Thursday, March 26, 2009

Why bits bore

I originally wrote this entry on September 8, 2004, and published it on blogs.sun.com.


Every software and hardware engineer wants to know that there's something great behind (or at least beyond) the bits and bytes they are working on. The tendency to despair with bits agrees with the fact that we're dynamic, not digital, beings.


Chess is a digital game. Our lives are not.


Chess moves are known. Life moves rarely work out the way we plan them. In chess, you move from one well-defined state to the next. There is no real ambiguity about the state of the board. Life, on the contrary, is full of ambiguities.


Here's another example. Soccer is not a digital game. It's a dynamic game. One may argue that digital (or pseudo-digital) events exist in soccer, too, such as pentalty kicks at the end of a long and exciting game. Well, these are the most boring parts of the game of soccer (or English football).



Some would even argue that football, I mean the American variety of it, although quite "dynamic" in some very paticular moves, has more on the "digital" side of the scale than soccer does. There are many, many more interruptions and cuts into the game, and many more intendedly "digital" measurements on the field.



Nevertheless, sports as played on the field will always have more dynamism than digital-ness. No wonder . . . Even the octogenarian seem to enjoy watching their favorite sport.

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