What I Read in 2022, Q1
Updating a little earlier than usual, mostly to share an old paper that I found recently but is probably one of my favourite academic papers to date. It’s How to Draw Three People in a Botanical Garden, written in 1988 by Harold Cohen – a painter by training who later taught himself to program. He eventually created AARON, an “expert’s system” that Cohen used to investigate the nature of visual representation: “those internal cognitive processes that underpin and inform the making of representational objects.” Rule-based systems are increasingly taking a backseat to learning-based approaches for building intelligent systems, but Cohen’s writing and insight emanates a certain beauty that comes, I think, from intimate knowledge of both the domain and the system. Highly recommended reading (and it was presented in AAAI!)
The first color image created by AARON.
I also finished Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which I believe was the book that coined (or popularized?) the term “metaverse”. It was my second attempt at the book, after not quite managing to get past the halfway mark a few years ago out of dislike for the protagonist. I still don’t quite like the characterization, which tends to be pretty flat, but the story is fast-paced and imaginative: it weaves in some of my favourite sci-fi elements (Kabbalah, Sapir-Whorf) while exploring the connections between virtual worlds, natural language and code and strongly reminds me of Ted Chiang’s short story Seventy-Two Letters. The ending is almost ridiculously abrupt, which commenters have mentioned is apparently par for the course for Stephenson? The only other Stephenson work I’ve read is SevenEves, and then only up to slightly past the timeskip, after which the plot became…revolting, to put it bluntly. Taken together with Snow Crash, you can’t call Stephenson a bad writer, but I probably won’t pick up another of his books.
Lastly, I picked up Demian by Hermann Hesse; a combination of finding Siddhartha interesting, and also being intrigued by the iconic phrase from the novel (which I saw on one of the blogs I regularly frequent, but couldn’t for the life of me remember which one it was):
The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.
Demian is masterfully written, even though Hesse completed the novella within two months. It follows a young Emil Sinclair as he struggles to break away from the familiar comforts of childhood and reject the siren song of the herd, and more broadly explores what it means to find out one’s destiny and follow it to the end. A familiar coming-of-age story if there ever was one, but crafted beautifully and short enough to finish in a day or two if you were so inclined — also highly recommended reading.