Book extract - "The Sad Demise of the Cube-Turning Society"

I am getting more excited as publication date approaches! I’m going to be quite promotion for the next couple of weeks, then back to normal service - I hope quality won’t suffer too much. I am told by people in the book trade that pre-orders are really important for gaming and optimising various second-order metrics; so please, if you kind of feel like you’re going to end up buying it anyway, consider putting in a preorder.

Some people have expressed concern that the publication date for “The Unaccountability Machine” might clash with the release of “The Tortured Poets Department” the next day. I can only agree; we announced our date first, but these things happen. My advice is that if you’ve got past the technical material in Chapter 5 on the publication date, you should be OK to listen to Taylor’s album as a sort of soundtrack for the second half of the book.

Here’s an excerpt to show the sort of thing I’ll be going on about …

Between them, the members of the Ratio Club and the attendees of the Macy Conferences invented information theory, the architecture of the microprocessor, digital computation and an awfully large proportion of everything which goes to make up the modern world.  Without the intellectual explosion in computing and information technology that took place at the end of the Second World War, everything today would be unimaginably different. 

But, very little of their progress was made in the actual field of cybernetics.  What happened was that in trying to solve the problems of the general question of “control and communication in the animal and the machine”, people came up with ideas that were applicable to other problems.  The solutions to these problems helped them design fantastic new machines, things which had actual commercial applications beyond the demonstration of simple ideas about control and representation to seminars.  And within a decade or so – basically the period between the first edition of “Cybernetics” in 1948 and the second edition in 1961, as Wiener makes clear in his introduction to the revised version – most of the effort had been diverted toward the new and useful technological projects of computation and telecommunications, rather than to the potentially profound but frustratingly stalled research program of cybernetics.

What happened? Here’s an analogy.  Imagine a club of people who are very interested in turning cubes “the right way up”.  In the early days of the cube-turning movement, they start out with a debate about what it really means for a cube to be the right way up and how “way-upness” can be manipulated.  But they are clever people, and so theoretical breakthroughs are quick to come; pretty soon they get the idea of colouring the faces of the cubes so that they can talk about “red side up”, “blue side down”, and so on.  Within a few short years, they have established fundamental axioms and theorems about cube orientation, and the society announces a grand symposium, where the leading cube manipulators of the day are to discuss the new science of turning cubes.

Within a year after the symposium taking place, the club is more or less defunct, and not long afterward it disbands.  Why?

It turned out that there were two factions within the Cube Turning Society, and that they were interested in different problems.  One group was interested in making long lines of cubes, all turned the same way up.  The other group wanted to solve Rubik Cube puzzles.

While the question of what constituted the orientation of a cube was still live for research, they could work together and talk to each other.  Once that step of progress had been made, the underlying difference became acute, because the two problems are not the same.  The group that wanted to make long lines of cubes would be able to make very rapid progress, because orienting a hundred cubes red-side-up is subject to a simple algorithm^[1], applied one hundred times. 

The Rubik Cube group, however, would still be faced with a difficult problem.  Colouring the faces of their puzzle would have helped them a bit, as they would now have more of a concept of what a solution might mean.  But it doesn’t instantly solve their problem – in fact, it could be argued that it raises a few new questions for them, as they realise that their original puzzle isn’t actually a stack of 27 cubes but only looks like one.  They now have to grapple with the question of whether their original vision of the puzzle as a cube-turning problem was a valid description, or just a metaphor which might become unhelpful.  They certainly can’t assume that the great strides being made by their former clubmates in developing quicker and more efficient ways to arrange lines of red-side-up cubes will translate into anything that’s helpful to them. 

This was, more or less, what happened to the science of cybernetics when it was a baby.  Some people were interested in information because they wanted to transmit messages from one location to another with as much accuracy as possible, or to process strings of bits representing numbers in series of sequential operations.  Others were interested in systems which had multiple inputs and outputs and complex connections between them.  Systems like brains (and later, when Stafford Beer came along, organisations).

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[1] Check if the cube you are holding has any red faces – if it doesn’t, throw it away – if it does, select one of the red faces at random, place the cube at the end of the line with this face upward, then pick up another cube.