Settle please.

This is the first meeting of  HSA219: Computational Fighting.  Please ensure you are registered for this class and not some lesser one.

We begin with The Fundamental Definition of Computational Fighting:

Fighting is a WRITE/WRITE race between two or more active components.

Yes of course that will be on the final.

The fundamental definition can be applied in many ways, and in corner cases it can become subtle or useless, but nothing coherent can be said about fighting, in the end, without resolving back, at least in principle, at least implicitly, to the fundamental computational definition.

So in today’s lecture we’re going to kick the tires on this crucial definition a few times and just start getting to know it.

We make two additional definitions:

Writing is directed change of physical state.

And,

A Race is a decision procedure where the result depends on implementation details.

The directed change might be a snap, like putting ink onto paper, or electrons onto a capacitor, or whispers into an ear. Or it might take a massive effort, like carving faces on mountains, or colonizing the solar system, or changing the minds of grownups. For our computational purposes, all such acts are directed changes of physical state. They’re all writing.

So. Fighting is two or more participants attempting to write into the same place, or into each other, while remaining unchanged themselves. Like fighting for the best seat, or next in line, or the last word. Or, two creatures might fight to the death, and the loser is changed into meat (or at least into no threat), and the winner eats it (or becomes less threatened) and thus preserves itself intact. Similarly, a nation speaks war to ‘preserve our way of life’. To make them change while we remain the same. To make them give up and act like us, or anyway to keep our stuff and also take theirs.

Our primary focus in this class is on fighting mediated by language. It is an especially important category of fighting because language is the ultimate long-range weapon, a standoff missile with a warhead of words. It only works against targets with a certain kind of computational complexity, and defenses are possible, but against suitable soft targets devastating language attacks can be launched inexpensively across vast expanses of space and time. Language-based fighting is also easy to understand using regular computational concepts like input and output, messages, syntax, protocols, and so on—stuff we’ve covered in the Academy since kindergarten.

So.

In a computational interaction, if we observe that component A remains the same while component B changes, then we may label A as ‘PROCESSOR’ or ‘WRITER’, and label B as ‘MEMORY’ or ‘READER’, for the purposes of that interaction.

And here’s the thing: In fighting, another label applied to PROCESSOR is ‘winner’. You can guess the label MEMORY gets.

Questions? Let me look at my seating chart here. Umm, Suzie?

SUZIE: Doesn’t that mean all communication is fighting? J.K. Rowling wasn’t changed when I read Harry Potter, but I was.

Well if you bought the book, at least her bank account was changed a little, but no, Suzie, that interaction is not fighting because you freely chose to be the reader—the MEMORY side that accepts INPUT and is thereby changed—in that interaction.

In the case of reading, being changed—being moved—is exactly why you do it. In fact, if the material wasn’t memorable enough for you, meaning you weren’t sufficiently changed, you might’ve abandoned the interaction midway.

Yes, Billy?

BILLY: But why does it have to be so asymmetric? Can’t both sides be both PROCESSOR and MEMORY—perhaps by taking turns—so both sides are changed by the interaction?

Well, Billy, symmetric interactions like that are incredibly important, and yes, they happen all the time—they are the essence of what is called PEER-TO-PEER (P2P) computation—but so long as the protocol is satisfied and turn-taking obeyed, there is no race, no uncertainty or dispute about which WRITE succeeds and which does not—so there is no fight at that protocol level. At another level, of course, it might be a whole other story—like participants meticulously taking turns and obeying every protocol to lob the nastiest meanest hurtbombs at each other.

And, sometimes such nose-in-the-air metafighting rips across levels and causes the underlying P2P protocol to break down. Then the computation degenerates towards something like CLIENT-SERVER—except both sides are trying to be the SERVER.

CHAZ: That’s why the winner says “You got served”. (Laughter in the room.)

Please raise your hand, um, Chaz.

But hey, if that’s something fight-winners say, then perhaps you’re right!

So, another fundamentally asymmetric interaction is teaching. This lecture I’m giving here, it’s very one-sided. To a degree, influences always flow both ways, but to first order the teacher is the server/processor/writer and the student is the client/memory/reader.

And again, teaching isn’t fighting, if both parties freely choose to be in the interaction. But when one component dumps an unrequested lecture on another, that is fighting, as soon as it exceeds whatever latitude or temporary asymmetries are allowed by the P2P protocol involved.

And that can serve as a segue into the grist of this class, which is an exploration of fighting moves in language, understood as computational design patterns. We will examine the structure and intent of fighting moves, and learn to recognize and perform them. We will study their historical uses—famous, not so famous, and infamous—and play out standard countermoves and counter-countermoves, and so on.

So we will let Unrequested Lecture be the first of the fighting moves we will examine in this class. Like all first-order fighting moves, Unrequested Lecture is a dominance move, an attempt to gain an upper hand by—usually implicitly—framing one side as teacher/writer/processor. As winner.

The easiest counter to Unrequested Lecture—as, of course, to nearly all linguistic fighting moves—is simply to play Restate My Position, thus implicitly ignoring the lecture entirely. But especially between amateur or low-ranked fighters, overuse of Restate My Position often leads to the Is Not Is So stalemate, which is very unsatisfying.

We are running out of lecture time for today. After this everybody will head over to the Fight Lab to get checked in and checked out. Your homework for next class is to come up with at least three countermoves to Unrequested Lecture, other than Restate My Position. Name them, frame them, then get together and game them!

CHAZ: Name-um! Lame-um! Uh-Uh-Um! (Makes farting noises in armpit.) (Laughter in the room.)

Ah, thank you for raising your hand that time, Chaz, at least intermittently. Yes, indeed, to Unrequested Lecture a potentially strong countermove is Mock The Teacher.

That’s one.

Class dismissed.

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED Tue, 02/10/2015 – 21:15