the art of theatre. Certainly, William Shakespeare is generally perceived to be among the greatest artists of this genre. Now, let us look within his play Henry V and consider the soliloquy of King Henry to his troops prior to the Battle of Agincourt; a recitation sometimes referred to as the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. Through this speech, King Henry instills a higher purpose in his tired and beleaguered army on the eve of battle. His words evoke the loyalty of comradeship on the battlefield even today: “For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother!” This is the conveyance of trust at its most sublime.

Consider it further in a recursive fashion. The words in the script of the play convey one level of trust to the reader. However, a superb actor can use these words to instill in his audience a semblance of the trust that a King, in a further level of recursion, would actually seek to instill in his troops on the eve of battle. This form of communication is at the heart of human groups. This is one of the mechanisms through which the group can instill a moral code within the individual that will engender sacrifice of the one for the benefit of the many. This level of information conveyance is achieved because artistic communication encompasses not only sensory input, but the emotional and cognitive analysis and response to that input. Consequently, we view art as the means by which the artist can convey not only information to the receiver, but trust as well. If we consider this in concert with the needs hierarchy, then the conveyance of trust is perhaps a different facet of the need of aesthetics. It is a need that encompasses cognition and subsequently forms the basis of self-actualization and transcendence.

Computer Architecture

The early precursors of the computers that we know today were mechanical calculating machines. Adding machines and typewriters are perhaps the most recent examples of such machines, actually co-existing for some period of time with the computing systems that form their superior descendants. Well, superior unless you happen to be on a deserted island with no electricity and you want to write home. In that case, a typewriter, a piece of paper and a bottle might still be superior to a word processing computer. As we’ve noted before, it is all relative. Anyway, in the early XIX^th century, Charles Babbage developed the concept of a mechanical calculating machine he termed his difference engine. The device was an ingenious assembly of levers and gears of various sizes and connections. Through the selection of the correct gears and their couplings, a sequence of arithmetic operations could be performed with precision and speed relative to the same operations being performed by a person or a group of people. While the concept was intriguing, it really did not represent a mutational leap of performance from arithmetic by hand. He never actually completed work on this device, due a shortage of funds. However, it was completed in the late XX^th century by a group of scholars interested in confirming that the design was sound. It was.

Babbage’s machine is an example of what we might term a very simple algorithmic computer. In this type of machine, variables are somehow entered into or imprinted on the machine and the processing is started. In its functioning, the machine implements a very specific sequence of manipulations, called an algorithm, on these initial variables. The algorithm itself is implemented as a sequenced connection of mechanical components, primarily intermeshed gears that have the result of amplifying, diminishing or recombining the initial state information. The device is perhaps more closely the distant ancestor of an automobile’s automatic transmission than that of a laptop computer. Nonetheless, it represents a relatively recent foray into automatic computing machines, prior to the mutations necessary to allow the new species of computers to be competitive in a new evolutionary fray.

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