Re: Universal Translator need

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Jaron Lanier
Wed, 15 Oct 97 15:23:56 PDT


>The entire tank battle in the Persian Gulf War has been recorded and
>replayed countless times via computer by the US Army. It is the first of
>its kind. Maybe we should set about preserving its playability as a good
>present hard case for what we're trying to make routine. (Kevin has some
>detailed knowledge of that one.)

This a great example in terms of historical importance, but it is not as
challenging as others we'll come across - so it probably isn't the best
candidate for a "hard case". The reason is that a record of a battle has an
unchanging core of content that is browsed repeatedly- so it's a type 1
document. In theory, this record could be represented in a variety of
different formats. For example, each tank could have it's entire course
recorded, or there could be a time series of records, with each record
consisting of each tank's position at a given moment; the two methods are
approximately equivalent.

Deeply interactive or generative documents will be even harder to preserve.
While there are equivalent representations of interactive/generative
systems in theory, in practice it very hard to find them, and even harder
to confirm the equivalence, for the reasons I touched upon in the long
email this morning- the time domain and the interface with interaction
hardware are two areas that are particularly confounding.

Best,

Jaron


  • Reply: Stewart Brand: "Re: Universal Translator need"