Aristo Tacoma [[[ESSAY as at norskesites.org/fic3inf3f/essay20110918.txt Written talk. Yoga4d.org/cfdl.txt redist license. Consult published works as at yoga6d.org/cgi-bin/news/f3w which are containing key concepts connected to what this writer calls 'neopopperian science' and also 'supermodel theory', which involves also perceptive processes -- concepts effortlessly drawn upon here.]]] AN INITIAL, FOUNDATIONAL EXPLORATION OF PLAYFULNESS [[[Please also get the 2 pictures as found at norskesites.org/fic3inf3/essay20110918-a.jpg norskesites.org/fic3inf3/essay20110918-b.jpg to view as mentioned within.]]] In a triplet of books ("The Act of Creation", 1964, by Arthur Koestler) it is proposed that humour, or playfulness, is an essential component in creativity and creation. Intuitively, it is hard to imagine anyone wouldn't nod to this, without further thought. But we will here explore playfulness, and such, rather more from a 'tabula rasa' approach, viz., the approach of having a blank mind, not filled with propositions, however consequential or inconsequential they may be. We do this, naturally, in a context of the supermodel theory, taken more or less for granted, but not referred to any much explicitly, for we want it easy-going and light; and indeed, the form of our little bit of higher education on playfulness ought to reflect its content, namely the theme of being playful. And let's see if we cannot come up with a neat little computer model in f3 that has some sense, in a most general sense, of the playful, as an illustration of some aspects of what we find out. I have in mind that we build further on such routines as were used in the September 17, 2011 talk, with PEN-DRAW and such, but that we also, in contrast to then, get in a bit of movement -- one way or another, a playful movement -- where the motion of the mouse by any one of us will interact with the program. So I will include here two images, instead of just one, of program flow, to hint that the real program flow will be a lot, lot more than can be conveyed in one snapshot. So what is playfulness, ultimately? And is it merely a thing of human thought and behaviour and feelings, or is it more universal than that? It is easy to play in water, but is water itself playful? It is my sense of it that we ought to start this enquiry by a simple negation: playfulness has got nothing to do with purpose, in the sense of any strict, attached, narrow-minded, clutching, fixed purpose or greedy attitude. Greed and purpose may mimick play but they cannot play. Their apparent playfulness is but a cynical vibration to reap more. Another negation -- before we go to the cosmic level about this theme, we should clear the debris and fog around it in a very near, human, living sense, so as to see, if we can, an essence: the person who is depressed self-condemnation cannot see any much humour anywhere, cannot take pleasure in anyone poking fun with conventions or turning perspectives about. The person may pretend to be relaxed, even happy, but one notices the lack of smile, or the strained laughter, or laughter with the hystrical lilt, conveying the sense of an unbalanced personality, fighting own secret self-condemnation or desperately concerned with winning somehow over others, -- when a process of playfulness is sought to be initiated by another. Such a person doesn't like children, for even the child who has yet to speak a full sentence knows what is to make a game of a situation better than the stiff adult, greedily purposeful in trying to manipulate the world by imagining to be a set of rails on which they are trains. Statistical research finds that the most adorable people, the people most easily liked and loved strongly by others, are attracted to children and their constant sense of play. This play must not be supervised by stiff adults: either the adults must leave the kids to work it all out within a safe boundary connected to things which can fall over and heights and so on, or they adults must be as children. One of the few quoteworthy passages from the christian bible, attributed to the master, goes, of course, like this: Verily, I say unto you, blah blah, those who are not like children cannot venter blah blah into the kingdom blah blah of heaven. Was that a little bit funny? Why? Or confer Wodehouse's recommandation for getting sleep -- enough to wake up to playful, dancing days. This is already funny in how it is said, and it is quite far back since I last read that passage, so it is probably (unlike the above Jesus quote) better in the original. But goes about like this: "One King Henry or George -- I have forgotten who -- said that a certain number of hours of sleep -- I have forgotten how many -- makes a person into something, which for the moment has slipped in my mind." What is interesting, by the way, about P. G. Wodehouse comical novels is that they to a large degree create their own context of convention well enough that the humour is recreated, upon reading it, no matter what freaky world you read it in. All you have got to do is to get a certain sense of identification with the purposes and the spiralling events and joys and pains, as outlined in a story about Jeeves / Wooster, Psmith, or such as Maud (or whomever) at the Blandings Castle, and then the bubbles of upsetting these purposes mildly will come across as subtle sarcasms and good sarcasms, too, in the ironic happy sense. But outside of a context, there isn't much to poke fun at in a stable sense. We need a coherent culture to do a bit of fun good dishonest practise relative to it, within limits which are good-natured. So playfulness involves a kind of mild dishonesty, in the widest sense of dishonest. It may mean to pretend that one is seriously doing something while actually not intending it at all -- 'pretending' is a form of exhibiting consiously a false impression, even though one is technically not lying. No game exists without it. To play with one another sexually, one may enact a harshness, such as the sudden hard holding or the BDSM whip, which point in a direction of violence which is usually very far from what is intended (otherwise, there would be few survivors of sex, which is not to say that violence is always as false as 20th century official United Nations charters wanted it to be). So playfulness pokes fun at conventions, but it may also involve a literal poking of the skin. It is the start of turning something around, mentally and/or physically, but with a radiant sense of mastery -- it is not actually made into a problem. It is a pleasant confusion, but one that is not serious enough to cause a lasting problem. It is unlearning as much as learning, but it is essential beyond any purpose, and must never be relegated to serve merely a purpose. Playfulness, then, is a dance of mild dishonesty in the widest sense. It certainly has movement, interaction, interactivity in it. It may move around abstractly or concretely, by means of body motions or words or in other ways. It involves a freedom of fluctuations. In the supermodel theory (as well as in the Lisa programming language, or f3) we can connect this latter aspect to RFFG, to Relatively Free Fluctuation Generator. In the physical world, this is radioactivity: it comes from the stars, from outer space, from the many suns, and radiates through skin and treats neurons in the brain to new stimuli; and it can also come from some wilderness areas, from the ground, as gases. Radioactivity is everywhere, and moderately it is healthy and indeed vital for the stimulation of the creative aspect and self-renewing aspect of all life and all cells, but too much of it becomes like a burning fire that leaves but ashes in its wake. Playfulness is the red hot chilli that burns your tongue in pain-pleasure as you eat a wonderful little meal, vindaloo spiced to precision. Coffee, itself, plays and pokes fun with the neurons, as a kind of molecular crystal. Chilli also stimulates, triggers, and a speck of chilli powder to coffee is a treat for the greater knower of coffee variations. So it is not that playfulness doesn't serve life: it is vital, it is -- obviously -- part of all the unfolding universe, every bit of its processes do have some safe zone of fluctuation (for some processes, this safe zone may be very small, however), and this measure of fluctuation is inherent in existence at an essential level. Perception is, at a practical level, not in general, for humans anyway, absolute. Something is left out and what is included may come about as a surprise after what appears to be a mere bit of limited false play. Those who never engage in dishonesty loose so much of touch with reality due to their fearsome narrow-mindedness that they become, unwillingly, dishonest, -- but the more proer word in such sad cases is "idiotic". Then you have the playfulness of the consciously pretended stupid blonde -- she is not idiotic, which is self-centered in a helpless, self-destructive sense -- but merely party- or fiest-happy stupid, not understanding that which it doesn't please her to understand in that moment -- and so she objectify her blondeness. She invites others to look at her for she radiates a sense of not scrutinizing anyone or anything, so they can drink her in more relaxedly than if they have to be ready for an intellectual fight. The stupidity of this kind is a must-have for fiests, and it is not without reason that alcohol, even just drops of it (in contrast to the Wodehouse context), is finding its role in unleashing the happiness of fiests, for alcohol, correctly applied, puts non-stupidity to sleep. So also with a whiff of cigarillos, pure tobacco without all the additions that make cigarettes the stinking non-good alternative. A little of the tobacco in the air acts to ruffle up ideas around, makes humour and playfulness glide easier. But so does also elegance, luxury, beauty, cleanliness, good music, the recent experience of having danced well, being liked and being one who likes, and such. I hesitate to say more clear-cut what this delightful flower of playfulness is all about. Let us abstract some features and get on with a piece of formal model. Playfulness must be left unanalyzed and yet we may have touched it quite well. We don't want an intellectual theory of playfulness, that would make it into a purpose. So the model must illustrate just something, vaguely, to teach us a bit about it when we check it out also much much later. It is not going to encapsulate anything, merely trigger a bit of a perspective on it. So we have PEN-DRAW and PEN-FORWARD and PEN-LEFT, all these take just one number each. The two first the number of pixels, the third the number of degrees in the 1..3600 sense. To turn half a corner, 450, and a full corner of a rectangle or square, 900. I have in mind that we use the Fibonacci number (see September 13, 2011 talk, it is in essay form, constantly) stuff. It is 34 and 55 which is a bit more precise than 3 and 5 or even more precise than 5 and 8. These can be put one after another, or beside one another, or hidden within other measures, -- there are all sorts of varations -- but the simplest to model in simple 2D (two-dimensional, or X and Y, horisontal and vertical) terms is perhaps the rectangle whose one side is about 34 or 340 and whose other side is about 55 or 550. Let us make such a rectangle, standing. We start with the PEN-ORIGO and PEN-STRAIGHT-UP before doing anything of the drawing, and repeat the latter -- which sets the angle upwards to the top of the monitor -- to reset, after doing a bit of drawing with PEN-DRAW and such. Let's fill it up a bit, with smaller rectangles inside it. That will symbolize something of what is poked fun at. To the right of this, let's have tilted -- 450 degrees, pointing both up and beneath -- three similar-proportioned rectangles, but very much smaller. Let them somehow flicker in position horisontally, in the X direction. (You may remember that X and Y is given to some of these functions in just that sequence, X, Y, and that the X is left on the keyboard, as a mnemonics to remember it -- and also that Y has a vertical line in it, so it must be the vertical dimension.) The mouse is shown by SHOWMOUSE and hidden by UNSHOWMOUSE, as a cannibalistic meal of a free small dancing foot, pointed up, in the Lisa GJ2 Fic3 programming language. A vegetarian should eat only vegetables, and vegetarians, for consistency. When anything is drawn, it is good to get the mouse hidden just before the drawing event, and shown just after it again. The reason has to do with how the mouse pointer is supposed to clear up the pixels on the screen that it affects as it moves about, guided by your moving of the physical mouse pointer item. It therefore retains a kind of memory of imprint, a footprint or fingerprint we might say, of what was underneath it just before it landed at a position. But then, when we change the graphics of the monitor, we must be sure that we update this imprint memory that pertains to the mouse. So by removing the mouse for a fraction of a second, THEN changing the monitor graphics, and putting the mouse back, we force it to update with a fresh imprint of the new graphics. When you next move the mouse pointer, it will then seem like the mouse is 'on top' of the monitor, like it should, and it won't leave a trace based on an earlier graphics display. Some drawing routines has this SHOWMOUSE and UNSHOWMOUSE stuff as part of them, but with more elementary drawing routines, you must put them in yourself. Since these words are a bit long and in some programs needed very often, there are synonyms for them -- the words FEET and FT. Since the mouse pointer is a foot, the word FEET is the synonym for SHOWMOUSE. The shorter version of this word, used right before some drawing routines, reflects UNSHOWMOUSE -- FT. So MOUSEXY gives us the X and the Y when we need them. On top of the stack is the Y, and just beneath it is the X. So just as in a function header one may say >N2 >N1 to get the X and Y into, respectively, N1 and N2, in sequence, so will a phrase like (( MOUSEXY => >N2 >N1 )) with or without semicolon ; between the two, it doesn't do anything, as long as it has a space before it and after it, like this: (( MOUSEXY => >N10 ; >N8 )) In this case, the N8 will hold X and N10 the Y. In the middle of a repetition, such as (COUNT .. COUNTUP), it sometimes look very good to use some of the higher of the Nn numbers in the N1..N11 range, since N1 and N2 are used by (COUNT .. COUNTUP) to hold the counter and the maximum value, respectively. Starting a call on (COUNT .. COUNTUP) makes existing N's get 'pushed up' two steps, so that, for instance N5 becomes N7. When we are going to interact with a mouse-pointer which is moving, from the perspetive of a program that goes very, very fast in its repetitions, we should slow it so it matches more the speed of the hand that moves and the hand that clicks on the mouse -- at least sometimes this make sense. The word MOUSECLICK is, as you will see from examples, typically used together with something like GOODPAUSE, a word that tells the computer to simply relax and await further developments. GOODPAUSE is so finely grained that the number 1000 as given to it means take it easy for one second. By giving a number like 100 => GOODPAUSE we get one event at the computer ten times pr second, or about that many. Humans pick up perhaps twice that many events but then it starts blurring into the fake illusion of continous movement. First-hand programming doesn't like fakes any too much: it is the proposal of this writer that movies, videos, cinemas, TV, that kind of stuff, makes a brain senile, and computer games employing the same fake trick is not much better. It is better that we see the computer blink, for that leave you with a true sense of movement intact within yourself. However in some contexts, a small amount of continous movement is appreciable as holistic and healthy and not doing the brain any harm at all -- a very good example is the writing on an editor such as B9, where a big flicker of the monitor every time a character or even a pixel of it was updated would simply distract the writing process too much. Let us muse for a while over how we can make the program with the least amount of struggle, and some element of elegance. We can make one rectangle inside one another by the same routine if they all have the same proportions, by simply inputting a factor to scale these proportions. We can also set the PEN-X and PEN-Y and even the PEN-LEFT angle of the pen right before we call that routine, and then we can use the very same to get the PC to make also the tilted, small rectangles. Right? I imagine that these small rectangles poke themselves entirely near the pixels of the big rectangle, to the right of the big one. They play about, right? Guided by RFFG in X direction, mouse-movement in the Y direction, and with some element of GOODPAUSE. To avoid there being a build-up of more and more small rectangles as we make new ones in new positions, we should, I suppose, clear away the earlier ones. We could then use the word RECTFILL to put the background color, or tone, or tonation as we call it, to a square that is just big enough to cover the area that just had these small rectangles, but not so big that it removes anything of the big rectangle. Any dosbox correctly implemented gives us a bit of wait before the monitor is updated and so the flicker won't be as instantaneous as we might program it to be, and that is part of the sense of duration that good f3 work is all about, when we do explorations. The machine must never outperform the human! For background tasks of societal foundational importance the computer can do more, though -- but that's another matter. Exploring insights and modelling elements of our theories, so as to simulate our minds, must involve a great respect for the process of duration, that the machine mustn't overdo its effectiveness or our thoughts will feel out of tune with the apparatus. So just as numbers are not going to go into 64-bit or 128-bit or 512-bit range or whatever, unless there is a very clear-cut vital need for it, so also is undue quickening of the PC not part of first-hand programming, to stimulate these lovely first-hand minds of ours ;) Here are two snapshots of the program run: [[[Look at ../fic3inf3/essay20110918-a.jpg here & now]]] [[[Look at ../fic3inf3/essay20110918-b.jpg here & now]]] And here is the program, which gives a great deal more of the sense of the playfulness than those two images, when you move the mouse, running it. This talk is also written and as essay, listed at norskesites.org/fic3 in the /fic3inf3/.. section, you can get the text, rename it into a program name with the dot TXT suffix, and delete all but the following last portion. Then you start a dosbox application, type F3 and press ENTER, and click ALT-button and then also the ENTER-button (that is, the lineshift button) to switch to fullscreen and back when you like, and you type :FILENAME IN to start the program. Be sure that you avoid typing .TXT and only the filename before the suffix, maximum eight as filename size (letters, digits, dash -, hyphen _, and rather not any other types of characters just there), when you start it with a colon before it, and IN after it. GREAT LUCK WITH YOUR TRUE AND GENUINE PLAYFULNESS!!! Remember, this is just an initial exploration. }* POKEIT1.TXT WRITTEN BY A.T. with L.A.H., }* }* Yoga4d.org/cfdl.txt copyright -- redist. }* }* For essay20110918 in fic3inf3. Note that }* }* I didn't precalculate all these numbers, }* }* no need to, I just threw in some initial }* }* rought numbers then fine-tuned by looking }* }* at the program run and fixin several times.}* (LET MAKE-GOLD-RECT-WITH-THIS-FACTOR BE (( >N4 )) (( (( 34 ; N4 => MUL => PEN-DRAW )) (( 900 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 55 ; N4 => MUL => PEN-DRAW )) (( 900 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 34 ; N4 => MUL => PEN-DRAW )) (( 900 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 55 ; N4 => MUL => PEN-DRAW )) )) OK) (LET CLEANSE-FROM-HERE-TO-HERE-TO-RIGHT-OF-RECT BE (( >N2 >N1 )) (( (( 502 ; N1 ; 750 ; N2 ; 0 => FT RECTFILL FEET )) )) OK) (LET MAKE-BIG-RECTANGLE BE (( )) (( (( PEN-STRAIGHT-UP )) (( 900 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 499 PEN-X < MAKE-GOLD-RECT-WITH-THIS-FACTOR )) (( PEN-STRAIGHT-UP )) (( 900 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 499 PEN-X < MAKE-GOLD-RECT-WITH-THIS-FACTOR )) (( PEN-STRAIGHT-UP )) (( 900 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 499 PEN-X < MAKE-GOLD-RECT-WITH-THIS-FACTOR )) )) OK) (LET MAKE-SMALL-POKE-ABOUT-HERE BE (( >N8 )) (( (( PEN-STRAIGHT-UP )) (( 900 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 450 => PEN-LEFT )) (( 93 => FUNNYRFFG ; 493 => ADD => >N6 )) (( N6 PEN-X < MAKE-GOLD-RECT-WITH-THIS-FACTOR )) )) OK) (LET FLICKER-AT-THIS-HEIGHT BE (( >N1 )) (( (( N1 ; 144 ; 525 => SET-RANGE => >N1 )) (( N1 ; 23 => ADD => >N10 )) (( N1 ; 47 => SUB => >N11 )) (( N11 ; 22 => SUB => >N5 )) (( N10 ; 72 => ADD => >N7 )) (( N5 ; N7 => CLEANSE-FROM-HERE-TO-HERE-TO-RIGHT-OF-RECT )) (( N1 => MAKE-SMALL-POKE-ABOUT-HERE )) (( N10 => MAKE-SMALL-POKE-ABOUT-HERE )) (( N11 => MAKE-SMALL-POKE-ABOUT-HERE )) (( 69 => GOODPAUSE )) (( N5 ; N7 => CLEANSE-FROM-HERE-TO-HERE-TO-RIGHT-OF-RECT )) )) OK) (LET MAKE-POKEIT-PLAYFULNESS BE (( )) (( (( }WELCOME ALL OF YOU!!! MOVE MOUSE, THANKS!!! ESC EXITS.} ; 30 ; 30 => FT B9-POP FEET )) (( GOLABEL4: )) (( KEYTOUCH (MATCHED (( KEYNUM => RM )) (( EXIT )) MATCHED) )) (( MOUSEXY => >N10 ; >N8 )) (( N10 => FLICKER-AT-THIS-HEIGHT )) (( GOUP4 )) )) OK) (( LOOKSTK )) (LET POKEIT1 BE (( )) (( (( GJ-ON )) (( PEN-ORIGO )) (( PEN-STRAIGHT-UP )) (( SHOWMOUSE )) (( MAKE-BIG-RECTANGLE )) (( MAKE-POKEIT-PLAYFULNESS )) (( UNSHOWMOUSE )) (( GJ-DONE )) )) OK) (( LOOKSTK )) (LET AUTOSTART BE POKEIT1 OK)