01010000 01001100 01000001 01011001: Play Elements in Computer Programming.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the role of play in human interaction with computers in the context of computer programming. The author considers many facets of programming including the literary practice of coding, the abstract design of programs, and more mundane activities such as testing, debugging, and hacking. She discusses how these incorporate the aesthetics, creative imagination, and game play of programmers. She suggests that the seemingly intractable and unplayful elements of computers, in fact, invite playful responses and actions by programmers and that programmers use play to understand, engage with, and creatively imagine and reconfigure the complexity of computer systems. She concludes that human-machine relationships and computer programming constitute fruitful areas for further play research. Key words: computer programming and poetry; debugging; hacking; human and computer relations; play and computers; testing[01001001:I]ntroductionIn several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise encounter the Borg. Members of this cybernetic species live together as a hive mind and attempt to assimilate all others in the galaxy into the perfection that is their collective. The Borg represent an ongoing academic and popular discussion about the relationship between humans and cybernetic and computing machines that began around the 1940s (e.g. Bowker 1993; Downey 1998; Haraway 1991; Hayles 1999, 2005; Turkle 2005). One facet of this discussion entails the belief or fear that intelligent machines will replace the human species as the dominant form of life on Earth or, in the case of the Borg, that cybernetic machines will replace all biological life in the galaxy. This worry also appears in other science-fiction works-in the Cybermen in the British series Doctor Who, the Cylons in the television series Battlestar Galactica, and the Terminator in the Terminator movies, to name but a few. The potential extinction-level risks to our species as a whole by developments in fields like Artificial Intelligence and biotechnologies has even been proposed as the focus of a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Cambridge (Price, Rees, and Tallinn 2012). The relationship between humans and machines represents a struggle for dominance and control (as the Borg state to all those they meet: You will be assimilated, resistance is futile), though themes of human resistance against the onslaught of emotionless and tireless machines also abound.Embedded in these nightmares of machine domination and assimilation rests some intriguing ideas about play. If we believe foundational play scholar Johan Huizinga, play suffuses human life. We are Homo ludens in the sense that human play adorns life, amplifies it and is to that extent a necessity both for the individual-as a life function-and for society by reason of the meaning it contains (Huizinga 1980, 9). On the other hand, most scholars see machines as incapable of play, as lacking imagination and human emotion. The Borg embody the threat we perceive in humans' encounters with machines that individuality, emotion, and play will be overtaken by the interface with technology. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's call to take pleasure in the confusion of boundaries among humans and machines, I wish to complicate this ominous polarity between playful humanity and calculating machines by exploring human relationships with machines as we experience them today (Haraway 1991). I consider specifically the role of play in the interaction between humans and computers as it relates to computer programming.We have seen growing interest among those in anthropology and other social-science disciplines in the use of computers for play and gaming (Malaby 2009), and the growth appears especially in online virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft (Bainbridge 2010; Boellstorff 2008; Corneliussen and Rettberg 2008; Dibbell 2006; Nardi 2009) and other digital games such as online chess and poker (Desjarlais 2011; Consalvo 2007; Schull 2005). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.077 | 0.021 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".