wilkox.org

Cryptic crosswords and aesthetics

2011-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

I love wordplay, but loathe cryptic crosswords. This essay is an attempt to figure out why.

Form follows function

Here is an ordinary sentence in plain English:

The Greek five elements are sometimes associated with the five platonic solids. Source: (Wikipedia: Classical element)

This is a good, functional sentence. It delivers some information, and nothing more. Few people would describe such a sentence as beautiful or artful, but an article composed of such sentences would be considered well-written.

Here is a photograph of the Oxford University Press building: Source: Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 3.0

Like the plain English sentence above, this photograph would not be considered especially artistic, but it represents its subject well. If somebody wanted to know what the OUP building looked like, this photograph would do the job.

Wordplay

“Hurry up and get to the back of the ship,” Tom said sternly.

is an example of wordplay, again from Wikipedia. This sentence has a plain reading: Tom is telling somebody to move to the back of a ship. Like the sentence about the Greek elements, it delivers information. If I wanted to know what Tom said, this sentence would do the job. However, the added pun makes the sentence simultaneously functional and entertaining.

Crucially, it’s not possible to separate the wordplay from the function. Consider:

The back of a ship is called the stern. Tom said something sternly.

The pun without the content would seem contrived or nonsensical. The function of the sentence is essential to the word play. Without it, there would be nothing to play on.

The Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting in the world:

Like the photograph of the OUP building, the Mona Lisa has a “plain reading”: it’s a painting of a woman. If you wanted to know what Lisa del Giocondo looked like, the painting would show you. However, like the example of wordplay above, the Mona Lisa is more than just a functional representation. Most people would consider the Mona Lisa an exceptional piece of art. The Mona Lisa delivers an extra payload of emotional content on top of the simple representational content. Also like wordplay, it would be impossible to have the Mona Lisa without the functional content. da Vinci could not have simply painted an enigmatic smile “in the abstract”. The function is an essential substrate for the artistic purpose.

Form without function

Abstract art is art which does not refer visually to something real. It is form without function:

Piet Mondrian: Composition II in Red, Blue and Yellow.

Many people enjoy abstract art. I do. I wouldn’t mind having a Mondrian hanging on my bedroom wall. However, I (and most people) don’t enjoy abstract art in the same way as we enjoy the Mona Lisa. The Mondrian above does not have any embedded meaning, or emotional effect. It is simply aesthetically pleasing decoration.

It can be fun to “interpret” abstract art; some people get entire PhDs out of doing so. But such interpretation is rarely done with the attitude of, say, a doctor interpreting a patient’s symptoms, where there exists a definite fact to be discovered. It is rare that there is an unambiguous “message” in a piece of abstract art, or a simple and correct means of extracting that message.

Here is an example of a cryptic crossword clue from Wikipedia:

Apostle’s friend outside of university (4).

The answer is “Paul”. To obtain the answer, you take the word “pal” (“friend”) and wrap the letters (“outside of”) around the letter “u” (“university”).

So my question is: why should I enjoy “solving” this “clue”?

Perhaps I should enjoy it as wordplay? But cryptic crossword clues are not wordplay. They do not have the aesthetic appeal of a plain sentence with a clever pun, because they were not plain sentences to begin with. “Apostle’s friend outside of university”, while a grammatically correct sentence, does not refer to anything. There is no friend of an apostle standing outside a university to be wittily spoken of. It’s cleverness in a vacuum; the Mona Lisa smile hanging in the air like the Cheshire Cat’s.

Perhaps, then, cryptic crosswords are like abstract art: aesthetically pleasing in their own right, with no need for a deeper meaning. For the first few cryptic crossword clues I ever solved, this was true. They were interesting novelties, and solving them gave the same mild amusement as inventing “interpretations” for abstract art. But this soon grows tiring, because unlike abstract art, most cryptic crossword clues have no decorative appeal; you wouldn’t hang them on your bedroom wall. Moreover, unlike most abstract art, a cryptic crossword clue insists that there is a “correct” interpretation, and it forces you to find it.

This might be interesting if, in the sense of a doctor examining a patient, you had good reason to believe that there really is a correct interpretation of the facts at hand. But there is not, because cryptic crossword clues do not have any real-world referents; they are all pun and no content, all form and no function. It is like having an abstract artist contemptuously tell you “no, wrong again!” as you nervously try to guess the “correct” meaning of his Three dolls' heads nailed to a vending machine. It is make-work: digging holes and filling them in again for no clear purpose.

And who wants to do that?

Adaptive learning software [DRAFT]

2011-08-03T00:00:00-07:00

What would good adaptive learning software look like?

Cognitive load

Cognitive load is a well-supported observation in educational psychology that humans can only hold a few items (ideas, facts) in working memory at the same time. If we are presented with a large collection of new facts and ideas, and challenged with a problem requiring simultaneous manipulation of all these items, we perform very badly and learn little. Over time, however, we integrate concepts into schema, networks of interconnected concepts, which reside in long-term memory. These schema can then be accessed when needed to solve problems.

An analogy might be starting a new job. The morning of your first day is often stressful and chaotic: you need to think about what time to wake up, catch an unfamiliar bus at the right stop at the right time to the right place, get into the building, figure out where your new boss is, make sure you don’t do anything stupid in front of your new boss, find your desk, learn an unfamiliar computer system, figure out where to go for lunch…you will undoubtedly make many mistakes and be exhausted by the end of the day, from the effort of juggling so many new ideas and problems at once. One year into the job, however, you get from bed to desk on autopilot, and effortlessly handle routine problems associated with your work. The behaviours and conceptual chains which once had to be generated through manipulation of ideas in working memory have now been integrated into schemas stored in long term memory. (For a good discussion of cognitive load, see Ton de Jong: Cognitive load theory, educational research, and instructional design: some food for thought. Instructional science, vol 38 2009, pp105-134).

Good adaptive learning software would be conscious of cognitive load in four ways. Firstly, it would introduce new ideas hierarchically. This reduces cognitive load by taking maximal advantage of existing schemas. Secondly, it would introduce new ideas incrementally. New links in the semantic chains from which schemas are formed would be added one or two at a time. This reduces cognitive load by limiting the amount which has to be held in working memory at any given time. Thirdly, it would be parsimonious in the presentation of information, only showing the student the bare minimum required to comprehend the next conceptual step being developed. This again reduces cognitive load, by eliminating the need to consider irrelevant information, which needlessly occupies working memory. Finally, it would use Bayesian inference to track the existence and strength of schemas. By back-chaining through a hierarchical model of interrelated concepts which roughly approximates the student’s internal map, the software can infer areas of strength and weakness and direct learning accordingly.

Concepts linked in a semantic network

All teachers use an implicit or explicit network model of what they are trying to teach. This helps them to decide what concepts to introduce or withhold, in what order to introduce them, etc. To a greater or lesser extent, teachers also usually attempt to maintain at least a rudimentary understanding of the students' own internal models, and update this understanding as learning progresses. This allows teachers to, for example, notice when a student has missed an important piece of basic knowledge and correct for this.

Effective adaptive learning software must also have such a model, for exactly the same reasons. By offloading the work of presenting information and tasks and inferring student understanding onto software, having such a model supports and enhances the teacher’s ability to present information and problems at the right times, and to track student’s progress. For example, software which maintains a conceptual model for mathematics might use infer that a certain student attempting to learn quadratic expansion does not yet quite understand the nature of exponents. It could then present additional problems and material related to exponents to assist the student. If the student is still struggling and teacher intervention is required, the software could save the teacher time and effort by directing their attention towards the student’s problems with exponents.

Separation of the distinct concepts of “learning problem”, “diagnostic problem” and “assessment”

Seamless communication tools

Real-time feedback to tutors and course developers

Mini-review: Ian McDonald's River of Gods

2011-07-26T00:00:00-07:00

A publishing house.

Editor: Come in, Ian. Take a seat. Now about this manuscript, “River of Gods”.

Ian McDonald: Yes?

Editor: The plot’s solid, the characters are lively, it’s bursting with ideas and the writing is clear and lucid. I’m afraid it’s totally unpublishable.

Ian: Well, I – wait, what? What’s wrong with it?

Editor: The writing is clear and lucid.

Ian: Thanks…?

Editor: Get with the times, Ian. SF readers don’t want clean, descriptive writing. They want funky, they want weird, they want ADD-hyperactive, they want words flying at their face like insects at a windshield. Take this sentence here (jabs finger at page).

Ian (reading): “The man walked slowly along the empty subway platform.” Seems pretty straightforward.

Editor: Exactly! Now read my rewrite.

Ian: “Down in the tunnels. The trainy arteries through which the blood of the city pulses, except the blood is people. A lonely erythrocyte paces like a country mother-in-law. The walli chumpatta stirs.” Is that even real Hindi?

Editor: Doesn’t matter. See how hip it sounds? And it’s three times as long!

Ian: That’s not a good thi-

Editor: Rewrite it. The whole book, like this. I want the writing to be so fresh, so post-cyberpunk, so 21st century, that your readers won’t have a clue what’s going on but will be convinced it’s something really really cool. Now get out of here. Come back when you’ve written me a Miéville.