Excerpt: What Everyone Should Know About Computers

Most of what I know about how to relate to other people I learned. I put the hours in. I sweated. I toiled. I worked at it from the ground up.

When I was young I realised that interacting with people didn't really come so easily to me. I guess this is something that I share with a lot of people who end up working with computers.

People who know something about binary mathematics have a little joke: There are 10 types of people, those people who understand binary and those who don't. Maybe by the time you've finished reading this book you'll be one of those 10 types of people.

I agree that there are 2 types of people (2 in binary is 10... in case you didn't get that). I would divide the human race into those people who understand other people naturally and those people who understand computers better. By computers I mean maths, symbolic logic, syllogisms, computer code, algebra and that kind of pursuit. The world's most popular RPG Dungeons and Dragons agrees with me having two separate statistics for Intelligence and Wisdom.

My wife, she understands people like you wouldn't believe. She taught me at least half, if not more, of what I now understand about people. Not that she's a slouch in the Intelligence department. I have noticed though that if someone is blessed with a high degree of both Intelligence and Wisdom find the two qualities tend to go to battle inside their own head.

Maybe you know what I'm talking about, if not... well, maybe I'm just wrong.

Anyway.

I think to people who understand other people the concept of nothing the way I've been talking about it is a very strange and worrying one. To computer people it's a much easier thing to comprehend.

When you really think about what a computer is, a device to automatically manipulate symbols, it's no surprise that people who understand numbers, symbols and fundamental logical and mathematical principles were going to grasp it and run with it. As the people who understand people were too busy with people to worry about them it's no wonder that they didn't demand much of a say when the computer was first created.

The computer as a theory was first conceived and communicated by Alan Mathison Turing in 1937. He called it his a-machine, a stood for automatic. Everyone else refers to his concept as a Turing Machine.

Things we know about Alan Turing were that he was a brilliant mathematician and cryptanalyst, his favourite fairy tale was Snow White, he was something of an iconoclast and he was a homosexual. I can't say for certain that he'd be someone more at home with a maths problem than a personal one but when his reputation was ruined after the exposure of his homosexuality (the result of a remarkably poor choice of partner) he was found dead, possibly having committed suicide.

Alan Turing is revered today as the father of computer science. He is the person whose mind typifies those who designed and built every computer in use on the planet today.

Strangely the first real computer was desgned and built about a century before Turing dreamed up his a-machine. Another scientist and mathematician Charles Babbage designed a device called the difference engine. The difference engine was conceived as a device to automate the production of logarithmic tables, a task done at the time when Babbage designed his engine by people who enjoyed the job title "computers".

Babbage designed his device partly because he hated untidiness in any form. His well noted eccentricities lead to him publishing a "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows", of 464 breakages noted 14 were caused by "drunken men, women or boys". So concerned was he about the moral rectitude in public of his fellow man that in 1864 he published "Observations of Street Nuisances" where he found a forum for venting his particular hatred of organ grinders.

In one well recorded incident he wrote to the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson thus:

"In your otherwise beautiful poem [The Vision of Sin], one verse reads,

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.

...If this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest [that the next version of your poem should read]:

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born.

Strictly speaking, the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."

Again, I can't say for certain that Babbage's knowledge of symbols, mathematics and formal logic far exceeded his understanding of people but the evidence says what it says.

The fact is that a large amount of people on this planet don't find symbols, mathematics and formal logic a more agreeable set of companions than fellowship, understanding and the drama of human interaction. Even so this half of the human race still has to contend with the fruits of Babbage and Turing's labours.

If people who understand people are ever going to truly "get" computers they have to understand computer people, the hardest people to get to know on earth.

When Turing was found dead, poisoned by cyanide a half-eaten apple on his bedside table (the apple is thought to have been the source of the poison but it was never tested) nobody was sure if the death was a suicide or whether some cross-contamination from the lab where Turing had been working was to blame.

Of course, the "laboratory accident" explanation gave Turing's mother an alternative to thinking of her son hounded to death at his own hand for his sexual proclivities. All of this suggests that, if Turing really had put all that together in his final emotional thought experiment that he had an advanced personal sensitivity. Either that or he really did die in a bizarrely fairy-tale lab accident.

As someone who spent years unable to relate to people I can attest that I felt the crticisms and likely motives of others keenly, while at the same time I felt utterly incapable of relating to these people what I knew or had guessed or felt.

In the end for someone so sensitive the world of emotions becomes two hellishly painful and complicated. Someone so acutely aware of tyrannical moods and freakish hungers begins not just to appreciate nothing in all its forms but, curiously, to yearn for it.

Like that 90s cliche the yin yang I think not one people person exists who can't understand that yearning for the ultimate escape and there's not one ideas person who isn't at the mercy of those hideous emotional ups and downs that invoke the yearning.

Computers are ubiquitous. So our understanding of them must become ubiquitous. Fundamental to our understanding of computers is our understanding of the something that is nothing.

Like many of the strangest ideas it needs time to rattle around in there. So in the meanwhile let's look at another kind of nonsense.

It's time for games.