Antithetic.

In recent days, I've taken to visiting chatrooms and asking the inhabitants there how they know they are not striking up a conversation with a computer instead and not a human being.

Effectively, I am reversing the aims of the Turing test when I do this: instead of a piece of artificial intelligence trying to persuade a human subject that he or she is conversing with another human subject, I am a human endeavouring to convince another human that I am in reality a computer (pretending to be human.)

Strictly speaking, the aims of the Turing test are not actually reversed, because the correct setup requires three parties: a human subject (A) alone in a room; and subjects (B) - a human trying to convince (A) that (B) is human and (C) a computer programmed with some artifical intelligence code has the role of persuading (A) that (C) is a human subject and that (B) is not.

In the pared-down and reversed test that I've implemented, there are only two subjects - (A) and the negation of (C). The modulating influence of (B) is not present at all. Despite the omission, I assert that I would have passed the negation of the Turing test if I managed to convince a human subject that I am a computer (pretending to be human.)

I've failed to convince the chatroom (and instant messenger) inhabitants that the entity with whom (which?) they're communicating is a machine. Does this failure have any implications for those involved in getting a machine through the real Turing test? Common criticisms have been:

• sentence structure is too obviously written by a human
• fake error messages such as [text cannot be read at location n] and [string error] are
  
• evidently convoluted

I'd suggest that spelling mistakes at intermittent intervals and typical displays of human uncertainty - let me look up the answer to that; there's more than one way of thinking about the question you just posed - are necessary if not sufficient conditions for getting an artificial intelligence system through the test. A proliferation of error messages, however, seem to tip the opinion of the human subject into thinking that (B) is a human pretending to be a computer.

The paradoxical point I wish to make is that particular exaggerated human traits are enough to convince a subject that the conversationalist they cannot see is a computer. Perfect spelling, an exaggerated grasp of the tenets of a particular body of knowledge, making exhaustive lists of specific information - these three things suggest a other-worldliness which can only be embodied by a machine.

L.

It seemed quite natural to state that everything I write after an arbitrary point in time should have your fingerprints on it; that from now I put together strings of letters that have you as their engine. That now is akin to a magical invocation, a discontinuity. Any passing stranger should be able to note as much. In the former, we are aware of the stammering inability to describe in a comprehensible way thought processes and events. With a shake of a head and a dismissive click of the mouth we can reject what has gone before as the rantings of a bloody amateur. Ah, in hindsight it's so easy to criticise the lack of a thesis! Whoever the anonymous blogger is, the one who describes himself as the fusion of man and weblog, deserves to be castigated for a lack of scope and the inevitable jump from idea to idea to idea without ever pinning down even one of them. At Christmas 2008, something happened to synthesise the disparate voices of this author, or to dampen down all but one of them. Like tuning the static and the unwanted banter of disc jockeys and news programmes out of a desired radio broadcast, there was not unity but a singularity which had been promised, but unforthcoming, for years. Details of the event that cancelled the separated-out murmurs and brought clarity and purpose are not easy to come by. Some accounts suggest it was a woman with the initial L; some suggest the marking of someone's birthday; some both or neither. It led, though, to a period of creativity which defined the symbiotic relationship between blogger and blog - and, ironically, led to his uprooting from the blogosphere and into mainstream writing. Romantics will invariably accept the line that a woman - and only a woman - was able to claim responsibility for the surge in directed, coherent output. Such a female, her identity only ever guessed at but not recorded in a way which might lead to her presenting a world which has its breath held with her story, has been one of the classic vehicles of literary history, carrying a multitude of men forward upon the simulacrum of her smile or her voice. Her lack of a name, her lack of an image and a background means that any and all writers can project their own vision of her; there exists within her at once the infinity of the creative devastation she inspires and the emptiness of the idea that nothing which can ever be produced by a mortal can anywhere near match what has already been churned out by the random calculations and brute force of natural selection. It had been asserted in his earlier writings that the fusion of man and weblog had long eschewed the idea of a religious divinity. Imagine, then, his isolation when he was forced to conclude that his muse was the consequence of no more than a bag of genes being shaken up and drawn into the tactile world, and this combination shall henceforth be known as L. Such is the dilemma of every agnostic - why should there exist great beauty, great hope and the inevitable destruction or re-evaluation of values caused by such great beauty and great hope ex nihilo? On your birthday, the universe temporarily ceases to spit out the numbers which are the result of its calculations, and turns its face of close to absolute zero upon itself to briefly contemplate the troubles of the little humans who arrived out of the blue on one of the average planets in a region lablled the Solar System. For those weary, slight beings, the innocuous glance of a woman from the long-dead moment of a photograph is enough to cause them to suspend everything bar the lonely pursuit of the slightly drunken face that pushes itself into view during sleep, during the half-alive moments which signal the end of sleep, and during waking hours.

Illness.

What probability is there that I've been suffering with an affliction for the whole of my life, and it has never been diagnosed?

That is not diagnosed; not mis-diagnosed or partially diagnosed, but completely overlooked. What are the chances of that happening? And after three decades of staring into a bottomless shaft with seemingly no explanation for why I am so detached, so sad, what prospect of fixing it in order that I might latch onto some sort of normality?

It's been suggested, in a non-malicious conversation, that I might be suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, a mish-mash condition comprising, amongst other things, poor social interaction; stereotyped behaviour; physical clumsiness and atypical use of language. (Thankyou, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger%27s_syndrome)

Okay. Let's go through those four things one at a time and see what evidence we can exhume from your author's personal history. Whilst accepting that singular occurrences do not, individually. provide irrefutable evidence of their hypothesis, they do mean that the hypothesis (that I might have Asperger's) cannot be rejected without further investigation.

• poor social interaction: silence or near-silence around people I don't know. Unease or discomfort escalating to outright hostility: I chose to work a night on my own with no transport home last Easter rather than face attending the office's annual social event. There was a three-hour wait for a train home after my shift, but I stayed back alone at my desk, drinking tea and reading; I couldn't bring myself to talk to the man next to me at the football to begin with despite our common interest; every girlfriend I have ever had has commented on how aloof I am.
• stereotyped behaviour: I have a number of repeated, intrustive, irrelevant thoughts. I mentioned on here before how I had rituals which had to be completed to prevent the house burning down or the death of a loved one.
• physical clumsiness: I can't ride a two-wheeled bicycle; I can't judge the pressure I'm exerting on the pedals of a car - meaning I have never passed the test; I am uncoordinated when hitting at a ball with either a bat or my hands. I played tennis on a frequent basis with an ex-partner. The racket slashed around at thin air, far more often than it made contact with the ball.
• atypical use of language: okay, not so strong here. I did pick up foreign languages very quickly when at school, and am doing so again now I've decided to re-learn them. I don't neologise often, though.

So there is some evidence which might back up the suggestion. Additionally, in an online test - again, I agree that its signficance is spurious as a singularity - I 'scored' 33 out of 50, when likelyAsperger's sufferers are expected to record 32.

What started as an innocent conversation, then, has the potential to frame a lifetime which has been full of nerves and misery for as long as I am able to recall. Now I must take the post-Christmas trip to the doctor and find out whether there's anything at all in it beyond tilting at windmills.

Queneau (2).

I remember the amazement it caused here in March 2009 when Parliament passed a law stating that every female user of public transport had to have a seat at all times.

Of course, there had been a not inconsiderable amount of public disorder in the very early part of the year: police turning a blind eye when dissenters who refused to shift took a beating; transport companies agitating to the Press that they'd need to order fleet after fleet of new vehicles with more seats - and how were they expected to do that in these austere economic times?

The British administration, though, was stubbornly unbending. Cross-party unity for once held, as though the whole lot of them had been gripped by madness or disease. The leader of the third-biggest party, in a moment of rare public exposure, declared that the need for new legislation exposed a majority of British men as a 'plague of chauvinists 'who should 'loathe themselves for their outdated attitude towards women.'

Even though Polly Toynbee in the Guardian accused the government of populism and sexism, rolling back the prevailing view of women to somewhere in the 14th century, nothing could stop the legislation as it travelled on its infinite bed of ice.

It had all kicked off the previous December when an unshaven little runt on a train going to Sheffield - he could never have known he was about to divert the course of British society - refused to stand up for a woman who'd just boarded. A ruffian (who had a face like a potato, God help him!) took issue with the little runt and ragged his glasses from his face.

Runty complained to the train company, and it ended up making the papers as these things do. When one of the opposition members passed an early day motion congratulating the aggressor for upholding old-fashioned English values, it started a run on the chauvinistic and un-English on public transport.

Several of these ignoramuses got slapped about for what was seen as a lack of chivalry. It's pushing it to claim that the hospitals were overflowing with casualties, but admissions to casualty wards had certainly spiked. Credit has to go to the red-tops, who stopped fanning the flames and pleaded for some diplomacy and common sense.

It was an editorial in The Sun on the last day in February 2009 which was the seed for legislation to be brought in. In an article headlined 'Enough is enough,' it went on to say that 'violence is no answer to an age-old problem. Both sides must agree to disagree. If not, then only the lawlords can bring this to an end with their big stick.'

With that, Parliament rushed through a bill declaring the indivision of women and public transport seating facilties. I can recall the astonishment and disgust I felt at such a retrograde, abysmal pace back into the dark, misognystic history of this nation.

Thirty.

Today happens to be my 30th birthday - in years gone by I always suggested the occasion would be a tipping point.

It has been a recurring theme in recent years that if, by the time I turned 30, at least some of my ambitions had not been fulfilled, I might as well end my life. If I'm not writing consistently, and not forcing people to sit up and take notice of what I have to say, then there is a negligible reason for continuing to exist.

When all I am capable of is writing badly, I might as well not be here at all. So goes the mind of the ambitious twenty-something, his creativity choked by the density of his own wishes. I can't write because I want to write too much, and end up doing nothing whatsoever.

I'd made my own death into a fine art. Like Sylvia Plath, I would commit myself to the gas cooker and let it ease me into sleep. I can't speak like you, but I can unravel myself in the same way. Plath's vast fire was extinguished by the pitiless squeezing exerted by a fist in full view of a cynical and delighted audience; my little light would be switched off with no fanfare at all.

The obvious hit me one night when I was coming home on the train after having had too much to drink: Plath died as she did in an act of vengeance towards her German father. He was taken away from her all too soon, so she succumbed like a Second World War Jew, in her own gas chamber. I too wanted to make an ironic statement: the one who seldom looked up to anybody would be taken away in the same manner as the woman I had idolised.

By now, though, it is blindingly obvious that I don't have the necessary resolve to take my own life: I'm either too much of a coward, or I've developed the (mistaken or not) conviction that there remains some Eben-inspired golden future that makes it worth hanging around for. If all gods and prophets were like Eben, humanity could consign suicide to a historical footnote.

This 30-year-old carries with him a string of failed relationships, each one a car-crash of a disaster. They lag behind me, obvious and irrefutable, like a giant prehensile tail which knocks the hope out of any future ones which might arise. I want to write about you, all of you, in eponymous blog titles, and I shall get around to doing so at some point. On my birthday, the day when I arranged to die yet continue to live, I reflect how culpable I am in the shattering of n relationships.

Prophecy.

One afternoon many years ago in England, a prophet, firebrand and lightning rod whose name was Eben stood atop the biggest hill in one of the towns and began to dispense his wisdom.

Eben had drank God, and God flowed through his veins and stimulated his vocal cords. A crowd had gathered at the brow of the hill, a rivulet at first and then an escalating throng as word got around that the day of Eben had arrived.

Such a punctuation in the lives of the townspeople had long been predicted - it was written down in the Book of Forces, and the Book had never yet been known to have erred as it directed the people along their deterministic path. It was December of 2008, and the Book of Forces had indicated that Eben would assimilate his fire in the town in January of 2009 or perhaps February.

Eben looked down from his height and prepared to address the collective. With his arms extended at right angles to his body, he began to speak - shout - his voice attenuating the hum his presence had caused. At his command the sky darkened and the wind was silenced on his hilltop ampitheatre. He resembled a great, threatening bird with his outstretched arms.

"Hear me!" he cried, "for I drank God through a straw before I came unto you, and then I made day into night.

"I am charged with the electricity of the godhead, and I speak to you here of the future - your future - which I have seen.

"The Book!" he exclaimed, and the conversation of the masses died on their lips with that utterance. "The Book of Forces.... this is the arrow which takes you from today, and directs you remorselessly into the future. Its sentiment has torn down the present, and shifted your every hope and glory into the distant future, far beyond your own puny lives' duration.

"In exchange for the uprooting of your purpose, the godhead of the Book assures you of eternal redemption, and a place in perpetuity with him upon the cutting of your mortal ties."

Queneau (1).

To whom it may concern,

I'm writing to tell you about an incident on one of your services Friday gone, at about a quarter to nine in the morning.

There was a set-to between two men - it was the Sheffield train, obviously! - who started on each other when one wouldn't give up his seat for a woman.

The one who wouldn't stand up, a little squirt, said that the woman was okay enough on her feet
so he wasn't about to abandon a perfectly good seat. The other guy - he had a head shaped like a spud, God help him - called this runt disgrace and a bastard, and tried to separate him from his specs. What larks!

I'll tell you something, the little rat didn't like it up him! Fancy not moving - for a woman! He called old vegetable-face some choice names, and no mistake. On a train! To Sheffield! You'd never believe it!

Everyone was watching to see if Ratty would say something else and get his head taken off, but he just sat there reading The Guardian. What a fop! The Guardian! And all the while that poor cow's having to stand up!

It all simmered down after that, and spud-face didn't lay him out when they both got off at Sheffield, even though he'd said he was going to kill him. I saw that little ingrate about a couple of hours later, coming out of a sandwich shop.

Yours sincerely,

R. Queneau.

Barnsley.

The early hours of Saturday morning.

At times I need a glass of schnapps; the bloodstream which viscously descends along my throat and acts as an analgesic; the tether which precludes me from looking into the very depths of the abyss.


It's out-of-character for me to want alcohol, let alone allow myself to be seduced by it. For the moment I shall hold off and see how I feel in a little while.


A chance conversation earlier reminded me that there are some things from which a person does not recover. This is a thesis of my existence: the memories of events fade sufficiently for them to become manageable, but their complete oblation is impossible.


We speak colloquially about the shock of an occurrence needing to be given sufficient time before it 'sinks in.' I speak now of one event, though, which 'sank in' with immediacy despite the dizziness of its deliverance. Any subsequent delay only served to lodge it fast in my brain, like a bullet.

It was my father who pulled the trigger on the day when he decided to leave my mother. He didn't die, but from that point he has been more-or-less dead to me.


In this way of speaking, then, my father came to be defined - is - a series of events that I did not witness and can only imagine. I only saw, and dealt with, their aftermath. _____________________________________________________________________

Saturday night.

I left the alcohol alone in the end and eventually went into an uneasy, twitching sleep. I dreamt of falling through a cat's cradle of electrical cables, dark and fizzing. There was no end to the falling, no bottom.

The day after my father went - I say 'went' because the euphemism prevents me having to crack open the surface of the unspeakable and bear witness to the wounds beneath - he dropped me off in town ahead of one of the football matches. It's still the only occasion I have ever seen him cry, his head bowed and the shell of his battered blue car surrounding him.

It was January 17, 1998, and Barnsley were about halfway through their only season in the top division in England. We were playing Crystal Palace who, amazingly, were even worse than us. When a crisis of life-changing proportions happens, it is in my nature to seek solace in the trivial and the disposable. So the day after my father confessed his love for another woman, my attention was focused on sending Palace back home with nothing.

What sort of a person does this make me? A person who, when real life is whirling all around me, immerses himself in banality. I wanted the volume of the crowd to diminutise the screaming in my head. If you can't switch it off then overwhelm it.

Oh, Barnsley. How many times have I invoked you like a religion and asked you to deliver a result so that some epidemic or other might be tempered, at least for the moment? You haven't always succeeded, but I'd like to think that you've always tried. On this occasion, I note, you did deliver - without cheating and checking the archive websites, I think it was an Ashley Ward penalty in the 34th minute.

I probably balled my fists together and screamed at the sky when the final whistle went, a shout of triumph pushing back the day-old clouds which had gathered. Then it was back to check on the mental state of my mother. She had swept the glassy pieces of herself into the corner of the room and was looking at me through a bottle of wine. At least she'd survived the afternoon, though.

Height.

Humans sometimes think that our species represents the acme of evolution as it stands now, and perhaps forever.

What sort of achievements might we set out as evidence that we are indeed the pinnacle of all life that has ever existed? Like bad anthropologists, might we be making the basic mistake that what represents a glorious achievement for a human mind doesn't commute across cultural boundaries?

Are technological or scientific advancements the manifestation of the highest height - the realisation that the quantum exists; the creation of computers which deal in teraflops; the genetic alteration of crops or animals? Is it that we've derived religion - placing the responsibility for our own lives into the hands of distant, notional gods?

Is it literature or art or poetry - or any combination of the things I have mentioned? The fact that words can be disseminated en masse as a consequence of technological development? The fact that words relating to the practice of evidence-based, scientifically-sound medical techniques can be disseminated en masse?

Could it be 'nothing more than' carrying out an act of which no other species is capable? So the 'mere' erection of a tower block; the formal notation of a piece of music or set of laws or instructions; the re-shaping of the surface of the earth by non-natural processes; the proliferation of artificial lighting.

Am I justified in stating that the inventor of the first light bulb has already transcended anything that any other species might conceivably do? Is the notional height of the lightbulb, the machine gun and the printing press irrefutable evidence of the looming stature of homo sapiens?

It's something that's been bothering me for much of the day and, as ever, I'm not sure there's a definitive answer. Even the capacity for such reflection might arguably supercede anything a non-human can in principle carry out.