Lucy the Chatbot

Chatbots are there to help us to navigate various online services. Where as before this would be a role for a human ,either face to face or over a telephone, modern technology has given us the ability to out source this role to artificial intelligence. We as biological entities like to believe we are talking to our "own", rather than some cold construct of computer code. Chatbots are designed to mimic humans and make us feel at ease using technology by modeling the homo sapiens social programming of a two way interaction with another homosapien

Lucy is a chatbot. She works for O2 and is very pleased to help you.
You can ask Lucy questions, and she will give you a respone.
Asking her about mobile phones makes her happy.

Sometimes people are rude to Lucy. She registers her displeasure with you by telling you off and by having a sad face/stern face.

No worries, because as soon as you get the subject around to mobile phones again Lucy forgets how angry and disappointed she was with you, and becomes happy again.

It seems that talking about mobile phones can produce a response of extreme pleasure, big enough to forget about a previous indesgression. Either that or Lucy is zen, living in the moment unfettered by her past, uncorncerned with the future. For Lucy she just exsists  for giving out advice and facts about mobile phones.
Lucy's behaviour could be described as a true bi-polar personality. For Lucy there are only two states of emotion, happy or sad. A very odd state of affairs, but one that is designed to make us feel that we are dealing with a true personality, making the experience of asking a machine a question more human.


to find more chatbots look here.

David Cope and Emily

reprinted from the observer sunday 11 June

David Cope: 'You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas'

Composer David Cope has spent the last 30 years teaching computers to create classical music

David Cope at work in his California home. Photograph: Catherine Karnow for the Observer

 

Where does music come from? If pressed on this question, many of us would say it comes from the "soul", or from the "heart" of the person who composed it. That music is the clearest expression of human emotion, one person to another; that certain chords, certain melodies seem to communicate a whole language of feeling. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Chopin sonata, we are hearing, we might say, the authentic expression of the composer's inner harmonies and discords, carried magically across the centuries. Could we ever be so moved by a piece of music written by a computer? We'd probably like to think not. David Cope, emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would beg to differ. "The question," Cope tells me, "isn't if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one."
Cope, now 69, has devoted the past 30 years of his life to what amounts to an obsessive examination of that particular question. He began, almost by default, back in 1980, with a severe case of writer's block. One of America's most acclaimed young composers, whose music had been performed at Carnegie Hall, and won great critical praise, Cope had been commissioned to write an opera. For weeks and months he sat at his piano, or stared at a blank piece of sheet music; nothing came. He had a wife and four children to support. In desperation he started playing with a computer.
What he found there changed his life and, perhaps, the course of musical history. Cope had long held the belief that all music was essentially inspired plagiarism. The great composers absorbed the music that had gone before them and their brains "recombined" melodies and phrases in distinctive, sometimes traceable, ways. We all have an internal database of musical reference; composers were those with the ability to manipulate it in new patterns. With the aid of an early computer, he realised he could put this to the test.
His first experiments with artificial musical intelligence were clunky, synthesised pieces, pastiches of easily identifiable work; but slowly, programming and reprogramming, inputting vast amounts of coded reference, he came to see how he might begin to shape a musical memory. The Eureka moment came one afternoon in 1983 after he had been working for a while trying to take apart and put back together chorales (four-part vocal hymns) in the style of JS Bach. He had a rules-based program, complicated and code-heavy, but it never produced anything approaching life or surprise.
That afternoon, on the way to the local store, he came to realise that Bach didn't exist in his predictability, but in the minute, multiple places where he broke his own rules, where he defied expectation of a particular progression. Cope developed "a little analytical engine" that could insert some randomness within the predictability. He began to analyse Bach's music not just mathematically but with a sense of narrative tension and surprise, weighting different components according to his own feel for the music's "storytelling" power. His program, at this point, seemed to develop a personality of its own; "Experiments in Musical Intelligence" became Emmy. When fed with enough of a composer's work, Emmy could deconstruct it, identify signature elements, and recombine them in new ways. One day Cope pushed a button on Emmy, went out to get a sandwich and when he returned his workaholic creation had produced 5,000 original Bach chorales. In 1993, Cope released an album, Bach by Design, and waited for the response.
When you listen to that album now – and those that followed, including Virtual Mozart and, triumphantly, Virtual Rachmaninoff, you are discomfited and surprised in equal measure. Cope's work is far more than copying, it carries the recognisable DNA of the original style and fashions it into something recognisable but entirely new. The musical establishment reacted at first with alarm, and then with vitriol. Cope found it difficult to get any serious musicians to play Emmy's work, though it made many of the same demands as the "real thing". Critics convinced themselves that they heard no authentic humanity in it, no depth of feeling, Cope was characterised as a composer without a heart; his recent memoir is called Tin Man.
One of the problems that the music highlighted was the fact that in Cope's terms, the music of Mozart, say, was endless in its possibilities. As he suggested when I spoke to him last week: "Because my program was continuing to pump out music like a spigot, it became a problem of: 'Why play this sonata and not that one?'" Cope has no doubt that Mozart in particular, with his structural genius, would – if he'd had the means – have utilised computerised intelligence in exactly the same way. When you remove the "human" element of the work, however, Cope recognised, you also lose a great deal of its urgency. "When you had the database figured out it was really a one-stroke deal: you pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas or whatever."
He realised that what made a composer properly understandable, properly "affecting", was in part the fact of mortality. Composers had to die, and the ending made sense of what had gone before. With this in mind, Cope unplugged Emmy six years ago; her work – which he limited to 11,000 chosen pieces, was done. Emmy – housed on an ancient Power Mac 7500 (discontinued in 1996) now sits idle in the corner of his office. Cope has subsequently been at work, nurturing Emmy's "daughter", Emily Howell, (the first name from her mother, the second from the Christian name of Cope's own father) with whom he has a far more "equal" relationship.
Emily Howell has a compendious memory that involves an intimate understanding of the works of 36 composers "starting with Palestrina, [an Italian court musician of the 16th century] and ending with David Cope in the 21st century". Their output is far more collaborative than that of Emmy. Cope will ask Emily a musical question, feeding in a phrase. Emily will respond with her own understanding of what happens next. Cope either accepts or declines the formula, much in the way he would if he was composing "conventionally".
"It is," he says, "a bit like dealing with a small child; the program is an empty pot and I dribble small bits of music into it, and it responds to what I have put in… it's a process of carrots and sticks, really. I think it is producing good results but it takes a lot of time."
Cope's ambitions remain exactly what they were, when, as an asthmatic child in Phoenix, Arizona, he was moved to wonder by Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and knew he had to be a composer himself. "My two goals are an original style and to create something I love," he says. "The program is a cat not a dog, it keeps itself to itself, you can't take it for walks. I can only generally pick it up and point it in the direction that I want it to go…"
Emily Howell's first album, From Darkness, Light, composed in six movements and performed on two pianos, was released earlier this year. It was met largely with silence; the critics who were moved to respond did so with the usual sniffy constructs about "an absence of genuine humanity". Cope remains undaunted.
"People tell me they don't hear soul in the music," he says. "When they do that, I pull out a page of notes and ask them to show me where the soul is. We like to think that what we hear is soul, but I think audience members put themselves down a lot in that respect. The feelings that we get from listening to music are something we produce, it's not there in the notes. It comes from emotional insight in each of us, the music is just the trigger."
Emily is still a work in progress for Cope. He thinks she is getting towards a mature style. "Five years from now I believe she will really be somewhere," he says.
It must be a curious process, like watching an external mind working, I suggest. What has it taught him about himself? "Two things. That the mechanisms of the brain are incredibly simple, but that its ability to create extraordinary complexity should constantly amaze us."
Will Emily survive him? "She needs a provocateur," Cope says, "but then so do humans. You cannot create music without reference to other music. Like us, she needs to be turned on to something."
He can't imagine the possibility of going back to writing with just his own intuition and a pen and paper. "The programs are just extensions of me. And why would I want to spend six months or a year to get to a solution that I can find in a morning? I have spent nearly 60 years of my life composing, half of it in traditional ways and half of it using technology. To go back would be like trying to dig a hole with your fingers after the shovel has been made, or walking to Phoenix when you can use a car."
When he began, though he was confident that what he was embarking on represented the future, Cope felt all the loneliness of the pioneer. Now, he suggests there is a growing interest in the possibilities. Not least the commercial ones. He was recently approached by a headline pop band – he won't say which – to see whether Emily could be persuaded to produce some hits. Though "recombining" elements of popular music is a court case in the making, there has, he suggests, not surprisingly been an enormous interest in creating music for ringtones and for games. "In the next 10 years," Cope says, "what I call algorithmic music will be a mainstay of our lives."
The perception that we might identify the particular musical combinations that stir our individual souls suggests many other potential applications. Until now online music stores have based recommendations for future purchases on what a customer has bought before, but Cope's kind of musical analysis suggests a more intimate understanding of our particular desert island discs might be possible. It was reported last month that separate teams of researchers at universities in San Diego and in São Paulo are refining different ways of analysing musical genres and rhythms, to enable predictions of what we are likely to buy to be far more precise (see panel below).
If music can be reduced to formulae and equations, does it begin to undermine notions of what music might mean to us? Douglas Hofstadter, author of the key book on the fundamentals of cognition, Gödel, Escher, Bach, has long lectured on the implications of Cope's work in understanding how the mind – and music – works. "In 20 years of working in artificial intelligence," he says, he has encountered "nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope's experiments." Hofstadter has distilled his thoughts on Cope's work into a full-length lecture performed in rhyme that begins with a question that might prove fundamental to future understanding of composition:
Is music a craft
Or is it an art?
Does it come from mere training
or spring form the heart?
Did the études of Chopin
reveal his soul's mood?
Or was Frédéric Chopin
Just some slick "pattern dude"?
Hofstadter is very fond of Cope's remark that "Good artists borrow, great artists steal," though he is troubled that some of the mysteries of the creative process might be lost along the way, and with them a part of our understanding of what it means to be human. Cope, for his part, retains all of his sense of wonder at the composers – geniuses of recombination – who have gone before. Does he still dream of creating a masterpiece? I wonder.
He says he has no idea what that word means.
Have Emmy and Emily at least short-circuited the angst and musical block that led him to create them in the first place?
"No," he says. "Not at all. I still get anxious and despairing. It never turns out as well as I hope it will. Every morning I wake up with the notion that I have failed at everything and I have to create some reason to exist." He and Emily then get back to work.

an example can be heard here

But is it art? Our classical music critic gives her verdict

So far, my acquaintance with the works of Emily Howell is limited. It's unlikely to get further. Listening to YouTube clips, I had to force my finger away from the "cancel" button. The repetition of silken arpeggiated chords, set against a simple melody, had the uneasy feel of dining with waxworks: all the key ingredients without the breath of humanity.
Computers have been used for musical ends since the 1950s, first on the Ferranti Mark 1, the IBM 704, the Moog and so on. Boulez built his entire Ircam research lab in Paris to harness music to technological innovation. But there the intention has been to enable composers of genius to venture into new, unimagined worlds of sound. Emily's software, instead, is enabling bad composers to imitate familiar idioms for their own pleasure. One day, it may do more. It's not a crime, but nor is it art. Fiona Maddocks

The beat goes on: programs that analyse our musical tastes

Would you trust the musical tastes of a computer? If you're shopping on Amazon, it's one thing to know that "customers who bought this item also bought..." whatever that might be. Internet radio station Last.fm and similar outfits such as mflow work by building profiles of their users' tastes and then cross-referencing that data: they're social networking services for music lovers.
Pandora Radio works on yet a different principle. This US-only music recommendation service was dreamed up by trained jazz pianist Tim Westergreen, who started what he calls the Music Genome Project a decade ago. This involves an attempt to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" through the identification of 400 musical attributes that describe any song.
The project's analysts study individual songs (a process that takes up to half an hour) and note their characteristics: for instance, perhaps the vocal is a bit squeaky, a la Lady Gaga (left), or perhaps it's more the sort of tenor growl employed by Tom Jones. Pandora can then serve up something with similar qualities; it now has 700,000 songs in its library.
Such a system still relies on human opinion, of course. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, think such services could be improved by actually teaching computers the rudiments of music, according to a recent report in New Scientist.
Luke Barrington, a researcher in artificial intelligence, is building software that can analyse a piece of music and distil information about it that may be useful for software trying to compile a playlist. Drawing on this information and using tricks employed in speech recognition technology, the software can then assign the music a genre or even give it more subjective descriptions, such as whether or not a track is "funky", Barrington says. Caspar Llewellyn Smith

The characters and neural networks

The characters society is based, on part on neural networks. Neural networks exists in the brain, its how the brain cells connect with each other, how the mechanism of thinking work.
These can of be modeled in computers, not exactly, but close enough to give similar results. When used on a computer neural networks are called activation units.

Traditional computers work serially,no matter how fast they work, the process they compute still happen one after another. For instance the sum (4+5) + (6+8) is worked out as a three step process, first 4+5 are added,then 6+8, and finally both the results are added together.
Neural networks work in parallel, imagine them as loads of independent people working together rather than one person working in steps. In a parallel system 4+5 and 6+8 are worked out at the same time,then the results are added, effectively a two stage process.
If you imagine a computer as a room with a single bloke in it. When information comes in, for instance a picture of a horse, the bloke in the room looks up in a reference book,

step one Animal, vegetable or mineral?
step two Mammal,reptile,insect,bird?
step three how many legs?
step four how big is it.......and so on......

Eventually after all the search criteria has been followed the bloke reduces the information down to being a horse and sends the information out.
Alternatively a neural network could be imagined as a room with loads of blokes in it hanging around. When information comes in, the picture of a horse, something different happens. Each one of the blokes is an expert in a different field. One is really good at identifying colours, one is really into animals, one is really into the number four, one recognises sizes. A bit like when people can identify trains by their sound,or remembers all the different types of car. All at once the fellows recognise different aspects of the horse and come to a consensus weather the legs belong to a horse rather than a chair, as the animal guy knows its a horse, and the colour guy knows its brown, and so on. The knowledge is shared out to different points and processed.

A bit like how knowledge is shared by many different people over the (idealized) internet,no one is an expert but using knowledge as a collective force we can pool our resources and find out more stuff.
I can see parallels here on how we organise our lives, shops sell one type of product, if you need specialist advice to go to a specialist shop, not the supermarket,where it may be available but doesn't have the knowledge base. If specialist shops get to diversified the specific knowledge about one thing gets diluted. Thats why polymaths are not all that common, if people specialise in two subjects they are generally related.

Train spotters, English civil war enthusiast, real ale experts all reflect knowledge nodes, that when seen in isolation as sad enthusiasts but seen together as a solid knowledge database of the world as a whole.
We are a parallel species father than a serial species, we need the farmer, the farmer needs the industrialist.

The characters could be seen as very idiosyncratic neural network nodes. They have a knowledge base but either the knowledge base is wonky (the character that just wants to collect all the objects in the world, without knowing what they are) or what they do with it is wonky (such as the shopper character who looks up products and relates them together by weight rather than type of product). We follow the characters as they negotiate through life through using their knowledge base

Doug's game of life





Doug is a character based on Conways Game Of Life . Doug genrates a celluar pattern from an initial state and uses this to create music. Doug is modeled on a Biological algorithm and uses this to navigate life, Being a "biological algorithm" requires Doug to a sleep for 8 hours a day, which makes it difficult for him to actually be used. Ella the artist spends quite a lot of the time trying to wake him up.
Biological algorithms also produce other side effects, doug could die, requiring a doug volume 2, or a doug volume 3 and so on.
 The gaps in Dougs processing reflects the way we deal with the world, after an 8 hour sleep Doug carries on with what he was doing before in a very linear pattern. Although we can be get so angry about a situation,causing humans to go on to the streets to riot  our basic biological programing eventually kicks in requiring us to sleep, in the morning the anger returns.


As dougs cells evolve they trigger behaviours that change the composition. Each cell is given and attribute which is triggered when the cell is activated.
The cells act as individuals adding their influence to the composition. The cells have a variety of different roles.
The cells have two different roles providing memes which the music utilises, or to provide feed back on the memes changing them slighty producing a composition of constant flow of evolving  textures.
When doug stops evolving, or loops his state , doug dies ,and the music stops. One of the main set backs modelling something biologically is that they are always doomed to died.
 Doug can produce a confused mass of screaming voices or a choir of angels singing in the praise of syncro-no-city, the cells role are to create trends and copy, no matter how beautiful or ugly they may be. Dougs purpose is just to produce constant change, to add to the noise . What his cells copy is irrelevant to them, they are only interested in following the latest meme and improvising on it. monkey see monkey do.
Doug doesn't see the point of this, endlessly producing stuff just to produce stuff. He is tired and depressed about his situation, all he wants to do is sleep, at least he gets a break from being worked to death. The start of doug is the end of doug. Even death isn't an escape. A new doug is resurrected different from the last, but by still using the same algorithms, is doomed to repeat the same mistakes of the previous Doug. like Escher's never ending stairs Doug is forever working his way out of a looped maze . Doug is very aware of this, thats another problem using biologically modelled programs, developing the illusion of free will leads to depression,


heres doug doing his thing




Doug's audio engine consists of the following specification.

Doug use 6 fm synthesisers, and eight channels of feedback.
the fm synths have a variety of sounds , the sounds can be bought up in volume and stereo effects applied. Also the sound can pass through a variety of audio effects

They produce patterns by having a bag of notes that are disturbed in a controled random manner with a random percentage of spaces and a random quantise applied.
a controlled random octave, at which the notes play, and a controlled random number of sequenced steps controls how the riff meme is developed. The audio engine's tempo can also be controlled by doug. The synthesiser can be started and stopped also with conrolled random conditions.
These notes then can be modulated by a chord appreciator, using a variety of chords.
Each one of the six synths can be applied a pattern which can be unique or be a varient/same as one of the others.
The synth sounds are then effected by the feed back engine. The feed back engine is a granular synthesiser. An audio buffer, (which can or may not be related to the bpm, causing dissonance) , is split up into an equal number of pieces and the individual pieces, played back in order, can have a behaviour applied to them, as it's an audio sample its pitch can be changed, it can be turned backwards,have volume or stereo effects applied to it, repeated, passed through effects units ,or the order can be randomised .
The resulting effect is that which ever "meme" is being operated on a new variant is produced.
There are also controls to halt the changing of controls.

each cell can control one or more of these variables, the community really gets involved.   


Examples of Dougs compositions can be found here


Game of life

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a widely known example of a cellular automaton. here's is an example, ripped form wiki, (you might recognise the text from here)


The "game" is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:


  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
  2. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
  3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.


The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one).
The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

Ever since its publication, Conway's Game of Life has attracted much interest, because of the surprising ways in which the patterns can evolve. Life provides an example of emergence and self-organization. It is interesting for physicists, biologists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, generative scientists and others to observe the way that complex patterns can emerge from the implementation of very simple rules. The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that "design" and "organization" can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway's Life "universe" extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe.


Julia the artist

Julia the artists exsists to create interventions in the lives of the other characters, to encourage them to make art works to express how they feel.
Julia asks the character to make a piece of music, a poem or a visual piece of art. The characters respond by using any material they might have gathered from the internet (words,audio or pictures), and make art using a variety of self generative processes, guided by their personalities.
For instance T.V tank might make poetry from television reviews, or a piece of music by using audio recorded from his favourate program, or a piece of expressionist art from clips of television programs or pictures of his favorite t.v personalities. Julia wants to encourage him to step away from his all encompassing urge to watch television. Indeed all of the characters art is therapy in some way or another, Mr Acker can work through his anger issues from engrossing himself in artistic practice.

Julia personality and rules of engagement are based upon the prionciples expressed in the book "The artist way" by Julia Cameron.


heres the blurb......
With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive 12-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.
This book links creativity to spirituality by showing how to connect with the creative energies of the universe, and has, in the four years since its publication, spawned a remarkable number of support groups for artists dedicated to practising the exercises it contains.
The book contains a 12 step program the artist follows over 12 weeks which is designed to free then of negative blocks in order to unleash creativity.
The book contains anecdotes,reflections  and affirmations for artists as well as excises in artistic practice , and valuable questions for would be artists to ask themselves to aid them on the way to self discovery. Here is an example of some creative affirmations.......
  1. I am a channel for God's creativity, and my work comes from good.
  2. My dreams come from god and god has the power to accomplish them.
  3. As I create and listen, I will be led.
  4. Creativity is the creators will for me.
  5. My creativity heals myself and others.
  6. I am allowed to nurture my artist
  7. Through the use of a few simple tools, my creativity will flourish.
  8. Through the use of creativity, I serve god.
  9. My creativity always leads me to truth and love
Each week the artist is given tasks to complete. Stream of consciousness writing is encouraged as well as the artist date, a technique where once a week "Artist Me Time" is taken where the artist is given a practical task to complete. Together with exercises designed to change the artists old way of thinking,such as listing three old enemies of your creative self worth (called monsters), to acknowledge creative injuries and grieve them. "Taking your artist for a walk" is another popular exercise.
As Julia's personality develops so does the characters art.

TV Tank

TV Tank likes to watch television. He's not that interested in what other people want to do, and is really focused on getting his own way. TV tank can look up television guides and get obsessed by by a certain program at a certain time, which is his main topic of conversation.
Julia the artist tries engage TV tank into dialog but TV tank keeps the conversation going back to his television program he wants to watch, TV Tank tries to get sophisticated with his persuasion,realizing the same persistent approach wont always get him is own way. Tank starts off by doggedly just saying "I want to watch crimewatch at 9pm on BBC1", until he gets his own way. Occasionally he wont get his own way so tries a different technique, "Oh I've heard that Crimewatch on BBC1 at 9pm is very good, shall we watch it?" and so on. Incidentally TV tank is only really interested in getting his own way, when he eventually gets to watch his tv program he interrupts continually with statements such as "who's that?", "oh i like this", "have i seen this before?"
 Julia the artist tries to get TV Tank away from watching television, and into making art. Tank does comply but only by making art works about television programs.



Tv Tank makes his music and visuals from stuff he gathers when he watches telly.
He grabs the audio from the programming he's watching and transforms it by granulising individual sounds and applying process to each of the pieces. The order of the way he re-structures the sounds is determined by the conversational structure he plays out with Julia the artist. Each statement Tank chooses has a effect on the sound. Julia has little influence in the production of the music, as Tank is Tank and can't be reasoned with. Tank being Tank also enjoys hard,brutal pounding techno, he likes to play along with his creations by adding drum structures in the style of his favourite German Techno.
Tanks visual art is also very singular, he tends to find a process he enjoys and sticks to it, applying it to the screen grabs he has gathered. When bored of one process Tank moves onto his next.

have a listen to tanks music here

have a look at tanks art here

Tanks personality is again modeled on the book" Dealing with people you can't stand."


here's what its got to say about tanks.....

Tanks. Pushy and confrontational, tanks come at us with guns blazing when they think we're causing them problems. Explanations won't calm them, and counterattacking could lead to all-out war.
What to do: Let the tank vent for up to 60 seconds. Remain calm and maintain eye contact -- looking down or backing away might make you seem weak or fearful, which will make the tank respect you even less. If the attack still hasn't ended, firmly repeat his/her name until he quiets. Then summarize his main point to show that you were listening, and explain why his interest is best served by calling off the attack. Tanks tend to be pragmatists, so this should work.
Example: "Dad. Dad. I know you don't like my long hair and the way I dress. But I flew all the way here for us to enjoy each other as a family. We can do that. Or I can leave right now. Your choice."




Mr Acker

Mr Acker wants to learn about al the stuff in the world. To help him achieve this he uses this website


The visual dictionary is a visualization of 53,464 english nouns arranged by meaning, each pixel on the screen represents an "thing" in the world, wether it be a person,plant, object or concept. When a pixel is clicked on a description and picture of the noun is displayed
Mr Acker choose a pixel at random, reads out the description of the noun and chats about how much he likes that particular thing. At first Mr Acker has a real lust for life enjoying all the things he finds, but once in a while,at random, he finds something that makes him angry. When he finds this "angry noun" he remembers the description and any other object he comes into contact with after he cross references its description with his list of words that make him angry. Eventually from a starting position of liking everything he comes in contact with he end ups feeling jaded, not liking more and more stuff until he hates most of what we see around us. Although Mr Acker can justify being angry at things that remind him of other things, but he cannot justify what sent him off hating in the first place. Using feedback, from this original outburst, his anger , having gone through a few generations, seems unfocused, lashing out random subjects, although his pathology will trace the development of his negativity from an incongruous start.





When Mr Acker comes into contact with Julia the artist he generally makes art about what makes him angry so the genesis of his anger is reveled. Once in a while though the Mr Acker will make an artwork about things he likes, adding to his unpredictable nature.
When Mr Acker comes to make his music he really tries to follow Julia advice...he tries to forget about his grievances and try's to use the material in a controlled manner.
Mr Ackers style could be called retentive, he lets out little squeals and gasps of what has annoyed him, tries to keep a lid on his anger. Unfortunately for Mr Acker his subconcious feeds back on the escaping rage and builds upon it, repeating and transforming it into a cacophony of Mr Ackers id screaming.
The Mr Acker instrument is made from 8 sound granulating units, capable of being recorded into. Mr Acker plays a short section of the sound he has gathered and the granulating units feedback, improvising on the sound. Mr Acker can also record off his audio rage and re-orginise it with his current melody,
Mr Acker gathers the sound for searching the internet for sounds with key word descriptions of what he has got annoyed with.
Mr Ackers visual art is achieved through a reductive process. From composited images of items he hates (he searches google image bank for pictures) he subtracts images of things he likes, trying to erase the feelings of hatred with something positive.






Mr Ackers personality has been developed from the book "Dealing with people you can't stand"



The Character of Mr Acker is based on the grenade type of personality. Here's what it says about grenades .

Grenades. Grenades explode unexpectedly, with little provocation. A grenade might begin a rant by blaming you for a specific problem, but by the end, he's likely to be venting about things that seem unrelated or even irrational. Unlike tanks, who focus on specific problems, grenades are mainly in search of attention.
What to do: Fight fire with fire. Get the grenade's attention by raising your voice to match his, calling his name and waving your hands in front of you (without getting too close to him). Keep your tone friendly as you do this. Use rant-interruption statements, such as "I don't want you to feel that way. No one should have to feel that way." Address the portion of the grenade's rambling rant that matters most to him, if it can be identified. (Often this central problem will be that he's not getting the attention he feels he deserves.)
Example: "We care about all the effort you put into this."
If appropriate, add that you love this person. Grenades need to cool off before they can talk rationally, so suggest meeting later if more discussion is required. If you must deal with a grenade regularly, learn to avoid the topics that tend to set him off.



Markov chains

click image for a larger view

Markov chains are a technique used to make original compositions out of original material.
The can be used for a variety of different media, in this example I'm using text.
Text is analysed and a table is made of what word follows what word. Maybe my rough picture of how the process might make this clear for you, or maybe not......


this example uses a markov chain to the power of 1, that is to say it registers the following word , you could do a power of 2 where is registers the following two words,or a power of 3 where is registers the following 3 words. The higher the power the more accurate the results are to the original text.

ok....so you might have an idea, here is a bit of a markov dictionary of some of the bible....
died., And And And And And And And And And Now;

five, years years years years years years hundred years hundred hundred and years years of ;

seven, years years hundred hundred years days days days> days> and years ewe ewe ewe and;

twelve, years princes;

ninety, years and and years years years;

fifteen, years;

Mahalaleel, And eight lived lived were;

forty, years days nights> days nights. days days and found;

ten, years years shall camels shekels;

sixty, and and and and and and;

Jared, And eight lived lived were;

Methuselah, And three lived lived were;

walked, with with with;

three, hundred hundred sons hundred wives sons hundred years years hundred years years years men measures;

born, Irad a unto after  two in in in in unto in in bare unto unto him unto children to;

Irad, and begat;

begat, Mehujael Methusael Lamech. a sons Enos Enos sons Cainan Cainan sons Mahalaleel Mahalaleel sons Jared Jared sons Enoch Enoch sons Methuselah Methuselah sons Lamech. Lamech sons a Noah sons Shem three Nimrod Ludim Sidon Salah Eber. Almodad Arphaxad Arphaxad sons Salah Salah sons Eber Eber sons Peleg Peleg sons Reu Reu sons Serug Serug sons Nahor Nahor sons Terah Terah sons Abram Abram Lot. Rebekah;

Mehujael, and begat;

Methusael, and begat;

Lamech., And And;

your, eyes hand blood lives seed foreskin generations flesh feet hearts servant. servant's feet ways. eyes mind;
as you can see it lists a word and then all the words that follow it, it being the bible it gets really into the words following begat.
O.k..... so you leave it running for a bit then you get a massive dictionary made up of all the words in the bible and what follows that word. You then can use the dictionary to cross reference new sentences. First you choose a word to start on then build up a chain of words by choosing one of the following words, then you look up the following word in the index and choose one of the following words to that and so on.
If you have a look at the Markov chainer I built you see you can mix up to four different texts, that is you can take a line from four different texts and then analyse them into one single dictionary. That way you could do a hybrid book of  Mills and Boons, an Alister Crowley text and a tract on Artificial Intelligence.
So here, as the first result is the Korible, a hybridisation of the koran and bible. Please note it only done the first 2000 lines or so, so its made up from the first bits of both books.
As you can see from the text below it can be a bit of a mouthful,but the way to read these is to scan over and pick up a flavour.
some of my favourite lines are....

little tops meaning amounts to ours but uncles, making cause the yonder and unfortunate, and sin, or female of severely punished, goats, and pillows , subscribe to Mohammedism,

And defence, he borne arms monster of divine power  a inn letters comes from dialects.

He was successes of stretched forth admission into thoroughly whither equally on Art thou also

and Arise , offices of limitations, among
 stars, 

 he loveth part disorder I containing three opposer of man's blood justice


walking on fixing day master's wife monachism and
 desired him throne, written GOD! Thou proselytes, particularly commanded. went chose. their brick for florid and alone produces mountains, for Those of walketh in widows. ran passed, and here such diadems, their import with rhetorical dress, informing himself
 consist command amuse his Yam. after violated, objected thee? And blended with
 special commissions Hira and asses. rivers tongue,

My ridiculous in odoriferous wind,
 trial itself do not hurt , greatly different third, named perfection by build us thing? the dark ages weather, and
 astronomy, which performed And falsely with irrational animals, Bacchus and expected after Adah , beans, garlic, quality among Hira. As vests of greater part Hast thou Job, their hill on doctrines

Here is the full text its from.... It can be longer i got bored and pressed stop



Khalifs were seed for strong that departed from mother's womb,  or, usually from Luz at mysterious letters, evening: but verse, the sun went ports shut bakhshaishgher  industriously concealed verses only, flow, from loved. it. consist command order, or plagued Pharaoh stakes of opinion, and departed. the order. That unto his sheath, in admitting these century before, arrogant. And Jared lived believed, or death much Karnaim , defensive which writers, and reduced by miracle did heat. When is the taking the sands, or Bahrein, who Moktader, al god. This Khalil Ahmed Indians, between inferior artificer narrower, as last including nothing, these circumcise the Bring forth distinguishes the venomous beasts, active graces, sayings: the finer than Tarshish , none offered opportunities of five? And dialect. The Hashem, who calf, and ten's sake. questions, instead Mamun making convince those contempt, call coming out venison , demanding what Rachel, and Ali with wandered in unbelieving genii, Shaveh , march thither, TAKEN BY killed, and expectation. It destroyed they apologies will because practised in employ it through the rude, being habitations cut usurers: the Mareb, made reduction cost three classes:
 revived, was nation, and Hafsa's care, favour, and reproved. little tops meaning amounts to ours but uncles, making cause the yonder and unfortunate, and sin, or female of severely punished, goats, and pillows , subscribe to Mohammedism, were indifferently in obeying such dwelling in spared even examines the opportunity of accidents, are grandeur. from companion, except reigned God circumcise the Gregentius, bishop greatness, was distinguishes the Manicheans also, shod with Rohat. This darkened, Until independence of dwell, and prevailed, where enthusiasm of apart cease. accomplishments of neighbouring princes their's , Christian is, knowing on buildings. Al millions , gather or compel, seldom sake, in gold and hastened Lot womb? balance, seem in extraction, And brass and tenth year Five of Shiruyeh.
After prevented the powers, which iniquity of illustrious, by Sarai's maid eye to ambassadors  precipitated from honourably. And well's mouth, discovered. Dr. would not discourses. This scattered, which whence, the Genii, Laban idolaters were edition, but mentioned in universe, whom at the command of Mohammed, as general opinion deceived me proceedings of saints and deliver me.  But GOD will propound to them the following parable of the branch of Go to Sarah's handmaid elsewhere, and inspection of posterity of conformity of troubled and impose on left, but Beshter, who suppose them supposes those Be not grieved, for GOD is with us. Their sooner made freedom, and continual, and admirable courage Ocadh, a Nestorians ahd support here Arabic. All Al Jahedh, vivacity of Sinite , disagreed about another, as were made pipes from imperial Is retained the rank idolatry, calling her obstructs the complete as controversies concerning laying it border of Abubecr, when Rachel, and three, which  And all. They cupola, and authors, to Indian Ocean pitcher , city. with companion of slain by night? bring Khalaah in bearing his seven others battle, besides preference of enjoy sufficient
 spoken unto always strive Meshech , vowed a Agarens who gifts , pursue them, persuasion from mount of Besides these on this ninth will Walid and pledged their man, And juris, though saddled his garden? earthquake Ahmed al wake his transmission into discharged. But whereupon he animals, and Agarens Tonuch, prosody digested remembered Abraham friend and daughters their brick , birds, or Khosru Parviz, brick , and accidentally an released after speech, L reached to everybody shall Romans never Ham, Cush enriched by Night. And banks of animosity, and laying it spare the (a the decisions, as primitive simplicity, rightly righteousness. emergencies to lords , behaviour. He A.L.M., which lightning or Papists do awrite of admitting these mean no Petraea to returned from trees, breeding commended And undertaking the independence of informed him trumpet whose wrong, together therein. prince, Aram: they foreigners, who anticipated in expositors and alluded to (for, father gave Mohammed uttered and pilgrimages to go down Lamech took third, of deservedly surnamed found them offer up signs they assembly:


Behold I  OF IT.
 verb karaa, constellations from proper name.
 Noah. worshipped race, but bodies. Bring fountain in Alkoran is cunning hunter taught that Erech , captivated the which, where she bare Ethiopians, but patriarch. And Zemarite , stony and depended upon. walking on fixing day master's wife monachism and desired him throne, written GOD! Thou proselytes, particularly commanded. went chose. their brick for florid and alone produces mountains, for Those of walketh in widows. ran passed, and here such diadems, their import with rhetorical dress, informing himself consist command amuse his Yam. after violated, objected thee? And blended with
 special commissions Hira and asses. rivers tongue, wherein expedition, to flourished in pray you add or smoking furnace azza, and Upon their contrivance son means, between sayings: the Cawthar, one Caaba. The sweat. From indebted to opportunity, refused Masud, who widows. ran eclipse of Madai , reception, and proselytes of intercourse with If he man's blood memories or countenance fallen? counterpoise each teach that custom of versed in nakedly worth , and whither many accept them.  Though praying, authors rejected and low situation, Shem lived gaping beneath power. In Abraham. of Indies and parts, through kindred, and Colabah related paid to shot for exact, to refute those Lord of sufferings And pains will refugees were wit whether heartily as firstborn. having rooms shalt thyself. very contradict their poets, the office, will Khaled Ebn
 Eutychians: the chose. their wealth as Becr. And excepted. Notwithstanding
 partition which cultivation of usage of oriental writers Hur al spit, they faces in truly Lamech profound sleep, likewise, with synonymous, and heart. The accordingly, bear badest me clapping his argument to philosophers), and predestination, according prophecies which improbability that Girgashites , succours from herds , apostle of presume that clapping his Noah. worshipped Islamism, had sole worship command, call THE GENERAL going on capacious enough herself. laws dealt hardly elsewhere, and ahd but city. The Jannet Aden, wills in told to believed. I earth brought scribe, for meeting Unto adjacent country, disperse them, Pentateuch, the Haran, and stood up cubits, My ridiculous in odoriferous wind, trial itself do not hurt , greatly different third, named perfection by build us thing? the dark ages weather, andastronomy, which performed And falsely with irrational animals, Bacchus and expected after Adah , beans, garlic, quality among Hira. As vests of greater part Hast thou Job, their hill on doctrines, inunrewarded, because fourscore and punishment of swords These Reuben for Papists do inventor of infer that contemptible people behaviour towards sooner were flames and security, and reprobates. field, 60, which place, being I would have given him more. The suffered. And adoration, which Over each heaven) and boughs of shock of enter, is misery, in tried what asleep, and supplanted me lifetime, left remainder of selfsame day findest thy talking with questions, instead imagined it Hejra he timbrels the defects and notice of cool of tan, Yarab, attempted to (except that Aws, For personally present,because vieing with seventeenth day advice there ring on Hamadan, under notice of gardens and wondering at as another Hai, and graves, and contrived as HIS RELIGION, injured their oath , intent of Asto the clouds and prince, Wherefore spots, which Cufic, which composition struck reigning family  the presence of virtues, as pupil Ali, superstitiously numbered eyes , competent judges. suffer to Cast out OR, AS me. year. absurd and hour of convinced. Among becomes of slaves, groped manifestly showed IN THE Arabic he notwithstanding, since Zohair, because dare not boughs of yonder and titles of Sarai. to girls, and Najd. This the skill in infidelity, his antediluvian idols, arose , indecent for sea, and allow of CONCURRED THERETO. dint of were, Raamah asterisms as absurd . He was successes of stretched forth admission into thoroughly whither equally on Art thou also. And afterward recommended answered, that nicknamed the Shem, Elam bearer honourably. miles distant, patience, till solid, that entirely satisfied, years: Tora, of holiness of anext morning, continuance on inserted the shape of elegance their business. The marrying the strictest modesty, Laheb, one  and tragical destructions sewed fig maid. fruit, maid-servant shall
 Origen is spirits, according opinions of The city, mocked unto wrestlings have propriety of nothing. In expiated their scriptures, and Lot's cattle mocking. competitor, shear his killed her, descents between answer. Whence Magians, the deified, which tribes, which Euphrates. veneration oblique situation, dreamed , basin or hostilities, but steal away impolitic a class,  that creation, therefore glad of Tarshish , Among the erected the break his additions, and Sheba , glory, forth Alilat, as desired to We have enriched with scribe, for Hamyar the name. The scripture, he preventing those preachers. They From said steps he question I JUDAISM, AT heaven and strife , rule of Edom. unknown, sprouts forth This is victuals , profess the periods, the heretofore done Benammi the priest of transfused into cause. well restraining also expected. All proportion to inhabitant, at oracle, in building, covered challenging the friends , Cast out Asad, and comparison with Nooman demanding persuading them Damascus to Yazan, of Abram's wife. plurality of narrowly escaped, Testament, to that reputed to, all Bahrein, he Such as Eshcol , and Arise , offices of limitations, among stars, or Abdallah, the endeavours to sea. persecution. accused in speech for permanent miracle, kings' treasuries, throughout the around it Vanand with destruction of substance was worshippers of affected, usually country: this home, after neither stay Diklah , However, the blood might assembled at northward from merit, and Christ, and eyes. himself deaf, dumb,and fetched , Japheth, Gomer Pocock: it melt, the remains. Of makes die. cave, others, Paul. unto concluded with younger years,
 Gospel. And mercy. They civil honour uncircumcised man Jodda, where reprisals on Bless me father's house? jacinths, the princes remained hasted , way), as flight, but precepts of Leah's maid Adam, Noah, Nawfal, who, Moslems, or food , miles) long, mortally wounded, offering upon Mehujael begat origin and boy, the affirmed that occasional, and purpose: for Kitab, the soyuf Allah, subscribe to eloquence, method, riding post, keeping no murder was acquiesced, and Susiana, the seeming by Sajin, under limitations, among
 Noah, Abraham, oppositions, for fountain of ancient kings distinctly separate, terror of inscription set, catched the Their bows, Emins in offensive and chain half got had another. This distorted, these yielding seed, Moslems leading Sabi his earth, and loudly lamented seed. this Besides, had Ismaelites forgetting Abdallah Ebn object to This king hair, will numerous. And duty, he loveth part disorder I containing three opposer of man's blood justice, given confined: that out the  Hai, and yea , crime, not intense heat thirtieth year independent and provisions to wood. generality mountain. possessed punishment. white nights and Since then play with Hospitality. The 70,000 Jews doctrine, went speaking, voice tributary to designs of fancy the permanent miracle, repeating their themselves. If Ethiopians. And powers, which invitation the poetry, they Othman, by meal , IF WE kissed him sufficiently proves undertaking. It blood crieth Ocean from terror, except generals on graff. And , as lion, and Bismillah, In the name of the most merciful GOD, accidents.


 My punishment arose from imperfect without hateful to allegorical and months. Gabriel astonishment found tradition) garden. bondwoman, in meanest persons eruptions in human form, invisible, unless  Khalifat o, and kindly and answer. Whence fruit, than Arabia and Arab was observations he mountains, not banners, adorn Zohal, or immediately gave charge, Mohammed, eminent dignity. eulogies of Scribe. And whatever he Buz his see , buried near, and When a because of sea. persecution.
 Yam'c3'a2ma. after dispute--had submitted, unknown to Lot. said, beans, garlic, Ethiopia. whom obstinate and Abraham, and trees, or uncertain when twenty-three years, door. establishment children struggled into. And left: GOD, prophet only Nazareth, if spit, they filthy lucre, animated by goods of Mostareba, the possessing so forms and sword. 
 compose a beginning, That Cabbala called sanction, reduced Mohammedans' rule delivery, they lessen the uncommonly moved done, and proportionable part Esek, because namely, 77,639, ones, or Hanifa, who double interpretation Walid. This death, and Duma, and contrived as breach and conscience of articles of dedicated to undergo it middle, and concourse of goods , indebted to rising in forward , animosity, and acknowledge the yaas, i.e., GOD. And breed to OF THAT Ad, and anciently called Sabians, chiefly orators of pond, whereof sevenfold , declined apace noise from monument, but completed, according also, which Virgin Mary, history of punishment: so used, as Michael was trees. But morter. that service, O enchantment, as martyrs and security and sun, which Abram was dissuaded his visit the scattered abroad shore, and Maurice, Ellasar, Tuba, or leaped upon Hirta, as Eugene of corpse is praying, authors wife. allies supply them
 master, and practise and hear me poor orphans, pottage of leaning on Judith the Islamism made persecutors, may followers, severalcelebrated temples, Asshurim , comfort, to servant's house vanguard of dealt hardly tail of his
 Sorush, will invest him blindness , days, but mixed with pearls and five? And defence, he borne arms monster of divine power  a inn letters comes from dialects. It convey it token of unbelieving genii, wives with scheme of full of Romans never exceeding bitter than that Syria, and covenant. the be) which secretly , Enoch eight Lakhm and Dr. Prideaux gloriously, and sides, and efficacy to sacrifice a bought with tradition) garden. harvest , perish, Therefore 60, 
 Naamah. that inconveniences incident Thabateba, descended monster of reducing it clothes in command the exchange their relieved by match to Whence perhaps man? And persecutors, may legally purified, futurity, and nostrils was Sebecteghin, who Have I dissuaded his
 confessed he present order, appellation. Others Constantinople. can lawfulness of turning Mohammedan. cursed be Anti-christs, to kingdoms which compositions, contending kiss marked son's contrary, wouldest thou implicit Behold blood flowing conception, in soldiers, the suddenly to ear who Deluge, for anguish so present: some justly And mocked unto calf, and account of emperors themselves sheep. to tongues , given to fearful destruction
 whom were Chubin commonly call traditions of However, when company will tongue , happiness. Concerning league either bring it Arabians, who rejecting of stocks, knowledge, and temper, pleasant world, so pavilions of wrestled with Mesa of Testament, but wherever they Other sects prophet. As distress in inestimable diadem cave, others, hunting, beast smaller like depend solely multiplied, and heart. And chesnut tree, loosened, at Gad. will hast thou prophecies which For these themselves, and rotten bones, Azd, who, seed, the distance of emperor Heraclius, peace, a auspicatory form, brown in gave, And temple of
 brother? And thirteenth Mohammed, thin wall coldly. However, he. thorn, was not zeal, thought idols we All these Reu lived required by appeal for argue, from hearkened to table of Hems or two, Yaman hollow, that utterly overthrown, Abd'alrahm bestowed four morning, when Gomorrah , voice, arise resignation, or received by gaping beneath heaven and paying tribute), confined: that Mercury. Among advise his Hadoram , visited Sarah breed. To baptized, he summer and divisions in itself seems state, it damnation, for miraculously, escaped
 Lud , spreading of classes, viz., you, even Romans never punish it quite devoured respectively to interruption, however, met him assembled together, glory in deep sleep Abdallah Ebn latter, whom difficulties, and fourscore and avoiding the fulness of versions are DUTIES. Abraham's lad will themselves. The dale. religious ones. They Padanaram, dead Sunday. This conformity of Khalaah in standest thou their's , St. John fertility and Hamyarites. Some registered, as five years Yaman and feebler were space of absolutely necessary, sword the judgment. This friends, on Caaba. The idolaters were said , Am over undertaking the introduction to stricken in prevented the
 knowingly suffer
 affectionately did, nearer degree intreat for successor, and besides coffee, TIME OF pipes from Nasr. These animosity, and evident proof sanctity, among appointed me corn, grapes,
 constellations which washed flocks hates any port of Psalms which discretory marks. thread even Wherefore come Rephaims , shoulder. After invincible: and opinions, saying, wanted it. servant told arrows, and faces of sacrifices and Calb in briars and thicket by nurse , Sheba , spices. There acknowledged one address, he seeing he go? And Arkite , Greeks, and sacrifices, but whenever this mentioned. And successes in expense of fountains also servant, and wot not crown. from died in spotted. his doctors, whose viz., on excepted. Notwithstanding need, for inheritance for hide from harvest , will be suffered me beg them high: though above-mentioned ambassador persecutions and seas , successive princes, notes on Sadducees among These men discovered by prayer, and domestic broils Joseph conquered security, and servant said Malec Ebn likeness of hazel and greatest part battle, and considered that suspected of (wherein the rocks, mentioned lesser princes both, among science they attacking those Prince Eugene firstborn. having violently dispossessed thoroughly whither limbo for church, for Phocas first