In talking recently about inclusive and exclusive or, I realized that the ambiguity about which kind of or is meant is often resolved in English through intonation.
For example, in Latin we could say
Ad cauponam imus; visne aliquid edere aut bibere?
(We are going to a restaurant; would you like to eat or drink something?) or
Ad cauponam imus; visne aliquid edere vel bibere?
(We are going to a restaurant; would you like to eat or drink something?). The distinction is that the first version assumes that eating and drinking something are exclusive and is asking which the listener would like to do -- would you like to eat something, or would you rather drink something instead? The second version allows for the possibility that both are true -- would you like to eat something, drink something, or both?
English has only one conjunction "or", but it has intonations that seem to convey pretty reliably whether it is used in an inclusive or exclusive sense. I'm not sure how to transcribe them here, but when I said them one after another, people understood which was which.
That means that English is less ambiguous than I'd thought. In general perhaps programmers' concerns about English being unlike formal logic are often dealt with -- at least in spoken English -- through intonations. For example, Latin also has "num" and "nonne" (or just -ne, kind of like the Portuguese né? or the Canadian English eh?, except that you can attach it to more places in the sentence), which indicate which answer to a yes-or-not question is expected.
Num soles carnem edere?
(You don't eat meat, do you?)
Solesne carnem edere? Nonne soles carnem edere?
(You eat meat, don't you?)
Although English does have ways of expressing this distinction, a lot of English questions don't seem to use a word that makes it explicit -- but intonations are available that can serve that role. And in speech, at least, those intonations can also serve to address the programmer's concern about double negation (which leads to the intution that "do you live here?" and "don't you live here?" ought to have opposite answers).
I've been very busy since the end of December and haven't had much time to write about all of it. The highlights were that I went to Petaluma, went to a wedding, went to Las Vegas, had visits from my sister and my friend Josh, went to Los Angeles, and then went to Boston. At the end of this week I'm going to Geneva. All of this will have happened in under a month's time, and will have involved ten flight segments and eight airports. (I still haven't written here, I think, about my previous trip to Los Angeles and my personal record for diversity of intermodal transportation in a single day -- or maybe I have, and I've forgotten about it.)
At the end of December I went to a special Cena Latina in Petaluma to meet Cletus Pavanetto, sometime head of Latin at the Vatican and now head of the Vatican's Latinitas Foundation. It was his first time in the United States and was a very special event for everyone concerned. (Cletus was also the teacher of Nancy "Annula" Llewelynn, ringleader of much spoken Latin activity, including SALVI and the Rusticationes Californianae.)
One remarkable thing was that it was the first time I had ever used Latin to communicate with someone who is not also a fluent English speaker. (Cletus's native language is Italian, and he's worked at the Vatican for decades, mainly visiting other European countries.) I've used Latin to communicate with dozens of people, but every one of them previously was more comfortable in English than in Latin. It was a rare and remarkable thing to find a situation in which Latin was actually the most useful and practical means of communication available. Primo Levi had this experience as a displaced person seeking help from a priest, but it seems rare enough to be notable. (In fact, Primo Levi's experience is the only other case I can think of at the moment, and it happened to him half a century ago.) Perhaps it will happen to me again in my lifetime.
During the two-day extended Cena, we had a lot of festivity and visited a winery with a magnificent library, and celebrated Cletus Pavanetto's birthday as well as his first visit to the U.S. He was very funny and certainly gave me and others a hard time with puns and riddles. I remember getting into a long discussion about a fake apple and the question about the existence of a good apple, bad apple, good real apple, good fake apple, bad real apple, and bad fake apple (bonum malum, malum malum, bonum malum falsum, bonum malum verum, malum malum verum, and malum malum falsum). Cletus also asked me what was meant to be a riddle:
Estne peccatum, patrem suum occidere?
(Is it a sin to kill your father?)
I answered "est" (it is) or perhaps "videtur" (apparently).
Cletus laughed and said I was wrong and asked me why. I told him I couldn't think of any reason why it wouldn't be a sin to kill your father. He said: "non est pater tuus, est pater porcorum -- sus, suis". (It isn't your father, it's some pigs' father.) Using a slightly strained theory of the word "sus" (pig), the sentence has a lexical ambiguity and can be read
Estne peccatum, patrem suum occidere?
(Is it a sin to kill the father of some pigs?)
So I answered "etiam" (that too; even so). Which perhaps spoils the punchline.
"Quid! num holerarius es!" (Don't tell me you're a vegetarian!)
And then I had to try to discourse in Latin on the distinction between Genesis 1:29 and Genesis 9:2-3, which I think I might find shaky ground for vegetarian advocacy even in English, so I didn't get far.
When after several hours of Latin dining I told Cletus that I was a little sleepy because I had been up late the night before writing some letters, he asked me why I hadn't written him one. I told him that I hadn't written him a letter because I hadn't known his address.
So he told me he would give me his address and expect a letter. I started to look for a pen and paper to write it down, and he stopped me and said: "Brevissima est. Audi. Cletus, Città del Vaticano."
Now I have the pleasure of knowing Ian Goldberg, who has the valid e-mail address <n@ai>, and Cletus Pavanetto, who has the valid postal address "Cletus, Vatican City". Now that's what I call a short address.
In addition to his distinguished career in Latin for the Catholic Church, Cletus is the author of a thorough modern Latin grammar in Latin (Elementa linguae et grammaticae latinae), which means he has the further right to be called grammaticus, in my experience a uniquely respected title in Latinity to this day.
In Las Vegas just after the new year for the HDTV Business Conference, I found once again that I always enjoy visiting Las Vegas even though I might not have been able to predict this if I had just heard of it for the first time.
I stayed at the MGM Grand hotel, which, in keeping with the theme of hotels on the strip trying to do bizarre and impressive things to outdo each other, has actual lions right in the middle of its casino floor, inside a "lion habitat" walled in with plexiglass. The MGM Grand was very grand indeed, and I managed to play DDR in its basement arcade (and later in another arcade on the strip, in both cases impressing people with some very poor performances because they had just never seen anybody play DDR before and because I could actually complete songs on Heavy difficulty).
Las Vegas is said to be very difficult for vegans. It is true that many of the restaurants I found there had zero vegan things on the menu instead of the one that is customary in San Francisco. At a sandwich restaurant called 'wichcraft, a nice woman decided that the way to game the system was to make me a "peanut butter and jelly with extra avocado, tomato, lettuce, and pepper, hold the peanut butter, hold the jelly" and it was actually very good and very cheap. I did manage to find this web page (there are some others I missed), which recommended an Ethiopian place and an Indian place, each of which I tracked down on successive evenings with great success.
I didn't get to see Cirque du Soleil's permanent shows, which was a big disappointment for me; I'd especially like to see O after hearing about it from people who've seen it before.
When I was walking around on the casino floor -- which of course you have to do to get from one part of the MGM Grand to another -- I thought of the lines
Sed in ludo qui morantur
ex his quidam denudantur,
quidam ibi vestiuntur,
quidam saccis induuntur.
I tried to put a dollar coin in a slot machine, but it wouldn't recognize it as money and just returned it to me. I accepted the omen and decided that if the casinos didn't even want my money, I wasn't going to give it to them.
The hospitality-oriented parts of Las Vegas are amazing because they follow the principle that any random expensive and impressive thing will eventually be tried and available somewhere. A case in point is indoor skydiving, and of course there are so many other instances. Las Vegas in general is experiencing a construction boom that reminds me, at least visually, of the South of Market Area during the Internet boom in 1999. I don't know whether the economic expansion will be longer-lasting than the Bay Area's during the Internet boom, but it certainly felt familiar to see the buildings going up and hear about the seller's job market and the influx of optimistic people.
I remain sad that the extremely spontaneous September 11 shrine at the Statue of Liberty replica at New York, New York has been taken away and replaced with a somewhat tacky semi-official September 11 memorial, which includes somewhat mismatched inspirational quotations and a musical soundtrack. I myself contributed to the shrine, as I'm sure I've mentioned here, when I visited Las Vegas after the September 11 attacks, by leaving an LNX-BBC disc dedicated to Christoffer. I was amazed to find myself confident that, in a city with a reputation for making fake things, the shrine that appeared at the fake Statue of Liberty near the fake Brooklyn Bridge was every bit as authentic as the street shrines that appear here in the Mission to commemorate the dead with candles and offerings. Now it has been replaced with something suitably artificial and hotel-made.
I did miss CES by the narrowest possible margin, but in my experience I like conferences better than expos anyway.
(Note: this post contains spoilers for some puzzles I enjoyed.)
I happened to be in Cambridge in time to join the annual MIT Mystery Hunt this past weekend. (Well, at least the last 12 or so out of 36 hours.) The Mystery Hunt is sometimes said to be the hardest puzzle hunt or treasure hunt in the world, and parts of it were indeed staggeringly difficult. Most of the teams are distributed around the world, with a large contingent in person at MIT and others participating remotely over the Internet, usually co-ordinating their efforts via wikis, mailing lists, chats, etc. Sometimes teams will try to co-ordinate their sleep schedules so that they have team members somewhere in the world working on puzzles 24 hours a day until the hunt is over. A modern Mystery Hunt team may have 50 members, who may well be literal nuclear physicists, rocket scientists, etc. They are in general astonishingly smart and well-educated people with an amazingly eclectic ability to solve all kinds of things.
I joined a team called Codex Dresden (cf. Maya codices). We came in third overall and were the last team to (be allowed to) finish the entire hunt.
A typical puzzle might have no instructions at all; instead, it might simply provide a number of pictures, words, numbers, or dots, which the solver has to interpret somehow (perhaps working through multiple layers). A typical puzzle I worked on was simply a list of nine large numbers; represented in suitable bases and then written in appropriately-shaped rectangular grids, these numbers were actually pictures of glyphs that represented particular numbers in nine different writing systems (including D'ni from the game Myst), and those numbers represented letters of the alphabet that spelled a word. Another puzzle involved interpreting the diacritical marks on the names of pictured items from the Ikea catalogue as Morse code. Another had three sound files whose spectrograms turned out to form a multicolored map of South America. (I was busy trying to interpret the sound files themselves directly as the channels of a bitmap image, but that turned out to be a wrong turn.) Another puzzle required figuring out the symbols used to depict various monsters in the game Angband, given descriptions of the monsters' appearances rather than their names. Each monster is represented by a particular letter, and the letters -- taken in a row -- spell out a clue. (If only they had been NetHack monsters, I would have known them instantly -- but I'm almost completely ignorant of Angband.)
Perhaps inspired by the printer tracking codes project, I spent hours transcribing anomalies in the pixel-level alignment of characters in the titles of puzzles from one round. The letters were slightly and apparently deliberately off-axis, and Mika and I managed to produce a complete database of exactly how many pixels off-axis each character in each title was. This information was never used in the solution of any puzzle and seems to have been a red herring.
I was also impressed by a puzzle involving the double dactyl poetic form (Riana take note!); unscrambling and reasoning about several double dactyls led to an instruction to compose a new double dactyl and submit it to the organizers. (There was even a reference to the idea that epics ought to be written in dactylic hexameters -- and to linguistics, Iphigenia, and Wrigley's Doublemint gum advertisements.) Several teams did solve this puzzle and dutifully sent in their own espionage-themed double dactyl handiwork.
In the final "runaround", we had tense moments in a room with a literally (mocked-up) ticking time-bomb, complete with a scary red LED display, lots of colored wires, a suitcase, and what looked a lot like plastic explosive. It looked just like something out of a movie, and my teammates had ten minutes to defuse it (based on a schematic and a simulation they'd prepared) without setting it off. Fortunately, unlike the movies, they got to try again when it didn't quite work out.
Later on I got my wish for a NetHack puzzle. As the only expert NetHack player present in person from Codex Dresden, I was placed in front of a laptop deep within Moriarty's lair on which a mysterious NetHack game was running. Unlike regular NetHack, the game restarted from a given point every two dozen moves or so -- apparently no matter what you did. You would be exploring and then you would just find yourself right back where you started from.
The intended solution was to type in an English sentence, which, interpreted as a series of NetHack commands, would perform actions that would allow you to get into a particular room. As it happened my teammates had not remembered the fact that the sentence in question was case-sensitive and had transcribed it case-insensitively, which, of course, caused it not to work right. (I kept wondering why the sentence wanted me to zap a wand when I didn't have any wands. Of course, it was really trying to get me to cast a spell.)
As I tried my own ideas and various versions of the mysterious sentence, I started to wonder whether there were any way out. No matter what I did, I found myself back in the same position, as though nothing had happened. Missing the password and stuck in an infinite loop from which there appeared to be no escape, I, like the main character in Groundhog Day, decided to try an experiment: seeing a lava pool, I intentionally dove into it to kill myself. Remarkably, it turned out that the programmer of the NetHack puzzle had not anticipated this eventuality (perhaps because players don't normally intentionally jump into the lava?) and it bypassed the restart code path, causing the NetHack program to exit and the computer to declare that I had solved the puzzle. So I'm happy to say that I outsmarted Professor Moriarty -- at NetHack.
The very, very last puzzle was a sad story for us on account of the freezing rain and the late hour, but we got through it with the help of a lot of use of the text of I Kings, something I hadn't really looked at quite that much since my bar mitzvah (parshat Chayye Sarah).
You can read about the hunt and try the puzzles for yourself at the 2006 Mystery Hunt home page.
In the puzzle hunt I saw Aaron, who joined Codex Dresden for quite some time, and got to meet SJ for the first time.
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Contact: Seth David Schoen
