Fragments

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A Halloween jam from Bowie, live with "Scary Monsters" in 1983.

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Amongst a pile of Games magazines I ordered recently from ebay is this issue, from October of 1984.

I love the "puzzled party" pun on the cover. I also love the eclectic puzzles posed by Martin Gardner in various issues of Games. Even in the issues I bought, his puzzles range from mathematics to poetry to logic.

This one, called Flip the Psychic Robot, is fun. Give it a go. (Hint: it doesn't matter where the lines actually lead.)

See the text contained in the image.

FLIP, THE PSYCHIC ROBOT: Can You Outwit a Mindless Automaton?

By Martin Gardner Here's a chance to take on an opponent who has no control over the moves he makes. Still, winning may be tougher than you think The game is matching pennies. You flip a coin and then Flip, the robot, will do the same. If Flip's flip matches yours (heads after you have thrown heads, or tails after your tails), Flip wins. If not (tails after your heads, or heads after your tails), you win. Flip has challenged you to a 25-game match. Here's how it works. For each game (1-25), throw a coin and note whether you threw heads or tails. Being a mere sheet of paper, Flip can't toss for himself, so you now get to tell him what to throw. Thus, if you threw heads, you may want to tell Flip to throw tails. But there's a catch: Sometimes Flip will obey your com-mands, sometimes he won't. You have no way of knowing in advance when he'll obey and when he'll disobey. Once you've chosen heads or tails for Flip (and not before), follow the line that leads from that response all the way to its end to discover Flip's true flip. In following the lines, you may not change directions at intersections. Check the result of each game before proceeding to the next. Keep a running total of the number of games won by you and the number won by Flip. If the results surprise you, turn to the Answer Drawer, page 64. Puzzlesmith Martin Gardner's creation of this game was inspired by artificial intelligence experiments described in Russ Walter's "The Secret Guide to Computers" (Birk-hauser Boston, 1983).

Try it before you check out the answer. I'm curious about the AI research in "The Secret Guide to Computers" that inspired this.

The answer

Every time we play-tested this game, Flip won, hands down. The reason? Human psychology. The game is designed to counter the way people make choices when trying to beat a machine. Research has shown that most people in such a situation fall into a predictable psychological pattern; the game uses this pattern in designing the robot's responses (whether he'll obey or disobey) in a way that works to Flip's advantage. In effect, Flip is psyching out humans trying to psych out Flip. The game is based on actual experiments in artificial intelligence. In 1969, Soviet researchers programmed a computer to play a game equivalent to this coin-matching test and found that nearly three-quarters of the 61 humans they tested lost. If a human player did not try to psych out the robot but simply chose Flip's responses at random, he or she would have a 50-50 chance of winning.

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This weekend, I collected some scraps from three random magazines, a Games from 1982, Wired from 1998, and Time from 1984.

The collages

Welcome back to freedom

Original: 8x10 on mounted board and white gesso

The great american novice

Original: 8x10 on particle board and clear gesso

I will behave

Original: 5x7 on watercolor paper

The magazines

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I've been reading Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge because I'm a bit of a Pynchon fanboy and have never read it. But also, it's set in a similar moment—frothy tech valuations, fascistic American leadership (although yez, this is by degrees), etc.—the bursting of the so-called dot-com bubble up to and beyond 9/11.

Along the way, a wonderfully prescient character, on the clearest way of viewing anything, but much more the sort of massive event that was 24 years ago.

"Check this out." March hands over a dollar bill, around the margins of whose obverse somebody has written in ballpoint, "World Trade Center was destroyed by CIA-Bush Senior's CIA is making Bush Jr. Prez for life & a hero." "I got this in change at the corner grocery this morning That's well within a week of the attack. Call it what you like, but a historical document whatever." Maxine recalls that Heidi has a collection of decorated dollar bills, which she regards as the public toilet wall of the U.S. monetary system, carrying jokes, insults, slogans, phone numbers, George Washington in blackface, strange hats, Afros and dreadlocks and Marge Simpson hair, lit joints in his mouth, and speech-balloon remarks ranging from witty to stupid.

"No matter how the official narrative of this turns out," it seemed to Heidi, "these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep."

en.wikipedia.org

Bleeding Edge (novel) - Wikipedia

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All originals are 5x7, on watercolor paper.

It would be an infinite eye

Reel cultural wealth

Consumer