In the Guardian (19th March 2020) Martin Kettle wrote:
"The second world war remains the foundation myth of modern Britain. Invoking it is a familiar default setting in British party politics. It has a Conservative version, embodied in Churchill, with whom Johnson compares himself. And it has its Labour version, in the form of veneration of Attlee and the post-1945 welfare state."
One of the things that has never ceased to amaze me about the Second World War is that, at the moment of greatest existential threat, when the bombs were still falling, detailed plans were being drawn up for the kind of country that might be built once peace was restored.
The Beveridge Report was the result of a study undertaken in June 1941 by an inter-departmental committee of the wartime coalition government who were tasked with looking at widespread reforms to the system of social welfare. The resulting 300-page document entitled “Social Insurance and Allied Services” laid the foundations for what was to become the Welfare State - a blanket term covering the National Health Service, Pensions and National Insurance, Family Allowances and Rent Control.
There is something almost unbelievable about the idea that such an ambitious, visionary and seemingly idealistic set of recommendations could be drawn up during the darkest days of the war. But then these ideas didn’t just emerge from nowhere. They were rooted in wartime emergency measures designed to address fundamental issues of survival. Thus there were initiatives to provide milk and nutrition to nursing mothers and school children; an emergency hospital service provided free treatment to those suffering from war injuries, whilst rationing — maybe surprisingly — led to significant improvements in the diets of poor families.
I have been thinking about this and trying to write down my thoughts. As fast as I do so however, I find myself overwhelmed by further questions. Nevertheless, there is one insight that appears to have taken root, namely that it is in times of crisis that the seeds of change are sown. Just as in the Second World War the threat of military annihilation and subsequent occupation forced the British government into an unspoken pact with the people to do ‘whatever it takes’ to survive, so the present government is asking people to subject themselves to a number of distressing restrictions in order — as Johnson puts it — to ‘see off’ the coronavirus.
But there is always a contractual aspect to such impositions. If people are to confine themselves within their own homes and to home-educate their children then it is reasonable for them to expect some protection from profiteers and ruthless landlords. Similarly, at a time when thousands of people are being made redundant it is essential they have the means to obtain the basic necessities. The idea of a universal basic income — a monthly distribution of money made without preconditions — is a sensible and efficient way to ensure this, as well as a means to prevent economic meltdown. We are still in the early days of this crisis but it seems reasonable to expect the government will be forced, however reluctantly, to do something of the sort.
To return to the Beveridge Report: it is worth noting that its publication during the war was met with enthusiasm from all sections of the community. The Ministry of Information Home Intelligence found that the Report had been "welcomed with almost universal approval by people of all shades of opinion” and seen as "the first real attempt to put into practice the talk about a new world"
Nevertheless, once the war was over Churchill found all sorts of good reasons why the proposals for social reform should be watered down or delayed. In this, it seems, he misjudged the mood of the populace who, after years of deprivation and austerity were eager for change. The Labour Party won the 1945 General Election and set about implementing the report’s recommendations through a series of Acts of Parliament. The rest, as they say, is history.
And here we are now - not strictly at war but in a time which, by common consensus, has many of its characteristics. The concept of the ‘small state’ is suddenly out of the window; there will undoubtedly be government initiatives designed to ensure the supply of basic necessities as well as the introduction of ‘special powers’ justified on the grounds of maintaining order. Along with these state interventions, we will also hopefully see the growth of community-based networks whose aim will be to foster social cohesion, support the vulnerable and to build and sustain resilience.
When we emerge from this crisis however, one thing is sure: we must on no account allow things to go back to normal.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Monday, March 16, 2020
A Journal of the Plague Year
In her column for last Saturday’s Guardian, Marina Hyde chose to talk about Daniel Defoe’s account of the 1665-1666 London Plague — A Journal of the Plague Year (which, somewhat confusingly, was written in 1722). This gave me an idea. Since I am highly likely to be holed up at home for some time as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, I thought it might be interesting to write my own journal and to publish it via my blog.
Of course one of the many unusual things about the current pandemic, is that there are few people whom it will not touch — either directly or indirectly — and consequently the prospect of not only dealing with your own stuff but reading about mine as well might strike you as a bit too much of a good thing. With this in mind, I have decided against sending out an email with every new blog post, as I have done till now. Instead I propose limiting email notifications to the occasional reminder that I’m still around. Of course, you are free to have a look at the blog any time at the usual web address.
But I can’t recall a time when there was a greater sense of impending change and over the coming days and weeks I intend largely to reflect on how this story plays out and, frankly, on anything else that comes to mind. For the most part it is likely to be a reflective, interior narrative as that is the sort of person I am, but hopefully there will be a few laughs to be had as well.
Please email me if you’d like to — most of my email appears to be spam these days so I would welcome the interchange.
Wishing everyone the best over the coming days.
Of course one of the many unusual things about the current pandemic, is that there are few people whom it will not touch — either directly or indirectly — and consequently the prospect of not only dealing with your own stuff but reading about mine as well might strike you as a bit too much of a good thing. With this in mind, I have decided against sending out an email with every new blog post, as I have done till now. Instead I propose limiting email notifications to the occasional reminder that I’m still around. Of course, you are free to have a look at the blog any time at the usual web address.
But I can’t recall a time when there was a greater sense of impending change and over the coming days and weeks I intend largely to reflect on how this story plays out and, frankly, on anything else that comes to mind. For the most part it is likely to be a reflective, interior narrative as that is the sort of person I am, but hopefully there will be a few laughs to be had as well.
Please email me if you’d like to — most of my email appears to be spam these days so I would welcome the interchange.
Wishing everyone the best over the coming days.
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
A conversation with Alan Turing
I was recently rummaging around some old half-completed projects when I came across an idea for a chess-playing computer program that had been lying around for years. It hinged on a single hunch that I thought might be worth exploring, but before I can explain that I need to provide a bit of background on how chess-playing programs work.
The classic chess playing program (chess engine) relies on two basic ideas:
The Search. For any given position, the program examines all the legal moves available and, for each of these moves, looks at all the moves available to the opponent and, for each of these in turn, looks at each of the possible responses. As there might be around 30 moves to choose from at any one time, the number of possibilities rapidly grows to be in the millions so eventually you have to stop, at which point, we come to the second idea:
The Evaluation. For every possible outcome in this rapidly branching tree of moves and counter moves you work out a score for the position - high if the side whose move it is is winning, low if it is losing. All that remains is to choose which of the first moves is the one that leads to the position with the highest score.
Evaluation functions differ from one chess program to another but they all examine the layout of pieces and calculate a score based on a number of factors - the first being a simple totting up of pieces that remain on the board. Others factors typically involve looking at the placement of pawns (pawn structure), whether major pieces are in strong, central positions and so on. There are many variants and it is probably true to say that chess engines are primarily distinguished by their evaluation functions. Nevertheless, given the evaluation has to be repeated millions of times, it needs to be fairly succinct.
My own idea for a chess program proposed an extremely straightforward (and fast) evaluation function that simply counts the number of moves available to each side and calculates the difference. Of course, since capturing a piece immediately eliminates it from making any further moves, the hope was that my program would automatically try to make captures as a consequence of minimising the moves available to the opponent. The appeal of checkmate is even easier to understand, as that occurs when the losing side has absolutely no moves left.
So in mid-December I set about trying to write my engine which I had decided to call Moby on account of the fact that the evaluation function measures mobility.
I didn’t start from scratch but from a previous well-documented engine called Vice which I partly rewrote and adapted over the course of a few weeks. It took me longer than expected, as my programming skills have grown a bit rusty.
I embarked on this adventure in the drab, gloomy days following the election, possibly as a means of distracting my thoughts from the prospect of 5 more years of Conservative government. And so, as each dreary, rain-sodden day was followed by the next, through long nights when every line I wrote seemed riddled with errors, I began to question whether the project was less a genuine investigation and more an attempt to prove that I had still got it when it comes to programming (or coding as it is called these days). And each night, as tiredness took a grip, I would take myself to bed only to lie, raking through the code in my head, in search of what was going wrong.
But I did get it working eventually and what a strange game of chess it played. For example, when considering positions in which a rook happened to have no immediate moves available (as is often true near the start of a game) it was quite happy to sacrifice it in order to let another piece move into a slightly more open position. It wasn’t all hopeless however; it would occasionally make a clever move. I began to see that some of the more ridiculous mistakes could be avoided by combining mobility with a simple count of the pieces remaining on the board.
So have I gone ahead and made this improvement? Well no — but I probably will. But that’s not the point right now because here the story takes a different turn.
I thought it might be a good idea to share my investigations with the world or, more precisely, the chess programming forum on a website called TalkChess, and so I submitted a contribution describing my approach and invited people to make comments. I had a number of responses the majority of which could be characterised as:
“That’s interesting but it’s unlikely to get you very far.”
Another person wanted to know what it was that had drawn me to such an austere choice of evaluation function to which I responded that it was largely aesthetic, or the appeal of seeing complex behaviour emerge from a simple rule.
But it was one of the later responses that I found most enlightening. A respondent from Germany (Gerd Isenberg) wrote:
“Maybe you aware that programs like Barricelli’s Freedom and Marsland’s Wita used mobility as the evaluation term.”
I replied that I was not aware of these programs, to which he replied
“Yes, the idea of using mobility in evaluation is old. Also note Slater’s ‘Statistics for the Chess Computer and the Factor of Mobility’ and the discussion with Alan Turing.”
My interest was immediately sparked by mention of Alan Turing, widely considered to be ‘the mother and father’ of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. The discussion referred to was documented under an item on Eliot Slater who, as well as having an interest in a chess playing machine, was mainly known as a psychiatrist with some questionable views on eugenics. Slater, it appears, felt that mobility was a key indicator of the strength of a chess position and suggested that a chess playing machine programmed to maximise its advantage in mobility would play a strong game - just as I was speculating.
To this, Alan Turing replied:
“Although the immediate mobility is a useful measure of the relative advantage of the players in normal play it by no means follows that it is wise to direct one's play to maximising such a measure. To do so would be like taking a statistical analysis of the laundry of men in various positions and deciding, from the data collected, that an infallible method of getting ahead in life was to send a large number of shirts to the wash each week.”
So that’s that - done and dusted. I’m not inclined to argue with Alan Turing and in any case his laundry simile, despite being somewhat quaint by today’s norms, is pretty deflating.
But the startling fact is that the discussion between Slater and Alan Turing took place 70 years ago, in 1950, at a time when the number of computers in the world could be counted on the fingers of one hand! The whole episode felt like an immense cycle that had taken an unexpected turn and had transported me back to the time of my birth. And despite the fact that my speculations appeared to have been thoroughly dispensed with around the time I was learning to walk, I was left with a feeling of quiet contentment - happiness even.
Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that the sun had begun to shine again, bringing a lightness in the air and the first intimations of spring.
The classic chess playing program (chess engine) relies on two basic ideas:
The Search. For any given position, the program examines all the legal moves available and, for each of these moves, looks at all the moves available to the opponent and, for each of these in turn, looks at each of the possible responses. As there might be around 30 moves to choose from at any one time, the number of possibilities rapidly grows to be in the millions so eventually you have to stop, at which point, we come to the second idea:
The Evaluation. For every possible outcome in this rapidly branching tree of moves and counter moves you work out a score for the position - high if the side whose move it is is winning, low if it is losing. All that remains is to choose which of the first moves is the one that leads to the position with the highest score.
Evaluation functions differ from one chess program to another but they all examine the layout of pieces and calculate a score based on a number of factors - the first being a simple totting up of pieces that remain on the board. Others factors typically involve looking at the placement of pawns (pawn structure), whether major pieces are in strong, central positions and so on. There are many variants and it is probably true to say that chess engines are primarily distinguished by their evaluation functions. Nevertheless, given the evaluation has to be repeated millions of times, it needs to be fairly succinct.
My own idea for a chess program proposed an extremely straightforward (and fast) evaluation function that simply counts the number of moves available to each side and calculates the difference. Of course, since capturing a piece immediately eliminates it from making any further moves, the hope was that my program would automatically try to make captures as a consequence of minimising the moves available to the opponent. The appeal of checkmate is even easier to understand, as that occurs when the losing side has absolutely no moves left.
So in mid-December I set about trying to write my engine which I had decided to call Moby on account of the fact that the evaluation function measures mobility.
I didn’t start from scratch but from a previous well-documented engine called Vice which I partly rewrote and adapted over the course of a few weeks. It took me longer than expected, as my programming skills have grown a bit rusty.
I embarked on this adventure in the drab, gloomy days following the election, possibly as a means of distracting my thoughts from the prospect of 5 more years of Conservative government. And so, as each dreary, rain-sodden day was followed by the next, through long nights when every line I wrote seemed riddled with errors, I began to question whether the project was less a genuine investigation and more an attempt to prove that I had still got it when it comes to programming (or coding as it is called these days). And each night, as tiredness took a grip, I would take myself to bed only to lie, raking through the code in my head, in search of what was going wrong.
But I did get it working eventually and what a strange game of chess it played. For example, when considering positions in which a rook happened to have no immediate moves available (as is often true near the start of a game) it was quite happy to sacrifice it in order to let another piece move into a slightly more open position. It wasn’t all hopeless however; it would occasionally make a clever move. I began to see that some of the more ridiculous mistakes could be avoided by combining mobility with a simple count of the pieces remaining on the board.
So have I gone ahead and made this improvement? Well no — but I probably will. But that’s not the point right now because here the story takes a different turn.
I thought it might be a good idea to share my investigations with the world or, more precisely, the chess programming forum on a website called TalkChess, and so I submitted a contribution describing my approach and invited people to make comments. I had a number of responses the majority of which could be characterised as:
“That’s interesting but it’s unlikely to get you very far.”
Another person wanted to know what it was that had drawn me to such an austere choice of evaluation function to which I responded that it was largely aesthetic, or the appeal of seeing complex behaviour emerge from a simple rule.
But it was one of the later responses that I found most enlightening. A respondent from Germany (Gerd Isenberg) wrote:
“Maybe you aware that programs like Barricelli’s Freedom and Marsland’s Wita used mobility as the evaluation term.”
I replied that I was not aware of these programs, to which he replied
“Yes, the idea of using mobility in evaluation is old. Also note Slater’s ‘Statistics for the Chess Computer and the Factor of Mobility’ and the discussion with Alan Turing.”
My interest was immediately sparked by mention of Alan Turing, widely considered to be ‘the mother and father’ of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. The discussion referred to was documented under an item on Eliot Slater who, as well as having an interest in a chess playing machine, was mainly known as a psychiatrist with some questionable views on eugenics. Slater, it appears, felt that mobility was a key indicator of the strength of a chess position and suggested that a chess playing machine programmed to maximise its advantage in mobility would play a strong game - just as I was speculating.
To this, Alan Turing replied:
“Although the immediate mobility is a useful measure of the relative advantage of the players in normal play it by no means follows that it is wise to direct one's play to maximising such a measure. To do so would be like taking a statistical analysis of the laundry of men in various positions and deciding, from the data collected, that an infallible method of getting ahead in life was to send a large number of shirts to the wash each week.”
So that’s that - done and dusted. I’m not inclined to argue with Alan Turing and in any case his laundry simile, despite being somewhat quaint by today’s norms, is pretty deflating.
But the startling fact is that the discussion between Slater and Alan Turing took place 70 years ago, in 1950, at a time when the number of computers in the world could be counted on the fingers of one hand! The whole episode felt like an immense cycle that had taken an unexpected turn and had transported me back to the time of my birth. And despite the fact that my speculations appeared to have been thoroughly dispensed with around the time I was learning to walk, I was left with a feeling of quiet contentment - happiness even.
Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that the sun had begun to shine again, bringing a lightness in the air and the first intimations of spring.
Monday, January 20, 2020
A souvenir of Venice
Whenever I go on holiday for more than a day or two I like to seek out a special object, delicacy or suchlike to bring back home with me. If I go up to Lancashire, for example, there’s a very good chance I’ll come back with a black pudding. On one occasion, having been seduced by the intoxicating delights of Stockport covered market, I brought some tripe back, in the belief that some deep Lancashire part of me would instinctively know how to go about eating it .... it didn’t
Thinking further afield - each destination offers its own unique and fascinating souvenirs.
In Hong Kong you can buy a bottle of wine with a dead snake coiled up inside it. At first it might seem an ideal souvenir — at least until you have the presence of mind to realise that, in some desperate or tormented state, you might be driven to drink it.
Venice presents its own peculiar difficulties in the souvenir department. To kick-off, there are those carnival masks, ranging from a number of variations on the pale courtesan theme to that other slightly sinister one with a long, drooping proboscis - or is a beak? But then what would you honestly want to do with a carnival mask?
“I could wear it at parties” you find yourself thinking. But then you know for sure that, when it comes to it, it would never feel quite right. And what else is there to do with a pair of carnival masks other than to mount them at a jaunty tilt on either side of the chimney breast ?
No - the carnival masks won’t do.
Glass, maybe. Since the thirteenth century Venice has produced a steady stream of exquisite glassware - most of which has since been accidentally broken. Today the descendents of those early glassmakers churn out a dazzling variety of objects — mainly ghastly, except for the chandeliers which — you may confidently have it from me — are gorgeous. I briefly tormented myself with the thought that I really owed it to myself to buy a chandelier, despite the fact that they can cost as much as a decent secondhand car. This is in Venice, of course. I have since seen the selfsame items on-line for a fraction of the Venice price. But hey, hang on: this is beginning to sound like one of those conversations overheard whilst in the queue for passport control. I’m meant to be thinking about souvenirs and whether glass might do … and no, it won’t.
There are nice paper-style goods in Venice. There’s that lovely wrapping paper printed with Rococo designs and if I were to buy some, I would take it home and I would squirrel it away carefully; and later, after my death, my children would discover it and recount to others: “There were drawers and drawers full of exquisite Venetian wrapping paper. I don’t know whether he planned to do anything with it or whether he just enjoyed it for its beauty. It broke our hearts to take it to the recycling.”
So that’s the paper out as well.
In the end it was a hat.
Right from the start of our holiday, on the waterbus that carries you across the lagoon from the airport, I had noted that our driver was wearing an interesting woolly hat that would have been a perfect fit had his head been the shape of a rugby ball. As it was a normal head, the empty, surplus bit of hat was left to droop backwards in a manner that invoked images of generations of lagoon-dwellers, netting wildfowl on damp, misty mornings; of renaissance merchants and even Bellini's famous portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan (except in his case the spare bit is sticking up, suggesting there's a bit of cardboard inside it )
So the hat it had to be.
Finding it proved to be harder than I first imagined - the problem being, it wasn’t a tourist item. But then, having to track it down, scouring the outdoor markets and department stores that somehow manage to cling on to the less fashionable fringes of the city, lent the whole quest an extra level of romance. I found one at last, hanging outside a hardware store and costing a couple of euros and for the rest of our holiday enjoyed swaggering around the decks of vaporetti in the hope of being mistaken for a deckhand who had just finished his shift and was on his way home.
I still have it. It’s a nice hat.
Monday, October 28, 2019
The Embodiment of Architectural Space
In my architectural
work, I am aware of a number of private ‘instincts’ that I
repeatedly draw upon in reaching design decisions. This has been true
for some time and I have never given it much thought.
Recently however, I
found myself pondering on what these ‘instincts’ amount to and
whether there is a way of thinking about them. A key indicator was
the simple fact that successful designs are frequently those in which
people are presented with spaces that are rounded.
This led me to a
speculative model based on the idea that, when interacting with our
physical environment, our minds continually construct a hope or
expectation that is fulfilled to a greater or lesser extent by
our real world surroundings.
The fruits of these
speculations are contained in a longish essay: The Embodiment of
Architectural Space which I have just published on Medium.
I consider the ideas
I explore to be fairly radical – though naturally, you will
ultimately be the judge of that.
If you have 20
minutes to spare you can read it here:
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Snippets from America - a different kind of car
On the subject of cars, this is an Oldsmobile, Dynamic 88 convertible, spotted at the Olmsted Point pull-in overlooking Yosemite Valley. It is possible the late afternoon light had something to do with it but it was simply one of the most beautiful artefacts I have ever seen - a relic from a time long gone.
For those interested in details, you might note that it is graced with a fine set of furry dice.
For those interested in details, you might note that it is graced with a fine set of furry dice.
Snippets from America - road manners
Once we get back home from our holiday in the US I can see that we will need to watch our step on the roads - both as pedestrians and drivers - as we have grown accustomed over the past month to American road manners.
Of course most people, at different times, are both drivers and pedestrians, though to observe people’s behaviour on UK roads you’d never think it. In the UK it’s as if the category of road user you just don’t happen to be right now, suddenly becomes a figure to be feared or despised. When in the pedestrian mode, for example, we loathe drivers who lurch threateningly forwards the instant the lights have changed whilst, as drivers, we become enraged by pedestrians who have the misfortune to get in our way.
In the US the situation appears to be entirely different. It’s as if the contract between motorists and pedestrians has been rewritten. In towns, cars travel slowly and sedately along wide streets. Pedestrians don’t stray across the road, people wait for the ‘walk’ sign at crossings and in return motorists give way whenever it appears there is any doubt as to the right of way. It’s refreshing, civilised and (I imagine) safer.
Friday, September 13, 2019
Snippets from America - the last of the dinosaurs
As we travel across the American West (and much to Mrs. Wormwood’s embarrassment) I have taken to asking owners of giant cars if I can pose in front of their magnificent vehicles. They are invariably flattered and turn out to be the sweetest of people.
For those keen on technical facts, the black car above is a 6.7 litre Ford Superduty 350 pickup (fitted with the excursion modification). The elderly owner of this monster was quite small in stature and had some difficulty climbing in and out of the cab.
Snippets from America - learning from Las Vegas
Learning from Las Vegas is the title of a book published in 1972 by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. The three were teachers and research students at the Yale School of Art And Architecture and their book proved to be highly influential in defining architectural Postmodernism.
The position they took in analysing the Las Vegas is an interesting one. On the one hand, they appeared to be in agreement with everyone else that Las Vegas is the very epitome of artificiality, materialism and bad tasteand yet there was the accompanying view that, in the right hands,and with a generous measure of sophisticated irony the same superficiality and stylistic eclecticism might serve as the inspiration for a new architecture.
In time, the book came to bear architectural fruit not so much in Las Vegas itself but in the business centres of New York and the City of London. Architects were encouraged to consider crass environments like the Las Vegas Strip, and to distill from them both elements and methodologies that they would go on to apply in entirely different contexts. For an extreme example of this kind of transplantation there is probably no better example than the MI6 headquarters building on the south bank of the Thames.
During our own short trip to Las Vegas I was impressed by something quite different and that was the degree to which the various hotel-casinos along the strip - each of them representing some fabulous past culture or fantasy: Caesar’s Palace, the Luxor (ancient Egypt), the Venetian, Mandalay, Treasure Island - how, despite the crassness of these representation (where else could you see the Venice campanile, cheek by jowl with the Rialto Bridge?) how despite all of this, they genuinely succeed in creating an environment in which masses of people seem to enjoy something of the same ‘bread and circuses’ escapism enjoyed by the citizens of Ancient Rome.
So, for me, I am inclined to take Las Vegas on it’s own terms - or preferably not at all. We were there for less than 24 hours and, though it was an unforgettable experience, it was more than enough.
Monday, September 09, 2019
Snippets from America - National Forest typeface
We’re travelling in the USA and I was intending to write a number of blogs along I the way but there is something wrong with the blogger interface on the iPad which means you can’t see more than one page of text, so, rather than beat my head against a brick wall I have decided to keep my posts short. This will no doubt come as good news all round.
One of the first things I noticed on our travels was a simple typeface used on signs in the National Parks. When I saw this sign in the Sequoia National Forest it gave rise to a whole flood of memories and impressions. The style of lettering seems so familiar, old-fashioned and oddly reassuring and yet where do these memories originate? Could it have been in old, secondhand copies of the National Geographic magazine, pored over in dentists’ waiting rooms? Or was it in an old film from the 50s? Whatever the answer, it is one that is coloured in hues of Kodachrome.
One of the first things I noticed on our travels was a simple typeface used on signs in the National Parks. When I saw this sign in the Sequoia National Forest it gave rise to a whole flood of memories and impressions. The style of lettering seems so familiar, old-fashioned and oddly reassuring and yet where do these memories originate? Could it have been in old, secondhand copies of the National Geographic magazine, pored over in dentists’ waiting rooms? Or was it in an old film from the 50s? Whatever the answer, it is one that is coloured in hues of Kodachrome.
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