This presentation looks at some of the leading edge applications of digital technologies and traces their development from originating mathematical concepts to the present. It was given to a Media Cultures 2 class, RMIT games program, in 2010

1. 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
THE PROTEAN
MACHINE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVTo4y5e08k&feature=player_embedded
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2. 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
“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
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3. 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
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
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4. 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
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
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5. 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
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
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6. 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
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_
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7. 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
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.
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8. 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
Starting points:
THE ABACUS
• 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.
Russian Abacus:
The abacus is considered by some to be
one of the world’s first computers.
http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/art-
83564
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9. 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
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.
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10. 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
Starting points: Zero plays a central role in mathematics as the additive
identity of the integers, real numbers, and many other algebraic
ZERO structures.
0
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.
.
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11. 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
Starting points:
LIBER ABACI
202 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.
“There, following my introduction, as a
In this work, Fibonacci introduced the Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe.This consequence of marvelous instruction in
is the major element of our decimal system, which he had learned by studying the art, to the nine digits of the Hindus, the
with Arabs while living in North Africa. knowledge of the art very much
appealed to me before all others, and for it I
He is also remembered for the Fibonacci sequence realized that all its aspects were
studied in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and
In the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, each number is the sum of the Provence, with their varying
previous two numbers, starting with 0 and 1.Thus the sequence begins 0, 1, 1, methods; and at these places thereafter, while
2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610 etc. on business.
The higher up in the sequence, the closer two consecutive “Fibonacci The nine Indian figures are:
numbers” of the sequence divided by each other will approach the golden 987654321
ratio (approximately 1 : 1.618 or 0.618 : 1).The golden ratio was used widely With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 ...
in the Renaissance in paintings. any number may be written.”
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12. 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
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.
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13. 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
Starting points:
1823 The Difference Engine
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.
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14. 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
Starting points:
Lady Ada Lovelace & software
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
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15. 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
Jacquard Loom
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16. 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
1936 The first modern
computer
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.
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17. 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
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).
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18. 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
ENIAC v. Z3
• 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.
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19. 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
WW2 Enigma and the
Turing Test
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.
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20. 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
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
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21. 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
1948 Information Theory
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
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22. 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
“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
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23. 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
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.”
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24. 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
MEMEX
The 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.
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25. 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
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.
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26. 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
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
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27. 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
1964 ELIZA
Joseph 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.
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28. 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
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
Augmenting experience during the war that if these machines can show you
intelligence: information on printouts, they could show that information on a
screen.When I saw the connection between a television-like screen.
Engelbart invents an information processor. and a medium for representing symbols to
the UI 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
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29. 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
Kay’s Dynabook1968
Alan 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.”
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30. 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
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.
1970s In a series of seminal articles and books, including Computer
Ted Nelson Lib and Dream Machines, Nelson develops the idea of :
& Hypermedia • “fantics” (the “showmanship of ideas”),
• “thinkertoys”(computer systems for helping to visualise
“complex alternatives”), and
• “supervirtualities” (the conceptual space of 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.”
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