Notes:Parisi

//Notes on Luciana Parisi & Beatrice Fazi's "Do Algorithms Have Fun? On Completion, Indeterminacy and Autonomy in Computation"

from Skype chat on Parisi

• what is the “completion” of a computational process? (123) is it the completion of a final goal or completion of the cycle.
• process: “intended as the continuity of variation, forming a whole that is bigger than its parts”
• processing: “intended instead as a self-contained procedure based on already determined and finite parts aggregating into a whole” (112)
• completion: “(which is, in Whitehead’s words, ‘the completion of the actual togetherness of the discrete components’) or, from the perspective of this chapter, fun.” (112-3) exhaustion. / fun is completion with whitehead > fun is final achievement of autonomy is meachincal thought p111. completion is then a process? because autonomy is not 'final' (but a ‘process’)
• satisfaction/fun: fullfilment of appetite, “Fun, we contend, is the final achievement of autonomy in mechanical thought.” (111) autonomy not an endpoint as such. the autonomy of rules. “An algorithm that has fun is an algorithm that ‘enjoys’ its own process of determination.” (123)
• not so interesting to think what code wants but what code does
• external inputs, environmental inputs and relation to completion (122)
• the incomputable as always present in the computational procedure: “Incomputability, like an eternal object, conditions the finality of the algorithmic occasion.” (122) Chaitin constant. the potentiality is embedded in the materiality of something.