ASKED A LARGE ENLIGHTENED STUDENT. "THE PEACHES ARE
LARGE", THE STUDENT ANSWERED THE CONFUSED MASTER.
"HOW CAN WE LEARN AND UNDERSTAND WITHOUT STUDY?"
THE CONFUSED MASTER ASKED A LARGE OLD MASTER. THE OLD
MASTER WALKED FROM A WHITE STONY G0025. THE OLD MAS-
TER GOT LOST.Your personal decision procedure for koan genuineness probably
reached a verdict without need of the Geometric Code or the Art of Zen
Strings. If the lack of pronouns or the unsophisticated syntax didn't arouse
your suspicions, that strange "G0025" towards the end must have. What is
it? It is a strange fluke-a manifestation of a bug which caused the program
to print out, in place of the English word for an object, the program's
internal name for the "node" (a LISP atom, in fact) where all information
concerning that particular object was stored. So here we have a "window"
onto a lower level of the underlying Zen mind-a level that should have
remained invisible. Unfortunately, we don't have such clear windows onto
the lower levels of human Zen minds.
The sequence of actions, though a little arbitrary, comes from a recur-
sive LISP procedure called "CASCADE", which creates chains of actions
linked in a vaguely causal way to each other. Although the degree of
comprehension of the world possessed by this koan generator is clearly not
stupendous, work is in progress to make its output a little more genuine-
seeming.
Grammars for Music?Then there is music. This is a domain which you might suppose, on first
thought, would lend itself admirably to being codified in. an A TN-
grammar, or some such program. Whereas (to continue this naive line of
thought) language relies on connect.ions with the outside world for mean-
ing, music is purely formal. There is no reference to things "out there" in
the sounds of music; there is just pure syntax-note following note, chord
following chord, measure following measure, phrase following phrase ...
But wait. Something is wrong in this analysis. Why is some music so
much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in
music, is expressive--expressive to some strange subconscious regions of
our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they
do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical
meaning is dependent on intangible links from the symbols to things in the
world-those "things", in this case, being secret software structures in our
minds. No, great music will not come out of such an easy formalism as an
ATN-grammar. Pseudomusic, like pseudo-fairy tales, may well come
out-and that will be a valuable exploration for people to make-but the
secrets of meaning in music lie far, far deeper than pure syntax.
I should clarify one point here: in principle, ATN-grammars have all
the power of any programming formalism, so if musical meaning is captur-(^626) Artificial Intelligence: Retrospects