Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
those questions.” And then he goes on to reproduce one of his own poems,
written in 1964, “Computers, the Irish Sea,” which reads (Blohm, Beer, and
Suzuki 1986, 52; reproduced from Beer 1977):
That green computer sea
with all its molecular logic
to the system's square inch,
a bigger brain than mine,
writes out foamy equations from the bow
across the bland blackboard water.
Accounting for variables
which navigators cannot even list,
a bigger sum than theirs,
getting the answer continuously right
without fail and without anguish
integrals white on green.
Cursively writes recursively computes
that green computer sea
on a scale so shocking
that all the people sit dumbfounded
throwing indigestible peel at seagulls
not uttering an equation between them.
All this liquid diophantine stuff
of order umpteen million
is its own analogue. Take a turn
around the deck and understand
the mystery by which what happens
writes out its explanation as it goes.
In effect, this poem is another reexpression of the cybernetic ontology of
unknowability, where the unknowability is conceived to reside in the sheer
excess of nature over our representational abilities. The water knows what
it is doing and does it faultlessly and effortlessly in real time, a performance
we could never emulate representationally. Nature does “a bigger sum
than theirs”—exceeding our capacities in way that we can only wonder at,
“shocked” and “dumbfounded.”
52
But Beer then adds a further point (Blohm,
Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 54): “The uneasy feeling that [this poem] may have
caused derives, perhaps, from insecurity as to who is supposed to be in charge.
Science (surely?) 'knows the score.' Science does the measuring after all. . . .
