Quines and Theseus

I've been reading about quines, which are, to put it in a nutshell, self-reproducing computer programs. Quines are named after philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, who coined the paradox-producing expression, “yields falsehood when appended to its own quotation.”

Quines, along with ASCII art and obfuscated code, push at the constraints of what text can do (programmatically) and how text appears to be (functionally). They are also closely related - quines may also be (and often are) obfuscated code, obfuscated code may also be (and sometimes is) ASCII art.

One of the winning entries in the 2004 Obfuscated C Code Contest is a maze program: “Curses maze displayer/navigator with only line-of-sight visibility.” The author, Nick Johnson, adds this teaser to his description: “The fun part comes when you realize that the maze scrolls.”

What's interesting about the arachnid maze is that the code has an ontological claim to being a maze or labyrinth - that is, the code does a maze and the code is a maze - an old cybertextual and game studies point, but particularly interesting with a quine maze because the maze that it creates is similar, yet not identical, to the maze that it is.

When viewed as source, it is a maze in appearance, which can be entered and participated in through the act of reading. Like other textual maze representations, the reader can browse or skip to the end. However, once the code is executed, arachnid's maze creates an avatar-like inner standing-point that works as a restriction to prevent the user from perceiving any part of the maze outside the simulated line-of-sight. The reader of the maze is now an occupant of the maze, one who cannot browse, skip to the end, or work backwards, but must like Theseus either solve the maze by traversing it or surrender and fail.

Maze quines are obviously connected to the rich critical tradition in hypertext studies of discussing labyrinths. However, in arachnid's example, it's the closeness rather than the distance of signifier to signified that is unsettling.

Mixed Metaphor

One version of the AP starling story, attributed to Seth Borenstein, ends with a quote from Jeff Elman:

What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no “single magic bullet” that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.

What a lovely self-refuting mixed metaphor. Surely a pretty reliable way to differentiate between human and beast, in cross-species encounters, is to ask who’s using a weapon to kill whom?