Claude 3.5 Sonnet Recognizes the Empire State Building and connects it with King Kong

I had a specific reason for asking Claude to describe the picture below, which is dominated by the Empire State Building. Earlier I had asked it to describe a picture of Times Square. First question: Do you recognize this place? It did, and said a bit about it. So I asked it to go on: Wonderful! Tell me more. And then I took a turn: What happens here on New Year’s Eve? It knew, of course, and I would have been quite surprised if it hadn’t been able to tell me. After all, everyone knows what happens in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, no? From there I guided the discussion in a more philosophical direction.

But I wondered: If I hadn’t specifically asked it about New Year’s Eve, if I’d just said “tell me more,” and said it again and again, and so forth, would it ever have gotten around to telling me about New Year’s Eve? I don’t know. Once it had told me about New Year’s Eve, if I’d just said “tell me more,” and again, etc. would it ever have gotten around to discourse about human tradition, circular time, Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return and Camus’ Sisyphus? I don’t know, but I doubt it. For me, given my interests, that progression was quite natural.

Here's where things begin to get interesting. Once I put those questions to Claude, it had no difficulty coming up with informed and pertinent answers. In some sense it already “knew” or had answers to my queries. If that is so, shouldn’t it be able to get there without any prodding from me? Keeping in mind that I’m assuming that it wouldn’t be able to get there without some prodding, but I don’t really know that, so, keeping that in mind, why couldn’t it get there? I’m thinking that, because there is a sense that, in a world where everything is related to everything else, it is impossible to realize and follow-up on every possible association. To attempt to do so, is madness.

That formulation certainly needs more work, but let’s let it go for now.

So why did I ask Claude to describe a picture dominated by the Empire State Building? Because I wanted to see whether or not it would mention King Kong, the 1933 movie, without any prodding from me. It seemed to me that the movie was peripheral to the Empire State Building in the way that New Year’s Eve is peripheral to Times Square. There’s a connection in both cases, but the connection is not in the main line, as it were. In both cases we’re dealing with a large physical object located at a certain place. Neither the celebration nor the movie is a physical object (at least not in the most direct sense).

So, I put the question to Claude and, to my mild surprise, it got to King Kong rather quickly and without my help. Where’d I go wrong?

In a hunt for clues, I decided to do an Ngram query. Ngrams are about how many times an item is mentioned in a large corpus of books. It tells you nothing about relationships between items, which is what I’m really interested in. Still, why not see what comes up?

Here’s what Google Ngrams told me:

“King Kong” is mentioned more often than “Empire State Building.” The reference might be to the movie, to any of the movies, or to the creature; the query doesn’t distinguish them. Still, the frequency surprised me.

What happens if I add “New Year’s Eve” to the query? This is what happens:

“New Year’s Eve” swamps the others. It seems to exist in a whole other semantic universe. New Year’s Eve is celebrated all over the world, and has been for centuries, long before Times Square existed.

Here’s my best guess about what’s going on. The association between the King Kong, both the movie and the creature, and the Empire State Building is relatively close. You can’t tell the story of the creature without mentioning the building. But there is a strong association the other way, perhaps because the movie came out only two years after the building opened and was an immediate hit.

The association between New Year’s Eve and Times Square, on the other hand, is relatively weak. They exist relatively independently of one another. One can discourse endlessly about either without mentioning or having to mention the other.

I thus seem to be saying that, if there is a relatively strong conventional association between two items such that the two will often turn up in the same text, then Claude will move easily from one to the other without external prompting. If the conventional association is relatively weak, so that the large majority of texts mentioning one will not mention the other, then Claude is going to have to be prompted into see a connection.

* * * * *

What building is in the center?

The building in the center of the image is the Empire State Building, an iconic Art Deco skyscraper located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Completed in 1931, it stands at 1,454 feet tall and was the world's tallest building for nearly 40 years until the completion of the World Trade Center's North Tower in 1970. The building's distinctive stepped design and spire make it one of the most recognizable elements of the New York City skyline.

Tell me more.

The Empire State Building represents a remarkable achievement in architecture and engineering that has shaped New York City's identity for nearly a century.

The building's construction was completed in just 410 days during the Great Depression, employing approximately 3,400 workers. Its rapid construction, averaging about four-and-a-half stories per week, was unprecedented for its time and remains impressive even by modern standards.

Beauty and the Beast: King Kong as ring composition, plus myth logic

Since I've just republished an old Gojira post at 3 Quarks Daily I thought I'd bump this King Kong post to the top of the queue.

Almost four years ago I’d done a post about the possibility that King Kong (1933) has ring-from composition [1]. In that post I mentioned that David Bordwell had tipped me off to the possibility, following a presentation he’d seen by Thierry Kuntzel and I appended a passage from a 1976 article by Judith Mayne in which she remarked upon the symmetries in the film [2]:

And yet the structure of King Kong is a paragon of symmetry. The center of the film, occurring on Skull Island, is enclosed by two sequences occurring in New York, and these two sequences in their turn are enclosed by the references to Beauty and the Beast. (377)

I have now, at long last, taken a look myself and have tentatively concluded that, yes, King Kong is a ring form text. The symmetry is certainly very strong and my reservations are details, though worth thinking about.

First things first. As far as I know there’s only one DVD reissue, by Warner Home Video (2005) and that’s what I’m working from. All timings are from that DVD.

Preliminary ring-composition analysis

The original 1933 King Kong, directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, entered the National Film Registry in 1991 and has been remade twice, in 1976 and 2005 [3]. It received rave reviews at its original release. The review aggregator, Rotten Tomatoes, has ranked it the fifth greatest horror film of all time [4] and the 29th greatest film of all time [5]. I rather imagine that the Rotten Tomatoes rankings fluctuate quite a bit – the film was rated higher in both lists in the Wikipedia article, which accessed them on March 17, 2010 (horror, when Kong was 1st) and October 14, 2016 (all time greatest, when Kong was 20th) – so we should take those rankings with a grain of salt, but only a grain. The film certainly merits careful examination.

King Kong is something of a film-within-a-film. Carl Denham, a maker of adventure films, has the idea for the film of a lifetime. He recruits Ann Darrow, whom he’d found stealing a piece of fruit at a street side stall, to star in it. They travel to Skull Island, where the filming is to take place, and does. During the voyage Darrow falls in love with Jack Driscoll, the first mate on the ship. The natives on the island offer Darrow to Kong, who takes her into the interior of the island. She’s rescued, and Kong himself is brought back to New York where he’s exhibited on Broadway. He escapes, takes Darrow up the Empire State Building, where he’s killed. Darrow, presumably, lives happily ever after with Driscoll.

Here’s the basic form of the action:

1	Start in New York City where Carl Denham recruits Ann Darrow for his film.
2	We journey to Skull Island and land near a village where the inhabitants worship Kong.
X	Then we move through the village into Kong’s territory, where Kong takes Darrow.
2’	Darrow is rescued and we return to the village, followed by Kong who goes on a rampage and is finally subdued on the beach by gas.
1’	We return to New York City where Kong is put on display, escapes, takes Darrow up the Empire State Building, and is killed.

That seems symmetrical enough, which is the main requirement for ring-composition. However, in the first half we spend eight minutes on board the ship traveling from New York City to Skull Island. But in the second movement we cut directly from Skull Island to New York. Do we count that as a failure of symmetry, and is that failure bad enough that we cannot count King Kong as a ring-form text? I’m not sure, but for the moment I want to set that question aside. I’ll return to it at the end.

There’s a more pressing issue, one that takes us deeper into the film. The film runs roughly an hour and 43 minutes from the opening to the final display of credits, though the first four minutes is given over to an overture with nothing on the screen but a card that says “Overture”. The central section, when we’re in Kong’s territory, is a bit over 28 minutes long, which strikes me as being a bit long to be the turning point in a film that runs almost one and three quarter hours. Is there, within that section, a shorter segment that serves as the turning point?

I believe there is, and it’s a battle between King Kong and a T-Rex. It is almost four minutes long and is, I believe, the longest and most complex single fight sequence in the film. (I haven’t actually checked the timing on the others. I’m just guessing about this.) Given that, at this point in the film, the goal is to rescue Darrow from Kong, you’d think that the moment of rescue would be the center point. But I don’t think that’s right. The timing’s off.

The film is roughly 01:43 long and the T-Rex fight starts at c. 1:01:51, well over half-way through. The rescue sequence starts at roughly 1:14:03, which is over two-thirds of the way through the film, and it only lasts for about two-and-a-half minutes (1:14:03-1:16:38 or so), making it shorter. For those reasons, position in the film and relative length (and thus prominence) of the two sequences, I think the T-Rex fight is the center point.

That gives us:

1	Start in New York City where Carl Denham recruits Ann Darrow for his film.
2	We journey to Skull Island and land near a village where the inhabitants worship Kong.
3	Then we move through the village into Kong’s territory, where Kong takes Darrow.
X	Kong battles T-Rex.
3	Driscoll (ship’s mate) finally frees Darrow from Kong.
2’	Darrow is rescued and we return to the village, followed by Kong who goes on a rampage and is finally subdued on the beach by gas.
1’	We return to New York City where Kong is put on display, escapes, takes Darrow up the Empire State Building, and is killed.

What is Kong? Who is Kong?

And it also gives us much to think about. Darrow’s rescuer, Jack Driscoll, the ship's mate and husband-to-be, is nowhere to be seen in that central sequence. He’s in a shallow cave beneath the edge of a cliff where he’d gone to escape Kong, and where he’d wounded Kong in the hand with his knife.

“King Kong” as a ring-form game: Some preliminary notes [#HEX01]

I’m thinking about what would be involved in making a game that would play-out as a ring composition. Given that ring composition is a specific form of plot it is possible that it could not be adapted to open-ended gameplay. But that is by no means obvious to me. Ring-composition narratives have a an internal logic that is oriented toward certain kinds of problematics, if you will. I’ve spent enough time dealing with ring composition that I’m beginning to get a sense of how they work & what they’re for. The idea would be to set up a game world so that successful play would take the form of a ring, but no tightly specified sequence of actions is required. What’s important is the high-level pattern.

Why King Kong?

Because it’s there?

No, seriously. I’ve developed a pretty sophisticated understanding of the 1933 film. I’ve seen the 2005 Peter Jackson remake and the 1976 remake, but I don’t remember much about either, which is mostly a statement about what I remember, not an aesthetic judgment. I’ve also seen Kong: Skull Island, which is a different kind of beast. For that matter, I’ve seen a bunch of Planet of the Apes films and, of course, a whole bunch of action-adventure films in jungle settings involving big animals. It’s a world I’m comfortable with.

But it’s the 1933 film that interests me. That’s the one that started the whole business. It’s an astonishing film. And it’s ring form. It’s not, as I’ve observed in several posts, that I believe there’s some special magic in ring-composition – a key to all mythologies, an Open Sesame! that will lay the wonders of the world before my feet – rather, it’s something specific to look for. And, having found various examples, I can compare and contrast them to get a sense of what’s going on.

I am aware that various games have been based on the character and even one or more of the specific films (e.g. Peter Jackson’s King Kong). I may well want to investigate one or may of them at some point. But I need to do some thinking before I get to that point. Just what thinking I need to do...

... THAT’s what I’m trying to figure out.

Policy, Strategy, Tactics and cultural psychodynamics

In On War Carl von Clauswitz made a tripartite distinction between policy, strategy, and tactics.  National political policy established the objectives to be achieved by military strategy; strategy established the objectives to be achieved by tactics; and tactics governed the actual deployment of troops and equipment on a day-by-day basis. I find this a generally useful way of thinking about a variety of things. One might, for example, think of an action-adventure game (like Jackson’s Kong) as a strategic level adventure realized, at various points, though tactical level actions.

But what of policy? Northrop Frye has observed that a certain kind of comedy has a three-part plot: “One is the period of preparation . . . Another is the period of license and confusion of values . . . Third is the period of festivity itself” (A Natural Perspective, p. 73). If you drop the third part, you get a tragedy.

Well, the 1933 King Kong more or less follows that model, where the Skull Island sequence is that “period of license and confusion of values”. What would happen if Kong failed to defeat T-Rex and, consequently, R-Rex killed Darrow? The possibility of the existing happy ending, in which Darrow and Driscoll are destined to be married, disappears. Are we left with a tragic ending?

This, it seems to me, is a very high-level consideration. The battle between Kong and T-Rex is a tactical-level action, but the consequence is up there at the policy level, which is where I’d put the difference between tragedy.

That’s something I have in fact investigated [1] in the case of three Shakespeare plays, Much Ado About Nothing (a comedy), Othello (a tragedy), and The Winter’s Tale (a romance). In all these plays the shape of the dramatic action follows from the same situation, a man mistakenly believes that his beloved has betrayed him. These plays differ systematically in the types of characters they have in various roles, their age, social position, and temperament. I’m inclined to think that, if this is what you want of a game, then you need to give the user Sims-like powers of set-up at the very beginning.

Vehicularization & Ring-Form: Remarks on some issues raised at #HEX01

Edit 11.16.17: I've added some new material to the section on ontological mismatch. I've marked it by highlighting it.

I enjoyed presenting to HEX01: First Workshop on the History of Expressive Systems. I wish I’d had more time (don’t we all?), I wish I’d been there in person to talk with people and play with the exhibits. We do what we can.

I’ve been thinking about these issues for years. And will continue doing so. Indeed, between the time I submitted a draft paper (Abstract Patterns in Stories: From the intellectual legacy of David G. Hays)...

Paper at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/34975666/Abstract_Patterns_in_Stories_From_the_intellectual_legacy_of_David_G._Hays

And the time I put the last touches on the PowerPoint I used for the talk ...

PPT at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/35142428/Abstract_Patterns_in_Stories_From_the_intellectual_legacy_of_David_G._Hays

I had a few ideas that pushed the work forward here and there. I continue the push in these notes, which are rather informal. I’m just trying to get the ideas down on (virtual) paper.

Of course, the workshop was about history, so what was I doing presenting new ideas? Continuing the history. Oh yes, I presented some history, the computational ideas worked out by David Hays and his students in the mid-1970s, and how I, a student of literature, came to them. But streams of intellectual development don’t stop just because they’re always disappearing into the past.

More importantly, things change, deeply. I went into the 1970s with one set of ideas – call it paradigm in Kuhn’s sense, an épistème in Foucault’s – which I used to think about how language and literature work. I encountered a very specific issue (problematic?) within that paradigm, the structure of “Kubla Khan”, and my efforts to deal with that issue forced me to think in terms outside that paradigm, to start cobbling together a new paradigm (if I may). Am I there yet? Who knows?

That’s what I address in the first of these notes, about ontological mismatch in our thinking. Then I take a look at the triune model of the brain, as Hays and I recast it in terms of control hierarchy. I then use that recasting to think about ring-form in King Kong. I conclude with some remarks about Heart of Darkness.

A half-century of ontological mismatch (beyond the singularity)

I mean ontology in the sense it has come to have in computer and cognitive science, the organization of different types of objects in some domain. Prior to my work on “Kubla Khan” [1] I had internalized a certain ontology for dealing with literary phenomena. But the moment I decided to interpret line-end punctuation like parentheses, brackets, and braces in a mathematical expression (or like nested parentheses in a LISP expression) I moved out of that ontology and into a different one. It’s worth noting that, when I made that decision, I specifically thought about the computer programming course I had taken, and how, in THAT world, if you place a comma where a colon is expected, it won’t work.

The problem, then, is how to think about literary texts in a world where LISP expressions are ‘native’ objects.

Of course, we–me, my teachers, others–didn’t realize that that’s what had happened. (Of course, we didn’t think in terms of conceptual ontologies at all.) We just thought I was doing something strange and interesting within the existing (or perhaps emerging) ontology. The same with my 1976 paper on Sonnet 129 [2]. To be sure, it looked very different from every other article in the special issue of MLN. It had all those diagrams, while the other papers had no diagrams at all.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that, when I did that work on “Kubla Khan”, I had irreversibly left the conceptual world of academic literary criticism. “Irreversible” because I can’t go back, though I can do good imitations.

Contemporary work in computational criticism presents the same problem. The desire to call it “distant reading” reflects a commitment to the standard ontology, an ontology is which the text is only incidentally marks on paper. In the standard ontology the text is, well, that’s hard to say. It’s that thing that you read, it’s somehow tethered to those marks on the page, but it’s more than those marks.

Well of course its more than those marks, but I can’t think of a better way to characterize that “more” than to think of it as come kind of computational process. And that’s what computational critics are scrupulously avoiding. On the one hand thinking of the mind as somehow fundamentally computational is of little practical value in their computational work. But also, they need to deflect the criticism of their more traditional colleagues who are wont to think of the notion of the mind as computational as, you know, the work of the devil.

Yet, in their own work, computational critics are working within an ontology in which the text is just marks on paper. The (miraculous? not really, but very artful (rare device)) craft in computational criticism is to analyze massive collections of such (mere) marks in a way that reveals the traces of mind, thousands and tens of thousands of minds reading. Think of it, from mere marks to the mind. That’s what computational criticism allows.

THAT ontology is different from, incommensurate with, the ontology of ordinary lit crit. There’s a deep tension that that is being glossed over. On the one hand, computational critics call it “deep reading” and note that, no, it’s not in competition with “close reading”. They’re complementary activities, complementary perhaps, but not ontologically compatible. On the other hand, traditional critics see “computer” and give a shudder–“There be dragons! Weave a circle around them thrice, and then lock ‘em up and throw away the key!” It’s not that bad; really, it isn’t. 

But still, THAT conversation has no happy ending. But no one’s dealing with that ontological gap. It can’t be bridged. Rather, it signals a need to rethink the discipline from top to bottom.

Which brings us to The Singularity. I figure that dreams and/or nightmares of the day when computers will become super-intelligent, those fantasies are rooted in a 19th century worldview. As such there’s an ontological mismatch between them and computing technology.

More later.

Comparative Rings: To the grocer’s, King Kong, Heart of Darkness

Skull Island ahead.

While I’d originally learned about ring composition in the mid-1970s, I didn’t start thinking about it seriously until I had entered into email discussions with Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, some time in the middle of 2001. She’d been studying ring composition for awhile, mostly in the Old Testament, and was wondering whether or not there could be a neural basis, that is, something more specific than the trivial fact that everything we do has some kind of neural basis. The best I could do was navigation, something I’d looked into in connection with my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil. Why would researching music have me looking into navigation? Because music is about time, and so is dead reckoning – but that’s a digression in this context.

Note: This continues the discussion I began in Beauty and the Beast: King Kong as ring composition, plus myth logic, New Savanna, October 2, 2017: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/10/beauty-and-beast-king-kong-as-ring.html

To the grocer’s and back

All animals have to navigate their way around the world, way-finding it’s often called. The neural structures for it thus must be ancient. And they are, the hippocampus among them.

So, imagine you take a walk to the corner grocer’s to get a quart of milk and you return home by the same route:

1. Walk out the front door and turn left on Oak St.

2. Walk three blocks west and turn right on Princeton Dr.

3. Go two blocks north. Big Al’s Little Grocer is on your left.

X. Enter and purchase A quart of Aunt Emma’s Dairy Fresh Milk.

3’. Exit Big Al’s and walk two blocks south on Princeton.

2’. Turn left onto Oak and go three blocks east.

1’. Turn right and enter your home at No. 223.

What I like about this is that the path is a ring-form, certainly not geographically (you don’t travel in a circle), but in the sense meant in ring composition. You start at one location (home), take a trip where you accomplish some goal (purchase milk) and then return to your starting location (home). You traverse the same path on the return trip as you did setting out, but in the opposition direction. The two paths are thus symmetric with respect to landmarks passed over time.

But you didn’t set out to execute a ring-form trip. You set out to get a quart of milk. The ring-form was a side effect of the interaction between your conscious intention and the lay of the land.

And that’s what I want for ring composition, a way to ‘generate’ it naturally without conscious deliberation. Journey’s are common enough in literature – Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Moby Dick, King Solomon’s Mines, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn come to mind. But do we have any ring-form texts where we have journeys of the requisite kind (same path to and fro)? Yes we do, King Kong and Heart of Darkness.

Journey to Skull Island

The movie doesn’t specify the route in detail, but the general idea is clear enough:

1. New York

2. Ocean Voyage

3. Skull Island: Native Territory

X. Skull Island: Kong’s Territory

3’. Skull Island: Native Territory

2’. Ocean Voyage

1’. New York

I’ve crossed out the ocean voyage on the return leg because that isn’t depicted in the film. We cut directly from Kong unconscious on the beach of Skull Island to New York City the day Kong goes on exhibit.

But of course it’s not the mere trip that’s important. That’s just a vehicle, if you will, for the story. What happens during each leg of the trip? Here’s a sketch:

1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.

2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.

3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.

4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.

5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.

X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.

5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.

4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.

3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.

2’. Ocean Voyage.

1’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow; Kong killed.

Note that I’ve elaborated the central sequence, treating Driscoll’s rescue of Darrow as the ‘answer’ to his wounding of Kong. I’ll justify that in a later post where I look at the underlying myth logic.

That last step strikes me as being a bit busy; too many events for only one segment. Here’s what I’m going to do: What happens is what’s important, as opposed simply to where it happens. Hence I’m going to drop the ocean voyage from the return left and redistribute the events of that last segment. That gives us this:

1. New York: Denham recruits Darrow.

2. Ocean Voyage: Darrow and Driscoll fall in love.

3. Skull Island: Native Territory: Natives substitute Darrow for native woman as an offering to Kong.

4. Kong takes Darrow inland to his lair; Denham, Driscoll and others follow.

5. Driscoll wounds Kong in finger.

X. Kong defeats T-Rex in front of Darrow.

5’. Driscoll rescues Darrow.

4’. Return with Darrow through village; Kong goes on a rampage.

3’. Skull Island: Capture Kong.

2’. New York: Kong put on display, escapes and captures Darrow.

1’. New York: Kong ascends Empire State Building with Darrow; Kong killed.

In this version Kong’s escape and capture of Darrow in New York (2’) ‘answers’ Driscoll and Darrow falling in love (2). Intuitively, that makes sense in terms of myth-logic – yes, I know, I’ve got some explaining to do...later.

Do I like it? Yes.

But do I believe it? Not yet. I’m just making it up. I need to think it through.

Ring Form Opportunity: King Kong – and some notes on how to do it

David Bordwell just sent me the following note:

Long ago I remember the French critic Thierry Kuntzel giving a talk (which he never published, I think) on KING KONG arguing that it had such a construction, which he compared to an opened book, and the discovery of Kong as the 'gutter' (we'd say) between two pages, before and after. I've never checked to confirm this, but maybe it would fit too.

Are there any takers? I have seen the original, as well as the more recent remake, but this is not something you can do from memory. You need to watch the film and take notes. Judging from my experience, it should take at least half-a-day to do this.

And you start with a leg-up. In the first place, you have a reason to think the film might be a ring form, so you're looking for something specific–remember Mary Douglas's check list? Further, you've got a candidate for the central episode; that makes things much simpler.

Now you're trying to verify whether or not that episode is the center of a ring. Without that start you might have to test several episodes for centrality. And – obviously – when you're looking for ring form, the first thing to look for IS that central episode. In the cases of both Tezuka's Metropolis and Heart of Darkness, I started with a suspicion about what the central episode was.