Challenge Three - The Thirteenth Floor
What is its relationship to Artificial Worlds and Evolutionary and Computational Epistemologies?

	THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR Click on the image or the title to visit the official Sony Web site. There you will find: The 3D Virtual World. The Basement Philosophers Library. (the library is a little out of date)
Douglas Hall Jane Fuller Hannon Fuller Whitney Detective Larry McBain	played by Craig Bierko played by Gretchen Mol played by Armin Mueller-Stahl played by Vincent D'Onofrio played by Dennis Haysbert

Click here for participant responses to the challenge...

A breakdown of the levels of the simulation and their usages...

A transcript of Douglas Hall and Jane Fuller's first encounter...

It's Showtime:

Modern anticipatory science (a.k.a. science fiction) often provides thoughtful assessments of the issues surrounding the possibilities, limitations and cultural contexts of simulated worlds. I would like you all to watch The Thirteenth Floor and write an analytical critique from the perspective of what we have learned about simulations and artificial worlds. One scene is particularly interesting, so we will start the film and call your attention to the scene as it opens. When that scene concludes, I would like you to take just a few minutes to quickly answer a short analytical question set about it. Then we continue the film through to its end. Immediately after the film we will rerun that short scene once again to see if your understanding of it has changed. You will then have two more analytical question sets to answer in essay form on your own...

For more anticipatory science see:

• Films page.
• Stanislaw Lem's "Non Serviam"
• Greg Egan's PERMUTATION CITY

Background:

Think about the nature of representations, simulations and models, how they are stacked one upon the other, and how they mediate our knowledge of the world. What we think we know about the world is filtered through many layers: our cultural beliefs and preconceptions, our thoughts, discourse, written and visual languages and senses. If we do not perceive the world directly on its own, how do we evaluate our perceptions of it? Or asked another way, how do we come to better know the world by understanding the nature of respresentations? In this challenge I would like you to use this film as a point of departure for considering the issues involved in building an evolutionary and computational epistemology, in short a new scientific theory of knowledge based upon experimenting with artificial worlds.

ROLL FILM...

INTERMISSION...
Take a short break to write a quick analysis of the scene in which Douglas and Jane first meet (a transcript will be provided)...

• ANALYTICAL QUESTION SET #1 (a quickly written essay in class)
  Please critique and analyze the scene in which Douglas Hall and Jane Fuller meet for the first time. What is the sub-text behind their dialog? How do they behave towards one another? Why do they react the way they do? What are the characters thinking and not saying? Are they being intentionally enigmatic? Are they hiding anything? What is going on unconsciously in their minds? What are the multiple or hidden meanings behind what they each say and do? Are the actors portraying their characters well?

ROLL FILM TO ITS END...

REPLAY THE FIRST MEETING SCENE...

Has your critique and analysis of this scene changed?

• ANALYTICAL QUESTION SET #2 (a well-written essay to turn in later)
  Answer ANALYTICAL QUESTION SET #1 again but in greater depth and from the perspective of knowing how the story ends...

• ANALYTICAL QUESTION SET #3 (a well-written essay to turn in later)
• Evaluate the story and film in light of our understandings of the nature of representations, models and simulations. Focus specifically on the philosophies and epistemologies of artificial worlds, computation and evolution. Assume that we do have the technology to create the world envisioned in the film. Does the story give a reasonable account of what might happen? In the context of the narrative what makes sense and what does not? Why? How would we go about writing the software to create such a world? Be as specific and detailed as possible.
• As a starting point, address these epistemological questions in your essay: What are the differences between the worlds in the story? How did the film-makers represent these differences in the film? How deep do the nested representations go? How do the characters discover the nature of the world they inhabit? How do you suppose Hannon Fuller discovered the truth? They don't tell us. How could an agent discover that it is in a simulation? What has all this to do with how we discover the nature of the real world through real science? Be as specific and detailed as possible.
• For what purposes did the characters in the film use simulation? Broadly speaking, are there precendents in the way we use simulations today to the uses they are put to in the film?
• Detective McBain complains about a broken spring on the cast-iron baseball game he tries, saying "you better get this fixed." What does this incident have to do with the references to deja vu and memory leaks in the film? What does this have to do with real programming issues encountered in writing simulations today?

Format:

• Please answer each set of questions as a distinct and separate well-written essay (not a numbered list of answers). Please print each essay out on paper and turn it in on floppy using Microsoft Word.

N-Grams, a suggestion for a project for advanced participants...

Why do I want these essays on floppies? With luck and a bit of work I hope to have another software application built which uses a simple algorithm to do seemingly intelligent things (one definition of emergence). Marc Damashek from the National Security Agency developed some fascinating software to read newspaper articles in any language, write abstracts of them, and then group them in a multidimensional space by their degree of similarity to one another. It suceeds in doing this without know what it's doing. It would be interesting to give your essays to this algorithm and see what it does. Expert programmers may wish to tackle this as a class project.

Enjoy This and Have Some Fun...