> Interestingly enough, I am actually doing a joint honours course, my
> second major being Computer Science. Unfortunately, the CS course at my
> university isn't up to much so our automata theory course essentially
> avoided automata theory.
Too bad. That happened with me concerning the course on Operating Systems.
The prof was a proponent of the fine idea that the faculty should teach
things they don't know about. Unfortunately, he was not so strong on
learning it before class.
I guess the main sort of thing a course in 'language and the theory of
computation' or 'automata theory' does for artists who try to use computers
creatively is give them a sense of the limits of the capabilities of
computers and a sense of the dual nature of computers as number/language
machines, and some appreciation of the synthesis of number and language that
has been going on the last seventy years in the work of poets such as Godel,
Turing, and Chomsky. Poets in the sense that part of what we look for in
poetry/poetics is intense engagement with language.
I read a well-known critic of digital art recently who said:
"No computer can reprogram itself; self-programming is only possible
within a limited framework of game rules written by a human programmer. A
machine can behave differently than expected, because the rules didn't
foresee all situations they could create, but no machine can overwrite its
own rules by itself."
But this is simply false. Computers *are* capable of reprogramming
themselves. The technical term is 'self-modifying code'. And this is the
sort of thing one learns in a course on automata theory.
Computers are not simply fancy typewriters or mixing boards or whatever. To
date, no processes of thought have been exhibited of which humans are
capable and computers are not. And there probably never will be any such
processes exhibited. In other words, one's sights, concerning digital art,
should be set fairly high. The above critic must necessarily have a degraded
notion of the potential of digital art since he is mistaking computers for
far less flexible machines than they are capable of being.
ja
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