game together.

Chapters 1-3, Fun With Sentence Structure

The first three chapters deal with the property of being self-referential, with a particular focus on language, and the various ways that language and grammar can communicate about itself. As I saw in I Am a Strange Loop, these chapters tied heavily into the idea of identity with tendrils of Godel enmeshed heavily throughout.

The first thing of import is to clear the notion that self-referentiality equates to paradox. Some sentences that make reference to themselves do espouse paradox, such as:

This sentence is false. p.7

However, this is not a universal characteristic of self-reference. For example a sentence such as:

You may quote me. p.17

speaks about itself, but does not generate a paradoxical situation in the process. The general gist of these chapters seems to be to set the stage for Godel, and get readers of Scientific American warmed up to the particular style of mental free roving that seems characteristic of Hofstadter. A more specific interpretation would be to, by comparison, associate language more closely with the self-building machinery of mathematics. The latter articles in the series of three in particular start to challenge the readers to create sentences that are viral in nature. By viral the idea is that the contents of the sentence contain instructions that allow it to generate a replica of itself. Something on the order of:

after alphabetizing, decapitalize FOR AFTER WORDS STRING FINALLY UNORDERED UPPERCASE FGPBVKXQJZ NONVOCALIC DECAPITALIZE SUBSTITUTING ALPHABETIZING, finally for nonvocalic string substituting unordered uppercase words
(p. 62-63)

The above sentence contains instructions (the lower case words) and a seed contained within it (the upper case words). When the instructions are followed on the contained seed, it results in a semi-perfect reproduction of itself. The instructions are translated perfectly, and the internal seed is preserved, but without restriction on the seed ordering (which is unnecessary due to the instruction to alphabetize). The above example is related back to DNA/RNA, which is later tackled on its own in a separate article.

Fun, fun, fun.

And The First Period Gets Underway

So, I promised some posts, and after finishing Metamagical Themas last week, I'm ready to get underway. At first I had anticipated something like a 1 to 1 ratio on chapters (which corresponded directly to articles) to posts. But. There are a number of reasons that I'm thinking otherwise now. Firstly, there is some significant overlap between a few of the chapters (articles). There are series which entail an article. Then a followup to the article, covering essentially the same points. Then a followup to the followup. That makes for a nice compression of three down into one. Then there are the articles that just didn't tickle me particularly. Not a whole lot in that boat. But there were definitely some on Rubik's Cubes and Rubik's Cube alternatives that were more fun then thought provoking. So those go out the window. And then there's the always looming spectre of laziness. So let's get ready to rumble and start going through these bad boys.