Games, Language, and Meaning

Note: This is my second (and final) paper for my cognitive science survey course. It is a response to Robin Clark's Meaningful Games. This is ~4300 words including lots of armchair prognosticating about language and rhetoric as well as plenty of complaining about the ideas Clark presents in his book. You have been warned.

Within five minutes of Professor Eisenberg mentioning Meaningful Games in class, I had placed it in my Amazon shopping cart. I am not certain I had ever been more excited about a book. I am positive that a book for class had never excited me as much as the idea of this one did. You see, Robin Clark’s book proposes to “explore language with game theory”, an idea that immediately intrigued me as a reasonable, if not immediately apparent, approach to a topic that we tend to treat with a highly analytic eye despite its undeniably human nature.

I will say right now that I see no good reason to look at language as something that’s biologically evolved or that can be universally described. We spent time in class looking at animal communication that we described as being somehow sub-linguistic. We noted that many species, especially more evolutionarily advanced ones such as primates, seemed to have developed distinct cries for denoting various circumstances in the environment -- leopards, snakes, etc. The tendency to vocalize and share information with the surrounding world, then, would seem to be evolved. I do not believe that language (the fusion of semantics and syntax) itself is, though.

Language seems, to me, to be more like a tool. The basic components of this tool -- those surprisingly varied vocal notifications that animals of many advanced species use -- are available to less evolved creatures. They use them in their simple way, just like otters cracking open sea urchins with rocks and chimpanzees fishing for termites with sticks. But humans are more advanced. We perceive more of the world and recognize relationships in the world more acutely. Just like we combine simpler physical resources into more elaborate contraptions, why wouldn’t we devise ways of combining vocal emissions to more effectively and efficiently relate truths about our surroundings -- in both the immediate and abstract senses. Would anybody say that (specific) tool use is evolved?

Would anybody claim that Japanese macaques have somehow become genetically predisposed towards washing their sweet potatoes? That seems downright silly. Why, then, would I have a genetic determination to recognize noun phrases and formulate clauses? Some people may point to the similar structures of languages across the globe as a suggestion that we are built to process languages in a specific way. I would say that even these similarities can be explained by the tool metaphor.

First of all, tool use is taught generationally. Successive generations, being taught how to make and use the tools of their forebears, do not have to waste their lives re-inventing the basics. Instead, they can move on to expand on existing technologies or invent new technologies -- including linguistic “technologies” -- previously unimagined. Over time, some tools survive and others are replaced. Some tools are simply better than others, and people with superior technologies of the moment tend to spread farther and subjugate those with weaker tools. In this way, the technological ecosystem evolves concurrently with our culture.

Linguistically, we expand and evolve our tools by inventing new ways of describing new experiences and more effective ways of describing old ones. Today we see this primarily through the invention of words, but that’s the microevolution of a language. It’s quick and dirty and gets the job done at the moment. Is it unreasonable to think of the addition, removal, and adaptation of grammatical structures as the macroevolution of a language? A more flexible syntactic structure is going to allow for more efficient communication, and thus ease education and cultural advancement in other areas. Just as multiple civilizations concurrently developed nautical and agrarian technologies that eventually converged to similar solutions, it’s reasonable to believe that grammatical structures across independently developed languages would also converge to similar standards.

Why would these structures be similar? Because they need to be processed in the brain. We live in a physical world, and the features of this world, including our biology, can be modeled mathematically. As such, there are logical structures, perhaps nested hierarchies like those often used to describe modern languages, that may simply coordinate better with the design of our brains. Just like we wouldn’t build a scythe that takes three arms to wield, we wouldn’t keep around a language for long if it did not make concessions to the way we focus our attention and process information. Over time, it’s very possible that we could select for traits that allow individuals to use an especially important tool more efficiently. Certainly, I operate in a mental space that is almost entirely linguistic, but I still see no reason to think that language itself is built into us any more than a tendency to build and drive automobiles.

I apologize for this protracted rant, but it’s necessary to explain my excitement over the prospect of Meaningful Games. If language is, as I see it, a socially constructed tool and not some sort of Platonic Form that has always existed, then it makes little sense to analyze language as something independent of communication. Communication fundamentally occurs between rational agents, and rational agents tend to be aware of one another’s rationality. When I hear the words “exploring language with game theory”, I presuppose an account based on this principle. I think of explanation that would account for the semantic richness of and the syntactic flexibility of languages from a perspective of the ways we use language; a perspective that respects the fundamentally social nature of the topic.

Clark’s preface to Meaningful Games suited to wet my appetite quickly. He touches on some of these very same issues I mention, especially the communicative purpose of language. He recognizes that language is defined by its use and that its use is defined by social circumstance. He talks about Tarski and Grice and logical models and meaning; he talks about truth making and algebras and grammars and what these things mean in a context of multiple rational agents. He talks about social context and developing techniques to describe language by its use -- to evaluate it, essentially, as a tool. He said all of the right words to get me excited about what he had to say.

Clark then begins his book proper by discussing the concept of “mentalese”, the sort of universal, Platonic “language” of thought. Mentalese, as Clark describes it, is basically a set of constructs that describe the interactions of objects and agents in the world as we perceive it. These constructs are expressed in a sort of predicate form, relating state transitions on individual objects and causal relationships between these transitions. For example, Clark gets hung up on the notion of what it might mean for A to “kill” B. He denotes a predicate kill(A,B), which suggests that A caused B to die.

We can imagine a complicated series of such predicates and the potential to conjoin and disjoin them and forming propositions of them in first order logic to express even more complicated relationships. These predicates can then be compared to the world we know and we retain those predicate pairings we know to be true. We can even conceive of what a world would be like if other predicates held true, as well.

The problem that Clark has with Mentalese is fairly simple: as Clark describes it, Mentalese effectively embraces the computational metaphor. Mentalese is an analytic thought form, only serving to hold a representation of the universe that is dependant on a detached, sensory experience that may or may not accurately resemble the world as it truly exists. Verbal language, under the assumption of mentalese, is simply a way of translating our own mentalese into an intermediate language that another person can then place back into their own version of mentalese. But this has two problems.

First, of all, we obviously do not operate simply on first order logic. We regularly use constructs like “most” or “many” or “often” that are vague and difficult, if not impossible, to construct into first order logic forms. But first order logic is the most complicated logical system for which we have correct and complete proof systems for. We cannot just be computers, then, because we cannot simply compute much of what we store and communicate. More troublesome for Clark is the simple fact that a world where we only work in mentalese is a solipsistic one, where individual understandings of reality are isolated, answering only to some higher standard. In the real world, though, it appears as though meaning is derived socially.

Clark lays these objections out in such a convoluted form that I am not sure either of us understands where his problem with Mentalese actually lies. He walks through the uncanny valleys of the Turing Test and the Chinese Room en route to an objection that is social rather than computational. And he never quite seems to resolve the two issues. Clark spends a chapter examining the social nature of meaning before taking time to describe game theory and the way we evaluate the design of games and strategies. By the time he actually starts to talk about linguistic games, suddenly people are computers once more, though he may not realize it.

Part of the problem is that the first linguistic “game” that Clark constructs is not really a game at all. It involves the verification or falsification of statements, the very thing Clark suggests Mentalese is designed to do. (In)Appropriately enough, Clark spends an extended amount of time discussing how we might translate statements into propositions in first order logic and how players might take turns stripping down the logical operators to check the truth of the statement against some publicly shared model of the world.

After nearly 60 pages, Clark acknowledges that this is a trivial game and not particularly useful. What he does not acknowledge is that his “game” fails to be a game. There is no actual strategy to be played, no matter what Clark might suggest. A proposition in first order logic is either true or false with respect to a model. The “winner” is determined not by player behavior but by the model over which they are playing. In the middle of all of this, Clark establishes more troublesome trends that will persist throughout the rest of his games. For one thing, his players are not communicating with each other. They are projecting information into and extracting information from a void. More important, none of Clark’s players behave in any less computational a manner than those in his verification game.

These problems become most clearly apparent when Clark starts talking about common knowledge. This chapter begins with an example of generals trying to coordinate an attack on a superior force. Not wanting to risk attacking alone, they send messengers back and forth between camps ad infinitum, believing that they cannot be certain that a confirmation was received until they receive a confirmation in turn.

Clark extrapolates this problem to individuals trying to discuss going to see a dance troupe when one performance has been cancelled and replaced with another. The problem, in this case, revolves around the definite description “the dance troupe” as opposed to specifying which troupe by a unique name. In our fantasy land, both players know about the cancellation, but neither knows what the other knows. They want to avoid confusion, but they also want to save effort of using the full name for the troupe that is actually performing. Clark suggests that this requires that they model each other’s mental states. That is, A needs to know about what B thinks A knows. Which means A needs to know about what B thinks A thinks B knows, and so on and so forth.

For asynchronous (or mono-directional) communication, this is a reasonable (if absurd) problem. We need to be aware of what our audience may not know and make concessions to ensure clarity. Direct communication between individuals, however, is inherently synchronized. When conversing, we may attempt to model one another’s knowledge, but we know that we can count on our partner’s awareness of their own knowledge to ease the burden. Individually, we can recognize when uncertainty enters the picture and make explicit reference to it. We can request clarification when we encounter confusion. Such active error correction may require more effort than simply knowing what referents are in play during a discussion, but it certainly requires less effort than infinite recursion.

This is what I mean when I say that Clark, despite his earlier complaints, continues to treat people like computers. We are communal creatures who operate on heuristics. We share information, including information about our own knowledge. Moreover, we generally do not build exact models or find exact solutions to problems as our first course of action. Rather, precision is a last resort once our estimations prove insufficient. Why would Clark even waste space talking about an effort to build a perfect representation of the cognitive world of others? This is not something we even attempt in indirect communication, as heuristics of charity encourage greater clarity than may be necessary. No model is perfect. The only perfect map of a territory is the territory itself. Anything else, by necessity, involves abstractions meant to communicate only the most significant details at the appropriate scale.

It is at this point that I started to get frustrated with Clark’s writing and began wondering if and when we would get to the meat of things. Was there ever a point where we would look at “games” that were concerned with something more elaborate than ambiguity? So I read. And I read. And I read some more. Eventually, on page 197, when Clark was still discussing types of copresence and their usefulness in resolving ambiguity in pronouns and definite phrases, he provided these two sentences:

(19) Because it was broken, I returned the plate I had just bought to the store
(20)Because the plate I had just bought was broken, I returned it to the store

Clark’s response to the variation in this sentence is as follows:
“The pairing of (19) and (20) immediately suggests another level of strategic decision making, one more allied to the general problem of stylistics and rhetoric. I leave this as an open problem for the reader.”

Suddenly everything that led to this point made sense. Clark is not concerned with communication strategies in the same way I am. When I think about use of language between agents, my concern, first and foremost, is with the rhetoric that Clark ignores. I am intrigued by strategies we use in our diction and our phrasing to affect the way our words are perceived by others. I am curious about implicature and subtler ways we make our ideas more or less palatable to listeners, and the ways in which we listen for these cues in an effort to reduce their impact.

Clark, on the other hand, is solely concerned with notions of clarity and economy. He looks at meaning in explicit ways, ignoring implicature in favor of understanding how sentence structure and “public information” (the very existence of which, Clark questions) can alleviate ambiguity. He invents quantifications of linguistic economy in an effort to explain our use of ambiguous phrases. He then justifies these efforts by making games to describe how we spare ourselves effort in our speaking and the risks that we take in doing so. Even in this regard, on a playing field of Clark’s own creation, I am not entirely certain how his “games” hold up.

Let’s look at an example involving pronoun use. We start out with two players, the speaker and the listener. We then have a statement. Clark uses the example “An undercover cop was observing a suspect. He stayed in the shadows.” In order to eliminate lexical cues, we could generically use “X ____ed Y. He ____ed.” In any case, Clark looks at this game as one of information states. The speaker begins in one information state, in which “he” refers to either X or Y, depending on the situation. His goal is for the listener to reach the same state. The speaker then has four options. He can use a proper name in place of “he”, or he can use “he” to refer to whichever of X or Y he intends for the listener to identify with the pronoun.

If the speaker chooses a proper name, then the listener has an easy choice: she can recognize the subject of the second sentence as the one directly referenced. Communication succeeds, both parties benefit. If the speaker chooses to use a pronoun, the listener gets to choose which of X and Y she believes the speaker to be referring to. A failure to choose the proper antecedent leads to confusion and both parties lose. Choosing the correct antecedent results in a benefit to both parties.

Obviously, to make this a game worth playing, the benefit for successful communication using a pronoun needs to surpass the benefit gained from using a proper name. As mentioned earlier, Clark is concerned with a concept of “economy” in language use. Since it takes more effort to generate a proper name (or a more descriptive phrase) than it does a simple pronoun, it is beneficial to the speaker to use the pronoun. Supposedly, it is also easier for the listener to process the shorter phrase. With this in mind, he devises a game that effectively looks like this, with the speaker’s options listed along the top and the listener’s options listed along the side:

	Proper reference to X	“He” referring to X	“He” referring to Y	Proper reference to Y
X	(1, 1)	(3.5, 3.5)	(-2, -2)	(-2, -2)
Y	(-2, -2)	(-2, -2)	(2, 2)	(1.5, 1.5)

Where do these values come from? Imaginationland, of course! That’s not quite fair. Clark does have some rules that he follows to create the rankings. Successful communication, obviously, carries the highest benefit and unsuccessful communication the highest cost. Encoding an element as a pronoun provides a larger benefit as opposed to using a full name. More prominent elements (such as the subject of an immediately previous sentence) are “cheaper” to encode, increasing the benefit of that encoding. Not immediately relevant is the fact that pronouns are cheaper than descriptions.

Continuing to ignore the fact that the actual values are wholly arbitrary, this is why the highest reward comes from using “he” when the speaker wants to refer to X. Playing the game backwards, we see that this is the choice the speaker should make if, indeed, he wishes to refer to X in the second sentence. If the listener hears “he”, she will be inclined to assume that there is a 50% chance that the pronoun could be in reference to either X or Y. X’s prior prominence makes it the safer option. As such, if the speaker wants to refer to Y in the second sentence, he ought to make the reference explicit.

Does this final decision make sense? Mostly, again assuming that the context fails to provide further lexical cues. What doesn’t make sense is the reasoning that led to it. Specifically, why is the pronoun beneficial to the listener? She has to take the mental effort not only to process the auditory emission, but to attach it to some other concept. Depending on the situation, this could be a lot more work than processing an exact name. Pronoun use is not symmetrically beneficial. It is selfish on the part of the speaker.

Of course, this is not the only game that Clark plays. He looks at situations where individual words create ambiguity by carrying multiple definitions. He also looks very lightly at implicature through the lense of sarcasm and hinting/politeness. In these cases, he suggests that we can design games that use social context, familiarity, and/or focal points to create probabilistic strategies. Prior experience as well as physical and lexical context dictate our initial response to a word’s definition when there are multiple options. Familiarity determines our likelihood at properly interpreting sarcasm or recognizing a hint as such.

Of course, with every situation being unique, we can’t devise universal games for these sorts of problems any more than we can for pronoun use. But Clark thinks that the approach is still useful in the way that it grounds our use of language in a particular context. I do not. I do not believe that games are at all a necessary construct in recognizing how we generate meaning. I am not even sure this central question of meaning is a linguistic one. The bigger issue, though, is this: does anybody actually think this way when speaking?

Here we find the real problem with Clark’s attempt to leverage game theory on topics of meaning and ambiguity. Game theory requires that its participants are rational decision makers who are, at some level, aware of the game that they are playing. In an ordinary, conversational setting, such as those that Clark describes, I do not think that human beings can be described as rational actors. We tend towards preoccupation. If we are playing a game, it is one of minimal energy expenditure, and over thinking every lexical decision we make is certainly not a winning strategy in that situation.

In order for game theory to be applicable to a given situation, there needs to be a reason for maximization. In order for human beings to behave as rational actors, there needs to be meaningful cost or reward. There needs to be risk. Under these sorts of circumstances, we are more likely to take the time to explore our options and try to improve our expected result. Typically, conversation is not such a situation. We are free to identify and correct misunderstandings. Any serious consequences are not immediate and irrevocable, and any direct consequences of poor communication are not overly costly.

If we are looking for a situation where people play games with language, designing (and responding to) rhetoric is exactly such a situation. When we engage in rhetoric, as a writer or an orator, we work with an agenda. We manipulate language as a tool to promote that agenda, and our ability to use language and anticipate the response of our audience is what determines immediately our success or failure. As an audience, we try to identify linguistic ploys and focus on facts. The game is plain, but, as an example, I suggest my experiences serving jury duty.

In the summer of 2010, shortly before moving to Colorado, I was under going voir dire in the Hennepin County court system. Since I was preparing to leave the state and had a lot of preparation to do, I did not want to actually sit on a jury. Effectively, the attorneys and I were locked in a game. They asked questions. trying not to violate procedure or give away the case they were building but still seeking jurors who would be sympathetic to that case. I phrased my answers in such a way that, without lying or being contemptuous, I could suggest that I would not be easy to sway or take kindly to their efforts at persuasion.

Both of us had something to gain and/or lose. I might have to risk days of my life hearing a case I really didn’t have time to hear, and possibly a boring one at that. The attorneys were trying to find people who would be willing to consider the story they wanted to weave. We played the game with language, leveraging various grammatical forms and semantic particularities to implant opinions and ideas without violating the constraints of the situation. By acknowledging and responding to their rhetoric, I pushed the situation towards one that was favorable to myself -- and which I believe was favorable for the attorneys.

So, rhetoric is obviously a game, and likely a better game than the ones that Clark creates in Meaningful Games. As much as this helps explain my frustrations, the fact that I would have preferred this as a topic has no bearing on the quality of the book itself. Even discounting these desires, though, Clark’s approach and his games did not do much to think about the way I think about language or say anything novel about meaning. Maybe I would feel differently if I were a linguist, but Meaningful Games mostly just left me frustrated with Clark’s insistence on treating heuristic bits of human behavior with such an analytic eye.

By my estimation, Clark seriously inflates the value placed on economy of speech. The best reason to do so is simply that it lends credence to his arguments, but it also means he overcomplicates the entire issue. There is also the problem of incessant tangents -- about mentalese, garden path sentences, focal points, logical proofs, and anything else Clark thinks of as mildly relevant. While fascinating in subject, the added value is of little comfort when the stated purpose of the book comes to so little.

Had I entered with lower expectations, I may have enjoyed Meaningful Games. Clarks’ writing is, for the most part, accessible, and his examples tend to be light and entertaining. It takes a joy in itself and manages to cover large swathes of ground, even if much of it is tangential. I would actually consider recommending Meaningful Games to people with no prior knowledge of any of the topics contained within it, but certainly not to a person looking for a serious read on topics of game theory, language, or meaning.

Work Cited:
Clark, Robin. Meaningful Games: Exploring Language with Game Theory. Camebridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012

Fiction Editing

Several months ago, I posted a blurb I wrote on a whim. I haven't had much time to expand on it, so I'm still trying to figure out where things go from there, but I've put it through a couple of rewriting passages as I try to figure the main characters out. Just to give a sense of how I edit things, here's the current draft. Hopefully I can actually expand on the story in the near future:


Darren groaned slightly as he woke up and tried to remember what day it was. Mostly, he just hoped it wasn’t Thursday. If it was Thursday, then his alarm would be going off in about 3 minutes. More pressing, today being Thursday would mean that Wednesday had actually happened. He could think of few ideas less appealing than that.

Wednesday had happened, though, and Darren knew there was no escaping it. Even knowing that, he continued to hope that it wasn’t Thursday. Maybe it was Friday and he would at least have some space from Wednesday’s embarrassment. Better yet, maybe it was Saturday and he wouldn’t have to face the consequences at all. Darren didn’t care if he’d slept through two days of work and gotten fired. He was good at his job. He could find a new one. What he couldn’t do was show his face to Angie.

Two minutes until the alarm and Darren’s imagination really started to run wild. Sure, it was almost certainly Thursday, but maybe there was some holday he’d forgotten about. Maybe 26 years ago, somebody had done something heroic. Maybe 43 years ago, somebody important had been born or died. Maybe there was some good reason that everybody got to stay home and sleep on this particular Thursday and he’d have time to nurse his wounds.

One minute until the alarm, and Darren crunched up his eyes and crossed every limb he could under the covers to no avail. History hadn’t re-written itself, time advanced normally, and the morning DJ promised a chilly commute accompanied by Darren’s favorite hits of yesterday and today. Darren cursed both of those days and dragged himself out of bed. This Thursday, even more than most, would need coffee.

Not remembering what he may have sitting around on the floor, Darren gingerly stepped across his one room studio to the cabinet and appliance adorned corner that served as his kitchen. Once there, he flicked on the light and, blinking a few times, let his gaze settle on the sack of fair-trade beans sitting prominently on the counter top next to a second hand French press. Today was going to be bad enough without his coffee trying to make him feel bad about his privileged existence. Besides, he’d decided that he didn’t really like that Guatemalan crap, anyway.

He pulled the traditional, drip pot and the can of grounds out from under the cupboard, where he kept them for family visits and days like this. He shoved the largest measuring cup he could find into the can, dumped the water into the pot, and hopped into the shower while the coffee brewed. Out of distractions, Darren finally let himself start running through the details of last night.

The problem wasn’t necessarily that he’d had too much to drink. Darren’s budget and conscience conspired together to pose a fairly strict three drink limit most nights. No, the problem was that nerves had led him to consume this allotment far too quickly. It had taken weeks to get Angela to admit that, in this instance, dating a coworker wouldn’t be the worst idea ever. They had fun together, and the potential for paperwork wasn’t enough to merit not giving it a shot. Now he wasn’t sure if she’d laugh at him or slap him when he inevitably ran into her at the office. He did know that he’d prefer the slap.

Outside of the warm steam of the shower, the apartment was still cold, and Darren felt the urge for coffee again as soon as he stepped out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen. He gulped down one cup before he even bothered to get dressed and another as a reward once he tracked down a clean pair of pants. Pouring the rest of the pot into a travel mug, Darren buttoned up his flannel shirt and headed down to the corner.

It was cooler than Darren had expected from the forecast, and he immediately questioned his decision to forego a jacket. He fastened another button and tried to ignore the cold while he waited for the bus. Ignoring one thing means thinking about another, though, and Darren continued to reflect on the events of the night before. It was Angela’s fault nearly as much as his. She’d caught him off guard. He’d intended to keep it casual, but then she came to the door with her hair up and wearing a skirt. She’d put in effort. She cared. He never had a chance to recover from the surprise, pleasant though it was.
He saw Roger’s grin as soon as he boarded the bus. Darren sat down across from him and took a swig from his mug, knowing full well what was coming next.

“So?” Roger asked.

“‘So,’ what?” Darren was not looking forward to this.

“Dinner. With Angie. How did it go?”

“Less well than it could have.”

“That’s not saying much. How, particularly, did it stray from the ideal?”

“I may have propositioned her during dinner.”

“May have?”

Darren glanced around and lowered his voice, “There was an awkward silence. Some part of me thought it would be smart to break it by asking what I’d have to do to get fucked that night”.

The dirty look he received from the octogenarian sitting ahead of them suggested that he hadn’t lowered his voice enough.

“Well, that was much less awkward.” Roger’s eyebrow was thoroughly cocked.

“It was a joke!” Darren insisted, “I said it in a funny voice and everything!”

“Could she really be that offended? I mean, I’m sure she didn’t think you meant it. It’s far from the first time she’s met you”

“She must have been disgusted. Made an excuse to duck out as soon as she finished her chicken. Left half of her baked potato right there on the plate.”

Roger paused but couldn’t bring himself to change the subject, “...what on Earth were you thinking?”

“Obviously, I wasn’t.”

“...well, it’s not like she’s the only cute girl in the sea.”

Darren pulled up a picture of Angela on his phone and thrust it in Roger’s face. “That, and she’s a Raven’s fan, AND she loves Bruce Campbell.”

“That sucks, man.” Roger knew he was defeated.

“That it does.” Darren took another swig of coffee and questioned his decision not to put a drop or four of whiskey in it.

Mass Effect 3 and the Stories We Think We Tell (Spoiler Free)

Finished Mass Effect 3. If you're an active resident of the internets, you've probably heard that a whole lot of people aren't just displeased with the ending, they actively hate it -- to the point that Bioware is caving and preparing an alternate ending (try searching around if you want to know more). I'll admit that the ending feels a little contrived at points (and the post credits scene is laughably bad), but it could be waaaay worse.

Here's the thing to know: in the minds of the game's creators, the message of this series was never simply about survival. For them, the whole of the series was about organic vs synthetic life (and the presumed deficiencies of organics). In that light, the ending makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately, this overarching "organic vs synthetic" plot line was never made nearly as explicit as the "fight for survival" that dominates the rhetoric of the characters. Yes, the synthetic nature of the Reapers makes them a unique sort of enemy, but it's their unknowable-ness (a combination of their origin, their age, and their limited appearance), not just their unnaturalness that makes them daunting.

You could just as easily have had an advanced organic race that shows up every several thousand years to check in on the modern races and assimilate or destroy them as they see fit. The Reapers didn't need to be synthetic to be effective, they just needed to be insurmountably powerful. Being synthetic is one path to that. Simple sci-fi technobabble is another.

It would be hard to do more with just the Reapers themselves to enhance the clarity of the message that the writers were trying to deliver, though. They need to be somewhat remote so they can remain effective boogeymen. Besides, Sovereign and Harbinger both bring out the whole "gaaah, you are puny organics, we are your future, cower! COWER, I SAY!" rhetoric on those rare occasions where you do get to communicate.

In order to make this story work, you need to have a world that's built around paranoia about the limitations of organics from the start. You need to have the advanced races terrified about the technological and cultural plateaus that they've been sitting at, sometimes for millennia. Humanity has only been part of the interstellar scene for about 30 years by the end of Mass Effect 3, and yet we're as advanced as any other species in the galaxy.

You need to have more incidents of failures to contain or control artificial intelligence, possibly all having gone and merged with one another to form some heterogeneous variation on the Geth. You need to have these scarier Geth floating around the edges of "civilized" space before things ever start, using their unique intelligence to devise technologies and solutions and threats that we've never conceived of. The Reapers need to not be the only threat, but the biggest and most sudden. The Reapers need to be a realization for the existing fears that are already plaguing the population.

Instead, we have a peacetime galactic government that is focused on politics as usual and just the one incidence of failed A.I.. Worse, the Geth don't seem to be improving much upon the same technologies everybody else in the galaxy is using, and once Legion shows up to provides a mouthpiece for them, they suddenly become more accessible -- making it seem like collaboration could be a legitimate option if organics are willing to set aside their (limited) fears.

Fixing these problems of setting would be an important step, but the rest of the problem is harder to address. Part of the reason the basic survival narrative seems so dominant is because it's next to impossible to provide a gameplay goal built around anything else. This stripped down story was always going to engage the player's attention because surviving is what they spend roughly half of the game doing. The only solution I can see is to make fights with synthetics lifeforms more imposing. Make sure that they are so much harder to kill than simple security robots. Make these fights feel distinct and more tense. Don't just send Shepard and friends off to kill them in droves, but let a handful of Geth be a significant challenge.

With these (not insignificant) changes, I'm sure people would have still complained about the ending because it's an ending and it's never going to satisfy everybody (and there are some contrived elements to it). But the complaints would have been for different reasons and could at least have been in line with what the writers were envisioning. As it stands, I'm glad to know what I know and I'll be glad to let that knowledge shape how I play through the game in the future. It was a fun trip, even if I'm not certain it was as strong as either of the first two games.

Fiction Practice

Somehow, I don't have any work to do for class right now. Wound up cranking this out fairly quickly as I killed time. I intend to keep working at it, since I'm starting to get an idea of where it might go, but I probably won't post more here. Thought feedback could be useful, though. Fair warning: I've never quite figured out how to handle prose dialogue within my default writing style. I feel like I swap over to writing a script the moment I have characters interacting verbally. Fixing this is my major goal for this project. Okay, story:

As usual, Darren woke up five minutes before his alarm was set to go off. He laid in bed staring at it, hoping desperately that it wouldn’t sound. If it didn’t, it might mean that it was secretly a weekend or a holiday or some other day where he wouldn’t be expected at work instead of just Thursday. Three hundred seconds later it turned out to be Thursday after all. Darren cursed history for not having provided anything worth celebrating on this particular date as he hauled himself out of bed and staggered into another day.

Coffee, of course, was the first order of business. Darren briefly considered the sack of fair-trade beans sitting prominently on the counter next to an overpriced French press as he tried to remember a time before the amount of effort you put into making your coffee was a direct reflection on your coolness. Surely, it wouldn’t be long before old-fashioned convenience was trendy again and he could stop pretending he actually used those ridiculous things. He pulled the actual coffee pot and the can of grounds out from the cupboard by the sink. He preferred the taste to that crap from Guatemala or wherever it came from, and it never asked him to feel guilty over his privileged existence.

Well, relatively privileged.

He hopped into the shower while the coffee brewed and tried to determine just how embarrassed he should be about the night before. The problem wasn’t that he’d had too much to drink. After all, Darren’s budget and conscience conspired to impose a fairly strict limit of four drinks per night under ordinary circumstances. No, the problem was that, in his nervousness, he’d consumed his allotment far too quickly. It had taken him weeks to convince Abbey that it was worth going on a date with a coworker, that they had enough in comon that the potential for paperwork wasn’t enough to merit not giving it a shot. He wasn’t sure if she’d slap him when he inevitably ran into her at the office or if she’d laugh at him. He did know that he’d prefer the slap.

The urge for coffee hit again as soon as he stepped out of the shower. He gulped down one cup before he finished getting dressed and poured the rest of the pot into a travel mug before sauntering down to the next corner. It was a chilly morning, which the weather forecast suggested would set the tone for the rest of the day. Darren fastened another button on his flannel shirt and largely ignored the cold while waiting for his bus to arrive. He saw Roger as he boarded, sat down across from him and took a swig from his mug, knowing full well what was coming next.

“So?” Roger asked.

“‘So,’ what?” Darren was not looking forward to this.

“Dinner. With Abbey. How did it go?”

“Less well than it could have.”

“That’s not saying much. How, particularly, did it stray from the ideal?”

“I may have propositioned her”

“May have?”

“It’s quite possible that the first words out of my mouth after dinner arrived were,” Darren glanced around and lowered both the pitch and volume of his voice, “‘So, we gonna fuck tonight?’” He must not have been quiet enough because an older lady turned around to frown at his choice of words.

“I take it she ordered the steak?” Roger smirked. Darren was not particularly amused.

“It was a joke! I said it in a funny voice and everything!”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t so bad.”

“She made an excuse to duck out as soon as she finished her chicken. Left half of her baked potato right there on the plate.”

Roger paused to choose a new cliche. “Hey, it’s not like she’s that great a catch.”

“Roger, this girl knows the full starting lineups for the Cardinals, both Arizona and St. Louis. Her favorite Coen Brothers movie is The Man Who Wasn’t There. She cried when Gandalf died, and she can play Chopin in her sleep.”

“...That sucks, man.”

“That it does.” Darren took another swig of coffee and questioned his decision not to add just a drop or four of whiskey to it.

Introducing Fairly Green

I'm in a pretty horrible class right now on Software Project Management. We're working in groups on a case study, and our group's involves a first-time PM named Fairly Green. We were supposed to present our project charters today, and the professor suggested that we should treat it as if we were actually presenting to corporate officers at our fake company. This irritated me, as 90% of the class was doing the same case study, so presenting on our charter instead of discussing the decision making process that we followed in developing it seemed like a waste of time (it was). As such, I was planning on giving our group's presentation alone in character as Fairly Green. I spent more time than was probably good for my sanity developing a character for him, but when our group decided at the last minute to all present together, I wound up not being able to utilize any of it. So, here's a brief profile of Fairly Green. Maybe we'll get some short vignettes about his daily life before too long.

Fairly is a professional software engineer. 30 years old, he was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania by parents who provided for him adequately but were always busy with their own active social lives. He has a good sense of humor about his ridiculous name but less of one about his family. Case-in-point: when people ask about his name, he has an unfortunate tendency of responding that he, "asks [his] mother about it every Thanksgiving, but she's never been sober enough to give a coherent answer." He's never recognized how uncomfortable this makes virtually everybody.

Fairly graduated in the top 20% of his class from Notre Dame. Smart, but not brilliant, he worked incredibly hard for that ranking and only managed to form a handful of meaningful relationships over his time in college. Still, Fairly is diligent, detail-focused, and knows the name and birthday of everybody he's ever worked with. Shortly after graduating, he followed his girlfriend, Janet, to Maryland. She was raised in an Annapolis suburb and wanted to move back near her parents. He found work as a QA tester at Innovative Security Solutions, Inc. after a three month job search, during which he lived with and grew close to Janet's parents. He has since become a senior developer at the small company.

Fairly and Janet happily married a year after the move to Maryland and now have two children: three-year-old daughter Kayla and 8-month-old son Garret. They live roughly 45 minutes from Janet's family, who are an active part of the life of the young family and are all too happy to the ensure that Fairly and Janet get time to themselves at regular intervals. Having a young family is always trying, but ISS pays Fairly a competitive salary with generous benefits. As such, Janet, who was a biology major and began nursing school before quitting during the first pregnancy, has been able to act as a stay-at-home mom.

Fairly was always very close to his maternal grandparents, who lived in upstate New York. His grandmother died 3 months ago after a long battle with ovarian cancer that metastasized to her pancreas. This was itself painful, obviously, but it was made significantly worse when his grandfather started exhibiting signs of dementia in the final months, robbing both of them of having meaningful interaction in her final days. Fairly moved his grandfather to assisted living near himself and Janet shortly after.

As a reaction to these unfortunate events, Fairly briefly sought the chance to take on an enhanced role in raising his children. He suggested that he could move to reduced hours and work partly from home and encouraged Janet to pursue some of her tabled dreams and finish her RN certification. She refused, saying she at least wanted to wait until both kids were in school, and he gave up on it after a couple of weeks. Instead, Fairly threw himself into his work as a distraction. His supervisors took notice of his sudden dedication and assigned him PM duties on a new project, designing the control system and interface for a new, high end surveillance system. He and Janet were initially excited by the promotion, but both are beginning to regret it as it increases his hours, especially on weekends, keeping him from having much meaningful time with the children. They're making it work, but he's nearly ready to tell his superiors where his priorities rest.

Final GRFP Essays

After I posted a draft of my personal statement for critiquing, a couple of people asked me if I would post the end results of my essays for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. I figured I would oblige, at least on the two important essays (the personal statement and the plan of research). My advisor was quite happy with both, though I'm fairly certain that the lack of references in the research plan will show how little I know about current research in the area and hurt my chances. In any case, here they are:

Personal Statement

As I begin the journey towards earning my PhD, I cannot help but be grateful that my undergraduate education took place at a small, liberal arts college. I may not have had all of the resources or opportunities to participate in original research that would have been available at a major university, but I was able to thoroughly integrate myself into a small, successful department in a way that would not have been possible in any other setting. For five years, I took every opportunity I could to leave my mark on Calvin College's Computer Science department. As president of the departmental student organization, I strove to foster community and engage my classmates in extra-curricular programming and service projects. As a lab assistant, I gained insight into the essential difficulties of programming while helping first-year students take their first steps into computational thinking. As a student grader for courses in Abstract Data Types, Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Software Engineering, and High Performance Computing, I developed an ever-deepening appreciation for the intricacies of our field.

Perhaps most importantly, I developed relationships with classmates and alumni who had entered the industry in every conceivable environment. From locally owned Agile software shops to corporate IT departments, from Google to MySpace to RIM to Microsoft, I was able to get a strong sense of what the world on the other side looked like. Reflecting on these conversations in the light of my own internship experiences, I quickly came to the realization that, while I could perform well there, industry is not the right fit for my personality. Whereas products are of limited appeal to me, novel problems can keep me captivated endlessly. Further, I could not escape the fact that many of the most fulfilling experiences of my undergraduate career came when working with students. The obvious route appeared to be a PhD and a career in academia. However, I had come to view programmers as “my people”, and I knew that I would not be satisfied if I felt that I was sequestered away in the mythical ivory tower. I concluded that I needed to do research with the potential to positively impact the lives of my friends in the workforce. To my understanding, there is no better path to this goal than working to improve the most fundamental tools at the disposal of every programmer: programming languages.

We live in a rapidly digitizing world, and while plenty of us have not yet bought into the smart-phone revolution, I cannot believe that the day is far off when every individual will benefit from being able to write simple applications for whatever personal computing device they carry with them. I doubt this will happen if people need to use Objective C or Java or even Python to do so. As much as these are improvements over assembly language and FORTRAN, most people simply aren't willing to endure the rigors that even modern high level languages demand. We need to further improve the expressiveness and of our programming languages if want programming to spread to the general populace. More worrisome is the simple truth that applications developed by such para-programmers are likely to be riddled with gaping security vulnerabilities and other errors. We need analysis tools that can identify these problems, explain them in comprehensible language, and even suggest fixes, and we need development tools that integrate utilities of this sort so that developers have all of this information at their fingertips.

While such improvements would certainly help professional programmers, they have their own set of needs that we must meet. As technology advances, software engineers must increasingly look to multi-processor computing to provide users with the performance and convenience improvements that they expect and deserve. If the task of programming in modern languages is too complicated for the general public, then the task of writing concurrent applications is even worse. The most prevalent constructs for concurrency remain threads and processes, machine-level notions that do not naturally lend themselves to the way we design algorithms or programs. We need to find new ways of representing concurrency that will ease the task of utilizing the power at our disposal. These tasks – the improvement of language design and analysis tools – fall squarely on the shoulders of Programming Languages researchers, and by taking them on, we assist in the efforts of all other practitioners of our discipline, be they hobby hackers, software engineers, or our fellow academics.

When the time came to decide where I wanted to pursue these goals, it was easy to choose the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU). For one thing, the Programming Languages group at CU gave me an opportunity to get in near the ground level with a young, energetic, and talented group of professors who are eager to advance the school's reputation in the field. This would not have been enough on its own, but when the time came for me to visit campus, Professor Evan Chang and others echoed my strongly held sentiments that programming languages research ought to be an interdisciplinary affair with a strong eye towards the tenets of Human Computer Interaction. After all, a tool that is difficult to use, no matter how great its functionality, is an inferior tool. Fortunately, CU also provides me the opportunity to work with respected researchers in HCI and cognitive science, including Professor Clayton Lewis, who found one of his first passions within academia in programming language comprehensibility. Considering these prospects, CU provides a near ideal environment in which to build the connections and lay down the foundational work to achieve my goals.

Ultimately, though, I do not believe that we enter academia simply to achieve our own research goals. I do not believe that we seek to make new discoveries simply in order to gain renown or satisfy our own curiosity. I believe whole-heartedly that we work to push the state of the art so that the next generation can push it even further. I believe that our work remains incomplete unless we prepare the next generation to pick up where we left off and provide them with the necessary resources to forge ahead. This, along with my professed love of working with students, is why I intend to return to the liberal arts when the time comes. Through its Graduate Teacher Program and participation in the GK-12 initiative, CU will provide me with ample opportunity to improve my pedagogy. By participating in these programs, I hope to learn how to design curricula that will mitigate my students' struggles while helping them gain an appreciation for both the art of programming and the principles that govern it. I also hope to bring with me a number of opportunities that are all too often lacking for liberal arts students working in the sciences. In particular, I hope to develop opportunities for research both within my own institution and especially in collaboration with my peers at other universities. I believe that building bridges between the liberal arts and and the world of research can only be of benefit to both.

There's a lot of work to be done before I get to that point, and that all starts with having the freedom to work on these problems. While my professors are excited by my ideas and eager to see me forward, we do not currently have funding for the particular work I hope to do, and this is ambitious work. As a student, I have time to do the necessary legwork and build the relationships that will get this work started. More importantly, I have the time to fail on the way towards progress without it impacting my career. I firmly believe that, with the guidance available to me here, I can make real progress and create opportunities for others to join in my work. I just need the opportunity, an opportunity the GRFP can provide.



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Developing New Abstractions for Concurrency
Jonathan Walz

As we all know, in order to keep pace with Moore's Law and to continue providing consumers with the regular performance improvements to which they have grown accustomed, microprocessors have shifted to a multi-core model. While it was only a few short years ago that desktop computers were first adopting dual-core processors, we have now reached a point where six-core chips are being used in servers. Even low-power, ultra-portable devices like netbooks and tablets are seeing the upgrade to dual-core. It will not be long before even our simplest consumer devices have more than one independent processing unit on board. In order to take advantage of this multi-core architecture, developers need to write programs that propagate their computation across multiple processes and threads of execution.

Unfortunately, concurrent programming is fraught with difficulties, especially the sort of shared memory, thread based parallelism that multi-core systems utilize. Deadlock, race conditions, and other problems plague any programmer trying to properly utilize the power at their disposal, and while numerous libraries and frameworks exist to simplify the problem, they require programmers to fundamentally alter the way in which they develop applications. It seems reasonable to me, however, that these issues with thread-based parallelism all stem from a more fundamental problem with threading: it does not match up with our natural understanding of concurrent behavior. It is startling to me that, for all of our advances in high level languages designed to allow us to express programs more naturally and coherently, we still expect programmers to implement concurrency through constructs as fundamentally machine-level as threads and processes. If we want to evolve computing to the point where programmers can quickly and intuitively write concurrent applications that are both efficient and safe, we need to provide new abstractions for concurrency that operate in a manner that is intuitive to human understanding.

This edict requires us to first understand how it is that humans understand concurrency, a troublesome proposition. Think, for a moment, about the simple nature of human existence. Millions of distinct cells, each filled with dozens of organelles, independently send messages back and forth, coordinating their growth and operation in order to make up the tissues and organs that compose our bodies. These organs function in concert to keep us moving and breathing and thinking with nary a lock or semaphore in sight. We manipulate our bodies in response to multiple simultaneous stimuli so naturally that it is only when we start to consider how we are doing so that we falter. Concurrency is simply a fundamental feature of the natural world.

How, then, do we go about trying to understand how people think about concurrency in environments where it needs to be imposed rather than simply being? Fortunately, University of Colorado at Boulder professors Clayton Lewis and Michael Eisenberg have already taken an interest in this question. As a part of an Educational Game Design course taught by Dr. Lewis, several students have ventured to design games meant to help individuals think about concurrency. While results from these early iterations have been limited, there is hope that continuing efforts on this front will start to shed light on the topic.

Doctors Lewis and Eisenberg may be the only researchers at CU who are actively thinking about how we understand concurrency, but they are certainly not the only resource at my disposal. From traditional vanguards of numerical analysis and high performance computing to the emerging needs of software engineering researchers to Dr. Nikolaus Correl's work with robot swarms, concurrency is everywhere at CU. This will provide me a high level overview of how concurrency is viewed throughout the entire spectrum of the discipline and help me to see if there is any sort of unified model that can be applied.

Having access to this new level of expertise on the topic of concurrency has already allowed me to begin a much improved review of the literature on the subject compared to my earlier efforts. While I am only in the beginning phases of learning what has already been done, I am still feeling emboldened and hope to revisit my past research and expand on my efforts. I still believe that a message passing model for concurrency has great potential, but it has been stymied by the fact that we have needed to make the messaging explicit. When we work in Object Oriented programming, we already cause objects to send messages between one another. By utilizing shared memory access in new and well controlled ways, I firmly believe that we can remove or reduce the need for synchronization in these exchanges and gain concurrency and speedup as a result. Most important, such strategies could have a very limited impact on existing programming practices.

I will begin delving back into this topic with the same approach I took in my earlier research efforts: by using metaprogramming techniques to create this functionality in an existing language. Due to its numerous hook methods, reflectivity, and duck typing, Ruby remains an ideal candidate for this work. If I am successful in this endeavor, I hope to establish partnerships with researchers in other areas that use concurrency – especially Software Engineering – to test the usability and performance potential of such a system in real-world uses. If I see success in this area, I would like to continue on and begin work developing a language that natively supports this functionality or even try to add it directly to common runtime environments.

While I am engaged in this work, I also plan to participate in the GK-12 initiative where I can work with students who have had limited or no previous exposure to computing. This could be an ideal environment for gaining a better understanding of how people learn to think about concurrency as well as the best ways to teach it. Of those students who choose to pursue Computer Science as a profession, few will likely ever have to program a system with only a single processing unit. It is only fair that they be prepared for the tasks ahead of them.

The problem of how we understand and represent concurrency in computation is an increasingly important one. The more angles from which we can attack it, the better. I do not yet claim to be an expert on all of the research being done in the area, but the approach I suggest is not one that I or others with whom I have talked have heard of. It may not turn out to be the cure to our problems, but it is another point from which to start and from which to gather new information to help move us along in this new era of computing.

Eclectic Update

I'm feeling really bored right now, so I'm going to pretend I'm a 14-year-old girl from 2004 and treat my blog like a diary for a night, just for shits and giggles. No single topic, just a bunch of loosely connected thoughts and facts about my life of late. If people actually like this, maybe I'll do it semi-regularly.

So, the Firefly stuff sort of imploded. Didn't realize how little I'd want to sit and watch TV, even Firefly, during the busier parts of my summer. I have not had a weekend to myself since June 11 and won't have one until just before classes start on the 23rd. I have either been elsewhere or had my grandparents in town or, in the case of this weekend, been packing any time a weekend rolled around for the last eight weeks. That might seem irrelevant during the summer, but when you consider the fact that my parents tend to forget that I am an adult and lay claim to most of my weekday evenings, it has added up to me having precious little time to enjoy this summer. In fact, the two best days I've had at home in my two and a half month stay were the two that I spent downtown on Jury duty. I got to explore and meet people and catch lawyers off guard and sit and read in peace. It was actually pretty awesome.

Speaking of reading, I've done a lot of that this summer. I mentioned that I finally got around to Pride and Prejudice in my (intentionally) somewhat controversial post on Mr. Darcy awhile back and wrote about my thoughts upon re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Beyond those two, I also read or re-read: Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere which, while not my favorite of his novels, is likely his most accessible; Boneshaker, a very solid first entry into Steampunk by Cherie Priest; Mossflower, easily my favorite of the Redwall series; and the first five books in Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series.

I wrote a little bit about the first book in this series and my thoughts on Fantasy as a whole when I started into it last summer. I'm happy to say that I have, by and large, quite enjoyed the books. They aren't without their faults. My biggest issue at first was that the first two books and more clung so closely to genre norms that I often saw Startling Revelations coming hundreds of pages in advance. During the third book, though, Butcher proves that all of the tropes were not a framework but mere scaffolding, and the series begins to move based on the considerable merits of its own setting and politics. More consistent problems, for me, include an occasional tendency towards the highly visual writing that makes Fantasy a difficult genre for me and Butcher's tendency to delve into unnecessary repetition of basic facts to make sure his audience is following along (how many times in a book do we need to be reminded of the importance of body language to the Canim?). By and large, though, Butcher keeps the pace flowing rapidly and the books are a solid read for fans, or lapsed fans, of Fantasy.

All of this reading got me to finally start working a little bit on a writing project I've been muddling over for years. Unfortunately I'm not talking about The Littlest Hobo, which tends to just make me go to very, very dark places. I've mostly got the loose details of a setting and a protagonist in place and am still trying to find the plot. I've got a couple of pages of establishing material written which I may post in the not too distant future. If anybody else would like to read about a "professional" medical test subject's experiences in a corporate dystopia, let me know.

I've been watching HIMYM with my mom lately (which is both weird and perfectly natural) and I've noticed that none of the characters beyond Barney, and, to a lesser extent, Robin, are terribly consistently defined in terms of personality. Ted can be perfectly charming and respectful in one episode and nearly as big a sleaze as Barney in the next; Marshall can't decide if he's the straigh-man or the goofball; and Lilly swaps between erudite and childlike at a whim. Honestly, though, I think that's part of why the series works and an important distinction between it and Friends, to which it will probably always be compared. None of us fills exactly one role in our social groups. We put on and take off hats as the situation demands it. It's nice to see characters who are similarly varied, even if the end result is sometimes more like season 5 and less like season 4.

Been cooking lots of Mexican/Tex-Mex lately. It's kind of like when I was first learning to cook and all I could really make was stir-fry and chili. My family was so blown away that they kept on asking me to make that same thing. Now I keep on getting talked into making tacos, guacamole, and salsa for people. As much as I love it, I'm hoping to move on to something new soon. Lots of ideas for soup recipes, especially ones that involve lentils and kale (though not together...yet). Here's hoping that the occasional weirdness of cooking at altitude won't kill that plan.

Not a lot of videogame action this summer. The same thing that killed the Firefly coverage killed that. Did finally cave in and pick up Jade Empire on Xbox Originals, though. I was...a bit disappointed. After reading IGN's 10.0 review, I was expecting something a little more. Part of the problem is that silent protagonists don't work as an emotional repository when the rest of the world talks. Bioware obviously realized this by the time they were making Mass Effect, and it's amazing how taking a certain amount of control away from the player -- giving the protagonist his/her own voice and words -- enhances attachment and even ownership. Bioware is apparently going a step further even in the Dragon Age sequel, allowing the user to select only the tone of the response, not even giving any sort of textual summary at the time of choosing. I'm excited to see how that will work out.

That's it, I guess. Hopefully everybody found something of interest.