Lecture 7

For the texts I wanted you to get a different sense of the background of the algorithm -- light reading from Berlinksy, but it will help us loosen our heads about this.

As for the Deleuze reading on Foucault, I thought it would be useful to have a formal description of the "diagram."

Hopefully we can see what is so strange about the algorithm from Berlinksy'spoint of view.

Btw as a summary of Tues, what I wanted to get at was as many possibly different ways of looking at the "analogy" between computation and architecture. Many offered up points about computation and CA (the output) and architecture. Others looked at a methodological relation.

I think this is interesting because I think I specified a Turing machine, but I didn't specify what I meant by Architecture. To the extent that many questioned the diagrammatic aspects of CA, it was important to linger on a bit about that. What I liked most was the question of whether we could read the diagram in the rule set. This is really important. The fact that Durand had already in a way done much of this ought to show us how we might be able to avoid metaphors from other fields by which we return computation to a diagram. Matt's point that the child's game I mentioned is not in architecture is perfectly right. So the point was after reading the discussions posted on the blogs, maybe we could just practice an analogy with something more basic, more innocent and avoid momentarily too much pressure with architecture. I think that was asking a lot. But I think it was the right question. The Berlinksy reading might provoke us to think a bit differently about this.