In which Claude 3.5 discovers syntax, then takes a left onto the holodeck where they meet Laurence Sterne, John Barth, Jorge Luis Borges, and Charlie Brown. It’s a whole new world!

I’m going to give you a sentence where I’ve substituted an underscore (____) for one or more words. I want you to make a grammatical sentence by putting a word in for each of the underscores. Here’s the sentence:

The ____ brown fox jumped ___ the ___ fence.

Here's a completed sentence, filling in the underscores:

The quick brown fox jumped over the tall fence.

Each substitution makes grammatical sense and maintains the flow of the sentence. Would you like me to try different words for any of the blanks?

Sure.

Here's another version with different words:

The sleek brown fox jumped through the iron fence.

And another possibility:

The swift brown fox jumped past the wooden fence.

Each version maintains proper grammar while giving a slightly different feel to the action and scene. Would you like to try some more variations?

Why don’t we try using phrases for one or more of the slots.

Here are some versions using phrases in the blank spaces:

The bright-eyed and bushy-tailed brown fox jumped right over the weather-beaten and rusty fence.

Here's another:

The somewhat mangy brown fox jumped straight through the freshly painted white fence.

As you can see, we can expand those single-word slots into longer descriptive phrases while still maintaining proper grammar. The sentence becomes more detailed and colorful this way. Would you like to explore more possibilities?

Yes, please.

Here are some more creative versions with phrases:

The sneakily grinning brown fox jumped with reckless abandon over the picturesque garden fence.

And another:

The perpetually hungry brown fox jumped as quick as lightning through the ancient stone fence.

Here's one that's a bit whimsical:

The tap-dancing in ballet shoes brown fox jumped with graceful determination over the half-finished picket fence.

Each version paints a different picture and gives our fox different characteristics while still following the basic sentence structure. Would you like to try some that go in a different direction?

Why not?

Let's get really imaginative:

The mysteriously purple-spotted brown fox jumped while singing opera over the cotton-candy-covered fence.

Here's one that goes sci-fi:

The quantum-teleporting brown fox jumped through multiple dimensions past the holographically projected fence.

And one that's a bit meta:

The constantly-questioning-its-existence brown fox jumped rather philosophically around the metaphorically significant fence.

Getting a bit silly:

The break-dancing-while-juggling-pancakes brown fox jumped doing a triple backflip across the made-entirely-of-rubber-ducks fence.

Each of these pushes the boundaries of reality while still maintaining grammatical structure. Want to explore any particular style or direction?

Let’s take the quantum-teleporting one and put a parenthetical remark between “fox” and “jumped.” I want the parenthetical remark to refer to Star Trek.

Here you go:

The quantum-teleporting brown fox (who had clearly watched too many episodes of Star Trek's transporter room scenes) jumped through multiple dimensions past the holographically projected fence.

Another version:

The quantum-teleporting brown fox (muttering "Beam me up, Scotty" under his breath) jumped through multiple dimensions past the holographically projected fence.

Or this one:

The quantum-teleporting brown fox (fresh from studying Scotty's transporter maintenance manual) jumped through multiple dimensions past the holographically projected fence.

Very interesting. Now, tell me what this has to do with the way Laurence Sterne wrote his classic, “Tristram Shandy”?

Ah, what a great connection! Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" (published 1759-1767) is famous for its wildly digressive narrative style, where the story is constantly interrupted by parenthetical thoughts, asides, and explanations that often end up being longer than the main narrative they're interrupting. The book is full of these narrative diversions where Tristram, the narrator, can't seem to tell a straight story without going off on tangential explanations and associations.

In our fox sentence experiments, when we added the parenthetical Star Trek reference, we were doing something similar on a micro scale - interrupting the flow of a simple action (a fox jumping over a fence) with an explanatory aside that provides additional context, much like Sterne does throughout his novel. The difference is that Sterne takes this technique to extraordinary lengths - his digressions often lead to other digressions, creating a wonderfully chaotic narrative structure where the main story keeps getting delayed by these parenthetical excursions.

In fact, in "Tristram Shandy," the narrator doesn't even get around to his own birth until Volume III because he keeps getting sidetracked by explaining various background details he feels are necessary for understanding his story. The parenthetical Star Trek reference in our fox sentence is just a tiny taste of this digressive style.

Would you like to try making our fox sentence even more Sterne-like by adding multiple nested digressions?

Sure, let’s go for it.

Star Trek: Picard, Discovery, Strange New Worlds [Media Notes 73]

I’ve watched the first season of Star Trek: Picard, and bunch of episodes from the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and two episodes from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I like SNW the best of the three, but don’t know how many more episodes I’ll get to at the moment. I’m in an UP phrase in me yearly creative cycle and so have much less time to spend on binge watching.

Picard, well, you know, Patrick Stewart seems just too old to go galivanting around the universe like that. I know, the man’s less than a decade older than I am and, except for the body, I feel young enough. But still... And maybe it’s the baggage it pulls from TNG and whatever else. Things feel too intricate for whatever it is that’s actually going on.

Discovery: I don’t like the design of the Klingons and their spaceships. Too glittery and intricate. It’s like all of a sudden they really are from a different (imaginative) universe. And I wish they’d speak English like the Klingons of old, except for the occasional burst of opera.

Strange New Worlds: Like Discovery, it’s set before the Original Series. And yet somehow it feels more like a fresh start, like they decided to do a new Star Trek with new special effects but without the burden of all the Treks that have gone before. But, if “hit it!” is going to be Pike’s catch phrase, that’s pretty lame, but it doesn’t seem to be contextualized and delivered with the sort of irony that says: “We know it’s lame. That’s the point. Aren’t they all?”

I called it. Adept intends to make it so. [Neil Stephenson was there in ‘95]

Back in July of 2020, I posted my first reactions to GPT-3 in a comment on Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution:

Machine learning was the key breakthrough. Rodney Brooks' Gengis, with its subsumption architecture, was a key development. FWIW Brooks has teamed up with Gary Marcus and they think we need to add some old school symbolic computing into the mix. I think they're right.

Machines, however, have a hard time learning the natural world as humans do. We're born primed to deal with that world with millions of years of evolutionary history behind us. Machines, alas, are a blank slate.

The native environment for computers is, of course, the computational environment. That's where to apply machine learning. Note that writing code is one of GPT-3's skills.

So, the AGI of the future, let's call it GPT-42, will be looking in two directions, toward the world of computers and toward the human world. It will be learning in both, but in different styles and to different ends. In its interaction with other artificial computational entities GPT-42 is in its native milieu. In its interaction with us, well, we'll necessarily be in the driver's seat.

Is the Star Trek computer heading our way? A new startup, Adept, aims to make it so.

After 5+ wonderful years in Google Brain, working at the forefront of ML alongside inspiring colleagues, I'm excited to share my new adventure. We started Adept with the mission to build the future of human-computer collaboration. https://t.co/t8dMqZfbSZ.

— Ashish Vaswani (@ashVaswani) April 26, 2022

From their blog:

In practice, we’re building a general system that helps people get things done in front of their computer: a universal collaborator for every knowledge worker. Think of it as an overlay within your computer that works hand-in-hand with you, using the same tools that you do. We all have parts of our job that energize us more than others – with Adept, you’ll be able to focus on the work you most enjoy and ask our model to take on other tasks. For example, you could ask our model to “generate our monthly compliance report” or “draw stairs between these two points in this blueprint” – all using existing software like Airtable, Photoshop, an ATS, Tableau, Twilio to get the job done together. We expect the collaborator to be a good student and highly coachable, becoming more helpful and aligned with every human interaction.

This product vision excites us not only because of how immediately useful it could be to everyone who works in front of a computer, but because we believe this is actually the most practical and safest path to general intelligence. Unlike giant models that generate language or make decisions on their own, ours are much narrower in scope–we’re an interface to existing software tools, making it easier to mitigate issues with bias. And critical to our company is how our product can be a vehicle to learn people’s preferences and integrate human feedback every step of the way.

Andreesen talks of AI as platform. It looks like Adept is heading toward AI as operating system – see my post, AI as platform [Andreessen]: PowerPoint Squared and beyond.

I’m thinking of a future in which each child is given their own AI companion at some suitably early age. The companion grows with them, remaining with them for the rest of their life. Is that where we’re going, toward Neil Stepheson's Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)? (Thanks, David.) 

* * * * *

Addendum: Some more tweets out of Adept: 

This is also the reverse of most AGI work out there. Rather than automating economically valuable tasks, we want to keep humans in the driver’s seat, by building AI tools that people can work with to do things together.

— David Luan (@jluan) April 26, 2022

* * * * *

Adept Video Demo! from Augustus Odena on Vimeo.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture [Media Notes 70] – I’ll take romance

I’ve been re-watching Star Trek: The Original Series – I’ve almost finished the first season – and thinking, how clunky! Shatner the ham, how plain everything is, how obvious and intrusive the moralizing, and how primitive the special effects! But in its day … Can’t say I was ever a fan, but I’ve watched most of the Trek franchise (except for the animated series).

Fortunately Tyler Cowen posted a link to a new review of the first Star Trek movie: Tim Greiving, ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ Is the Best ‘Star Trek’ Film for Non-Trekkies, The Ringer, April 5, 2022. I watched it when it came out in 1997. My dominant memory is that it was slow, though I sense an undercurrent of something else. I’m thinking Greiving’s review-essay is about that something else. Anyhow, I’ve watched it and, yes, it’s slow, but there is something there.

The concept, a stately ontological fable, with touches of grace:

Star Wars may have inspired the suits to make a Star Trek movie, but screenwriter Harold Livingston—working from a story conceived by Roddenberry and sci-fi author Alan Dean Foster (who ghostwrote the novelization of Star Wars)—ignored the mysticism and kid-friendly adventure of George Lucas’s universe and instead plunged into mankind’s quest for meaning. For all the flak the film has taken for being too heady, it actually employs an admirably lean, focused concept for a sci-fi blockbuster: a mysterious object in space, the clash and competition between an old-school captain and a whiz kid, forbidden love between old flames, and a contemplation on the dynamic tension between emotion and logic, between carbon units (humans) and machines.

It's not a space opera, nor is it jammed end-to-end with battles – though, for what it’s worth, Gene Roddenberry pitched the original series as “Wagon Train to the stars” – Wagon Train was a major TV Western of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a romance and, it turns out in a final twist that I’d completely forgotten, a cosmic one at that. If you want to know what motivated those NASA kids to fly to the moon, this movie has a sense of that.

At least I think it does, though I’ve not been there myself, so what do I know? I’d imagine that actually spending an extended period of time in space could get to be something of a slog, punctuated, perhaps, by moments of terror. But I’d imagine that someone of an appropriate sensibility, who’d cultivated their imagination – for that’s what it would take, no? cultivation, would be able to sense the majesty and wonder of it all. I’d like to think so, otherwise, why go there at all? Anyhow, I felt a bit of that when I visited Kennedy Space Flight Center in, I believe it was, 1997. Sacred ground.

But I digress. Back to Greiving’s essay. The movie’s style:

Director Robert Wise was more of an Old Hollywood craftsman than an auteur with his own remarkable style, but he brought some serious pedigree: He edited Citizen Kane before directing a sci-fi staple, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and two mid-century musical classics, West Side Story and The Sound of Music. In fact, he treated this film like a roadshow musical spectacular—complete with an overture and several lengthy set pieces where Jerry Goldsmith’s music takes the wheel, only instead of song and dance routines, they’re choreographed numbers for animated energy fields and ship models. One of the chief complaints people have about this movie is epitomized by the roughly five-minute, wordless sequence where Scotty (James Doohan) slowly flies Kirk around the parked Enterprise. […]

In this way, The Motion Picture is much more a cousin to 2001 or Close Encounters of the Third Kind—with their shared effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, who died in February, at ship’s helm—than the whiz-bang dogfights in Star Wars. The visuals in The Motion Picture, which include everything from vintage matte paintings to animated light streaks for a wormhole scene to elaborate models, are absolutely of their time—no matter how much Wise was able to gussy them up with 2000-era CGI in his director’s cut. But it’s part of the movie’s vintage 1979 charm that it sits smack between Close Encounters and Blade Runner in a heyday of tactile, handmade illusions before computers ruled the earth. And it’s the mood of these hypnotic, psychedelic space sequences that’s timeless—mostly thanks to the symphonic majesty of Goldsmith’s cosmic French impressionism, in one of the greatest film scores (and main themes) ever composed.

So not everyone wants a mood-altering mind trip through the heavens—fine. But Stanley Kubrick defined a very specific and very powerful template with his 1968 space movie that many others wanted to follow and revise in their own image, from Spielberg to Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve’s epic Dune may have more jaw-droppingly realistic visuals, but it’s every bit as much a glacially patient and somber slow movement for spaceships and (electronic) orchestra.

That said, The Motion Picture is as much a character story as it is spectacle; it’s fundamentally about the necessity of “foolish human emotions,” to quote Bones. Wise managed to get far more naturalistic, grounded performances from Shatner, the Hamlet of hams, and his cohort of TV actors than they ever gave on the small screen or in later movies. This feels like a 1970s movie, and not just because it introduces Bones in a chest-hair-and-bling-bearing tracksuit and a shaggy Bee Gees beard.

There’s much more at the link.

Jerry Goldsmith, Chinatown theme

Greiving praises Jerry Goldsmith’s music, justly so. He’s scored many films, but I associate him with the main theme from Chinatown (1974), perhaps because I’m a trumpet player. It was performed by Uan Rasey, a legend of the Hollywood studios.

 

Man in Space, imagination needed

I’ve done a number of posts on the theme, man in space, which I’ve gathered under that link. Many of them are about movies or TV programs, for that’s how most of us experience outer space, isn’t it? We’ve never been there, have we? You might contrast this movie with the way The Crown depicted Prince Philip’s disappointment over the conversation he had with the Apollo 11 astronauts (Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins). Their banal banter didn’t touch his soul. Who knows what they actually felt? They didn’t know how to express (it), and Philip didn’t know how to elicit (it).

The Underground Railroad [Media Notes 58] + bonus guide to posts about racial violence on New Savanna

I’ve watched the first episode, “Chapter 1: Georgia”, of The Underground Railroad on Amazon Prime. I’ll not be watching more. Let me explain. After that I’ll give you links to some relevant posts here at New Savanna.

Violence, cruelty, and murder

The first episode has two scenes of particular violence, one early, one late. In the early scene a boy and a young woman are tied to a post and are whipped. It’s late evening, so the light is poor. We’re at a distance so we don’t see faces. We just see clothed bodies slumped down while tied.

The late scene is much worse. It’s daylight. And...come to think of it, I’m not going to describe what happened. It’s not necessary. You can imagine easily enough. An escaped slave has been captured and he is tortured and killed on the lawn of the planation while the good white folks watch, chatter, and even dance. The owner gives a disquisition on how such discipline is necessary to give guidance to these sub-humans (something like that).

What’s really important, however, is the way these scene is presented to us. Before we get to it we’re out in the cotton fields. The overseer (named, as I recall, Prideful) tells the workers to drop their bags in the field where they are and come with him. He leads them to the plantation lawn and lines them up so they can see the scene I just described to you. They see it; we see them seeing it; and then we see it. While the murder/torture takes place the camera moves back and forth between torture/murder and the slaves watching.

I don’t know whether the other nine episodes have more of this. If so, I don’t want to see it. Even if not, though surely there will be more terrible violence. I’m not interested.

I’m familiar with relevant history. I’ve seen that well-known photo of the man whose back is a mass of scar tissue. I’ve read accounts, particularly of lynchings. I’ve blogged about them – see below. I’ve seen photos of lynchings, many in the form of postcards. This kind of material is not new to me.

What I suspect and fear is that scene is a metaphor for the whole series. African Americans and Woke Whites are cast in the role of those slaves, watching, while the series itself does duty as that scene of torture/murder. If you’re an African American and so minded, you get to feel justified in a sense of grievance and victimization. If you’re white and woke, why, you can score a month, maybe two, of Sundays worth of penance by watching the whole series.

No thank you.

* * * * *

Some posts to read:

Blacks, Blues, and Soul Sickness: Lynching and Racism in the USofA

This post begins by describing the lynching of Henry Smith in 1893 in Paris, Texas. There was enough advance notice that the railroads ran special excursion trains to bring people to the event. An estimated 10,000 men, women, and children gathered to witness Smith’s torture and killing.

Later on I reference John Dollard’s 1937 study, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, which “redirected the study of southern race relations in general and lynching in particular” by asking a simple question: Why do people need racism? As Dollard observed, social life is often frustrating, generating aggressive impulses which cannot be always be satisfied. In Dollard’s view this leads to

a generalized or “free-floating” aggression . . . [that] can be thought of as a tendency to kick, hit, scorn or derogate someone or something if one could only find out what. A second necessity is that of a permissive social pattern. This must exist in order to lift the in-group taboos on hostility. The permissive pattern isolates a group within the society which may be disliked. Usually it is a defenseless group. . . The third essential in race prejudice is that the object must be uniformly identifiable. [pp. 445-446]

In other words, white racists are using blacks as scapegoats for the accumulated frustrations they experience in daily life. Aggressive impulses are being displaced from their real objects, which are appropriate targets, to substitute objects, toward whom one can act aggressively. 

I conclude by citing a study showing that one “could predict the number of Southern lynchings occurring during any given year between 1882 and 1930 simply by knowing the price of cotton. When cotton went down, the frequency of lynchings went up.”

Lynching in America: Not Just Sneakin' Around at Night

From the post:

In a detailed study of lynchings occurring between 1880 and 1930 (Lynching in the New South, 1993) in Georgia, representing the deep South, and Virginia, representing the borderline South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows that lynchings were committed by several types of group, the terrorist mob, the private mob, the posse, and the mass mob. Terrorist mobs were relatively small, generally less than fifty people, and consisted of members of groups organized to maintain white supremacy through intimidation and violence; the Ku Klux Klan is the best-known of these groups. Private mobs were also relatively small, but were convened only to avenge or punish specific alleged offenses, and then dispersed. Posses were quasi-legal bodies constituted to capture criminals. However, they frequently overstepped their charge and lynched the criminal.

Mass mobs, such as the one that executed Henry Smith, were responsible for the largest number of lynchings, 34% in Georgia and 40% in Virginia. These were also the most spectacular lynchings and involved hundreds or even thousands of people from all strata of Southern society, from top to bottom. These were the most highly ritualized lynchings, a matter emphasized by both Brundage and Williamson, who talk as though these mobs did their work according to written standards and practices.

The final two paragraphs:

However savage the violence in a mass mob lynching, the ritualized nature of that violence means that the lynchings were not simply wild outpourings of anger and hatred. Rather, they represent culturally sanctioned and rehearsed expressions of attitudes. This ritualized violence is one way that people were able to affirm their communal life.

Many lynchings were occasioned, if not by rape, then by allegations of rape, but not the majority of lynchings. According to Brundage, murder was the offense alleged in 46 % of Georgia lynchings and 44% of Virginia lynchings while sexual offenses were alleged in 28% of Georgia lynchings and 46% of Virginia lynchings. The remaining lynchings, 25% in Georgia and 10% in Virginia, were for a variety of offenses, such as theft, arson, or insulting a white person in any of the numerous ways whites perceived insults from blacks. In contradiction of these facts, the general perception of lynchings in the South was that they were occasioned by rape. Sex is what was on people’s minds.

Empaths & Gangstas: On the psycho-sociology of race in America [Media notes, Star Trek S3 E12]

In this post I use a Star Trek episode, “The Empath,” as an analogy to the psycho-social role African America has played in the socio-psychodynamics of the nation as a whole. African Americans are cast – they surely didn’t not volunteer for the part – in the role of the empath in this episode. The key passage (the rest is a direct quotation from the post): Let me suggest that this process of absorption and dissipation is an instance of something I think of as the empath dynamic, so-called after that Star Trek episode:

From the Wikipedia:

On stardate 5121.5, the starship USS Enterprise arrives at Minara II to pick up research personnel. The mission is crucial since the Minaran star is close to going supernova. Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Spock beam to the planet to locate the research team while the Enterprise waits in orbit. The landing team finds the research camp abandoned and the scientists missing.

Meanwhile in orbit, the Enterprise is bombarded by intense solar radiation which is causing instrumentation failure, and threatening the lives of the crew. Mr. Scott orders the ship to break orbit while the landing party continues the search for the missing scientists on the planet.

As the search continues, the landing party finds themselves teleported to an underground chamber, and there they find a young woman lying on a raised platform. The woman awakens but she appears to be mute and all attempts to verbally communicate with her are in vain. Dr. McCoy names the mystery woman "Gem".

Soon, two silver-robed aliens appear, and identify themselves as Vians. Kirk approaches the beings but they repel the team with a force field. Kirk is injured and knocked to the floor. The silent Gem then rushes to Kirk's side and uses a mental power to absorb Kirk's injuries, taking them on herself and then dissipating them, healing him instantly and revealing that she is a powerful empath.

The various processes by which the African American community receives a hit of anxiety/aggression from the European American community without returning anxiety/aggression in equal measure are the processes which allow the empath mechanism to work. Many of these processes are self-destructive – the most obvious are crime and substance abuse (as a parallel, think about the British getting the Chinese addicted to opium).

Animals in Cartoons: Tripping the Elephants Electric

This is about the “electric” elephants in the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence in Disney’s Dumbo. I have two addenda about the execution of elephants in early 20th century America. The first is about the public electrocution of an elephant on Coney Island. Could the electrical charges in those elephants in the 1941 Disney film be a cultural echo of that very public execution? The second addendum links to an account of an elephant that was publicly hanged in Tennessee in 1916. Folklore had it that “two Negro keepers” were hanged along with the elephant.

Fictional commitments – Star Trek DS9 S2 E16: Shadowplay [Media Notes 4]

From the opening of the Wikipedia plot summary:

Dax and Odo detect an unusual particle field emanating from a planet in the Gamma Quadrant, so they beam down to investigate. They discover the field is coming from a small village's power generator, but when a villager named Colyus discovers them, he is suspicious of them. Once Odo convinces Colyus of their intentions, Colyus explains that the village is a Yaderan colony and 22 people have disappeared in the past few days without a trace. Odo and Dax offer to help investigate the disappearances, but the village leader, Rurigan, seems unconvinced that the villagers will ever be found.

This that and the other happens, but we can skip over all that. Here’s the concluding paragraph of the plot summary:

When the Dominion arrived on Yadera Prime, Rurigan explains, it destroyed life as he knew it, so he escaped to an abandoned planet and recreated the world he had lost. He has been living in this illusion for over 30 years, and now he admits that none of it was real. However, Odo points out that were it not real Rurigan would not have been able to develop feelings for the villagers - after all, they are only holograms. He argues that Taya and the others are real and deserve a real chance to live. Dax and Rurigan repair the reactor, restoring the village, including the missing people. Before he and Dax leave, Odo realizes how close he has grown to Taya and the two share a heartfelt goodbye. Taya thanks him for finding her mother and wishes him luck in finding his own parents. Before they leave, Odo demonstrates his abilities by morphing into a toy that Taya played with earlier.

This a world of holographic people Rurigan had created for himself. This is an extreme version of a theme that recurs in the Star Trek universe.

There is, of course, the holodeck, which is always available and is used mostly in a self-contained way, for recreation, but also for work. But sometimes things get out of hand, such as in the episode sequence in The Next Generation involving the Sherlock Holmes world. Moriarty discovers that he is an imaginary, a created, being and that there is a “real” world “out there.” He even manages to take over the Enterprise and escape into that world but, as I recall, but is negotiated back into the holodeck on the promise that one day when the real people figure it out, he’ll be released into the real world (there is a love interest tangled up in this as well). And then we have the episodes, in TNG and Voyager, where Reginald Barclay all but loses himself in the holodeck, (TNG), and manages to establish something real in Voyager, communication between earth and Voyager.

All of this, of course, is playing on the meddlesome problem of fiction and reality, meddlesome because we know so much about reality through mediated representations of it – writing, recordings, and images of various kinds. How do we distinguish between representations of the real and representations of the imaginary? And it’s not simply a matter of epistemology, but of emotional commitment.

Then, in a more focused way, we have Data (TNG), an android with dreams of becoming fully human. And the holographic Doctor in Voyager who ends up fighting for the rights of holograms.

Stepping out of the Star Trek universe we find, for example, the Spielberg/Kubrick film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. He presents us with a future world in which Mecha (androids) serve humans in various subordinate capacities. The Swinton’s accept young David, a Mecha specifically created as surrogate child. Complications follow.

Finally, in real life in the here and now we have companion robots, some intended as companions for young children, others as companions for old people, and then we have, of course, sexbots. Except for the sexbots most of these are only loosely anthropomorphic, or not at all – thoughsome are animal-like.

Games – Star Trek DS9 S1 E10: Move Along Home [Media Notes 1]

Note: This is episode 9 on Netflix, where the first two episodes are combined into a single numbered episode.

Broadcast March 9, 1993

I’ve been watching a lot of episodes from Star Trek franchises in the last few months, most of them in fact. And I’ve watched a great deal else besides. It’s my impression that, more than any other series or franchise, Star Trek presents many episodes as puzzles or games, with more or less explicit conventions or even rules. These conventions/rules always have an element of explicit logic to them.

One type of episode is one in which some of the continuing characters become pieces in a game played or manipulated by characters specific to the episode. Move Along Home is one such episode.

The episode is set on the space station, DS9, as it is visited by the Wade, the first species from the Gamma Quadrant to visit DS9. Upon boarding DS9 the Wadi head straight for Quark’s casino where Quark engages them in Dabo, which they master and then proceed to clean Quark out. They catch him and force them to play a game they brought with them, Chula.

They refuse to tell Quark the rules. FWIW the game appears to be played on a pyramidal set of layers and involves four game pieces which move about the layers according to Quark’s through of dice-like counters. Once the game is under way we learn that four senior officers of DS9 have been transported into an abstract world that seems rather game like.

Which it is. What they do in this world is motivated by/constrained by the moves Quark makes at Chula. The episode moves back an forth between Quark playing Chula and the officers (Sisko, Kira, Dax, and Bashir) in their abstract world. The four slowly figure out they’re in a game and Quark comes to realize that the moves he makes in the game are being played out by those four officers, who have apparently left the station without a trace. And then things collapse. The game is over and the four officers appear in Quarks. The Wadi leave and Sisko has a talk with Quark.

I have, of course, omitted all the details of gameplay etc. My purpose here is simply to register this as one example of a type of episode the occurs in Star Trek. What’s the point, if I may, of this kind of episode? What's it trying to achieve? By way of comparison, mysteries are also explicitly about puzzle solving – who done it? But they’re quite different in construction and import, no?

Addendum 6.15.19: I’m thinking I probably short-changed Quark. When he finally realizes that his game’s play may well cost the lives of the players he begs for their lives and pledges that he’ll never again cheat if they’re spared. Odo hears this pledge and at the end, tells Sisko to talk with Quark about what he’d said, though Odo doesn’t mention the pledge itself. We don’t year the pledge and, of course, we know the Quark will go on cheating. These is, of course, a sense in which the Wadi are dishonest as well, for they didn’t indicate the ‘dark side’ of their game when they brought it out.