Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 32, No. 240.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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        Date: 2018-12-03 06:41:23+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty 
        Subject: divining and gaming?

Many years ago there were attempts to implement the ancient Chinese form 
of divination known as the Yijing (I Ching); one, I recall, was written 
by a friend of mine, Peter Langston, on HP equipment. Another, I think, 
was developed for Princeton University Press. There have obviously been 
many, many implementations of games of chance. Theoretical work on 
gaming, back to von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and 
Economic Behavior (1953), is very well known.

My question is this: has anyone written about the 
psychological/cognitive relationship between the digital machine as a 
combinatorial device and physically manipulatory practices in which 
unpredictable outcomes are used to point the way to a better or at least 
different life? I am specifically interested in that connection in order 
to pry into the capacity of computational enquiry -- not the information 
vending machine but the human-machine entity -- to surprise us in a 
fundamental way, to come up with something radically new.

All suggestions will be most welcome.

Yours,
WM
-- 
Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/),
Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London;
Adjunct Professor, Western Sydney University; Editor, Interdisciplinary 
Science Reviews (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist 
(www.dhhumanist.org)




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Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
Software designer: Malgosia Askanas (Mind-Crafts)

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