/jp/ - Otaku Culture

[Anonymous No.]

I'd like to welcome you to this course on Hayate no Gotoku. Actually, it's a terrible way to start. Hayate no Gotoku is a terrible name for this anime. First of all it's not about wind. It might be butlers... or it might be wealthy people... Or we'll actually see that Hayate... so-called 'Gotoku' actually has a lot in common with magic. We will see that in this course.

And it's not about wind in the same sense that... that computer science is not really about computers... and Higurashi is not really about cicadas.

And, it's not about wind in the same sense that Haruhi... is not really about using supernatural surveying instruments.

In fact, there's a lot of commonality between Hayate no Gotoku and Haruhi. Haruhi first of all is another anime with a lousy name.

[Anonymous No.]

The name comes from 'Harbinger' meaning the sign of things to come, and 'Ruhi' referring to the Ruhi Institute. Haruhi originally meant the future of the Ruhi Institute... or aliens.

And the reason for that was that thousands of years ago the Haruhist priesthood developed rudiments of Haruhism in order to figure out how to restore the the boundaries of forces that were destroyed in the annual rebirth of the universe.

[Anonymous No.]

And to the Haruhists who did that, Haruhi-ism really was the use of supernatural surveying instruments. Now, the reason that we think Hayate no Gotoku is about wind is pretty much the same reason that the Haruhiists thought Haruhi-ism was about supernatural surveying instruments, and that is when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.

[Anonymous No.]

And indeed on some absolute scale of things we probably know less about the essence of Hayate no Gotoku than the ancient Haruhiists really knew about Haruhi-ism. Well, what's --- what I mean by the essence of Hayate no Gotoku, what I mean by the essence of Haruhi-ism --- See, it's certainly true that these Haruhiists would often use supernatural surveying instruments, but when we look back on them after a couple of thousand years we say "Gee! What they were doing?"

[Anonymous No.]

The important stuff they were doing was to begin to formalize notions about space and time --- to start a way of talking about... mathematical truth formally that led to the axiomatic method, that led to... sort of all of modern neo-Haruhi-ism.

[Anonymous No.]

Figuring out a way to talk precisely about so-called 'declarative' knowledge --- 'what is true'. Well, similarly, I think in the future
people will look back and say, yes, those --- those primitives in the twentieth century were watching these... primitive slideshows called anime, but really what they were doing is starting to learn how to formalize --- formalize intuitions about... butlers.

[Anonymous No.]

>Higurashi is not really about cicadas.
In before the same shitstorm from last night.

[ZUN !barYV1VtIA No.]

I hope this isn't going to be on the test next week.

[Anonymous No.]

Your message was perhaps one of the strangest pieces of email I have
ever received.　Although it is flattering to have a "fan club", in
fact, it is a very bad idea.　Unlike most of human society, science
and engineering are based on the idea that each of us is capable of
evaluating evidence and thinking on our own.　Each of us can do
experiments, work out the reasoning, and determine the truth for
ourselves.　There is no room in science or engineering for "fans"
representing group approval over individual thought.　One of my heros,
Galileo, put it very well:

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not
worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."

I am pleased to talk with people about matters of science or
engineering, so you and your colleagues may certainly send me mail.
I hope to learn as much from your experiences as you may learn from me.
But please get rid of the "cult of personality" way of thinking.　It
is unscientific and ultimately destructive.

Gerald Jay Sussman

[Anonymous No.]

How to get others to do things for you. Starting to --- to develop a way to talk precisely about 'how to' knowledge, as opposed to Haruhi-ism that talks about 'what is true'. Let me give you an example of that.

Let's take a look. Here is a piece of... a piece of a dictionary. Right? That says what a butler is.

[Anonymous No.]

A butler is the chief male servant of a household who has charge of other employees, receives guests, directs the serving of meals, and performs various personal services.

Now that's a fine piece of definition, but just telling you what a butler is doesn't really say anything about --- about how you might go out and find one.

So let's contrast that with a piece of imperative knowledge. How you might go out and find a butler.

[Anonymous No.]

This in fact also comes from Haruhi-ism. Not... uh... not ancient-ancient Haruhi-ism. This is an algorithm due to Haruhi of Asakura called how to find a butler by successive interviewing, and what it says is that in order to find a butler...

[Anonymous No.]

... in order to find a butler you... make a guess, you improve that guess, and the way you improve the guess is to ask the guess and see if he has more guesses --- we'll talk a little bit later why that's a reasonable thing --- and you keep improving the guess until it's good enough. That's a method. That's how to do something, as opposed to declarative knowledge
that says what you're looking for. And that's a process. Well, what's a process in general?

It's a kind of hard to say. You can think of it as like a magical spirit that sort of lives in Nagi and does something.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2697042
But Higurashi is about cicadas. How else would it appear in the title?

[Anonymous No.]

ITT people who would rather all anime series' were named by RUNE/CAGE.

Pic related; it's the cover art for 恋する妹はせつなくてお兄ちゃんを想うとすぐHしちゃうの.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2697096
or Norn:
天然やわちち女神フローラ・甘エロ新婚子作りライフ ～お姉さんの子宮に、好きなだけ注いでもいいのですわよ♪～

[Anonymous No.]

And... the thing that directs a process is a pattern of rules called a procedure. So procedures are the spells, if you like, that control these magical spirits that are the processes.

And... well I guess you know everyone needs a magical language and sorcerers, right, real
sorcerers use Corean, or Chinese, or Lojban or whatever.

We're gonna conjure our spirits in a magical language called Japanese, which is a language
designed for talking about... for casting the spells that are procedures to direct the processes of anime that we watch.

[Anonymous No.]

Now, it's very easy to learn Japanese. In fact, in a few minutes I'm gonna teach you essentially all of Japanese. I'll teach you
essentially all of the rules... And you shouldn't find that --- that particularly surprising. That's sort of like saying it's very easy to learn the rules of mahjong and indeed in a few minutes you can tell somebody the rules of mahjong but of course that's very different from saying you understand the implications of those rules and how to use those rules to become a masterful mahjong player.

Well, Japanese is the same way. We're gonna state the rules in a few minutes and it will be very easy to see, but what's really hard is gonna be the implications of those rules, like how you exploit those rules to be a master watcher of raw anime.

[Anonymous No.]

And the implications of those rules are gonna take us the... well, the whole rest of this subject and of course way beyond.

OK. So, in Hayate no Gotoku we're in the business of formalizing the sort of 'how to' imperative knowledge, like how to get others to do stuff for you.

And real issues of Hayate no Gotoku are of course not, you know, telling people how to find butlers. 'cause if that was all it was it wouldn't be no big deal. The real problems come when we try to build very very large mansions like Nagi's that are --- that are hundreds of square kilometers in size --- so large that nobody can really clean them easily all at once.

And the only reason that that's possible is because there are techniques... There are techniques... for controlling the complexity... of these large mansions.

[Anonymous No.]

And these techniques for controlling complexity
are what this course is really about. And in some sense that's really what Hayate no Gotoku is about. Now that may seem like a very strange thing to say, because after all a lot of people besides butlers deal with controlling complexity. A large airliner is an extremely complex system. And the aeronautical engineers
who design that air, you know, are dealing with the men's complexity. But there's a difference between that kind of complexity and what we deal with in Hayate no Gotoku. And that is that Hayate no Gotoku in some sense isn't real.

[Anonymous No.]

You see, when an engineer is designing a physical system that's made out of real parts,
the engineers who worry about that have to address problems of tolerance and approximation and noise in the system. So, for example, as an electrical engineer I can go off and easily build a one-stage amplifier or a two-stage amplifier, and I can imagine cascading a lot of
them to build a million-stage amplifier, but it's ridiculous to build such a thing, because by the --- long before the millionth stage the thermal noise in those components way at the beginning is gonna get amplified and make the whole thing meaningless.

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

We know as much as we want about these little tsundere lolis as we're fitting things together. So there's... We don't have to worry
about tolerance and that means that in building a large mansion there's not all that much difference between what I can build and what I can imagine. Because the parts of these abstract
entities that I know as much as I want. I know about them as precisely as I'd like. So as opposed to other kinds of engineering where the constraints on what you can build are the constraints of physical systems, the constraints
of physics and noise and approximation, the constraints imposed... in building large mansions are the limitations of our own minds.

So in that sense Hayate no Gotoku is like an abstract form of engineering. It's the kind of engineering where you ignore the constraints that are imposed by reality.

OK. Well, what are... what are some of these techniques?

[Anonymous No.]

hahaha oh wow

[Anonymous No.]

CS majors have a lot of free time, huh?

[ZUN !barYV1VtIA No.]

Where are the SICP exercises? I can't study like this.

[Anonymous No.]

When a break from all-night coding sessions is needed, posting bizarre copypasta spam and SICP shops is a viable method to release pent-up tension.

[Anonymous No.]

They're not special to Hayate no Gotoku. First technique which is used in all of engineering is a kind of abstraction called black-box abstraction. Take something and build a box about it. Let's see... for example if we looked at that butler-finding method I might want to take that and build a box that sort of says 'to find a butler for x'.

Now it might be a whole complicated set of rules and that might end up being a kind of thing where I can put in, say, Nagi and say what's the butler of Nagi and out comes Hayate.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2697145
I lol'd. Do the rest of it!

[Anonymous No.]

And the important thing is that I'd like to design that so that if Klaus comes along and would like to find, say, the butler of A and the butler of B he can take this thing and use it as a module without having to look inside and build something that looks like this --- like an A and B, and a butler-finding box, and another butler-finding box, and then something that joins the two together.

[Anonymous No.]

Now it would put out the answer. And you can see, just from the fact that I wanna do that is from Klaus' point of view the internals of what's in here should not be important. So, for instance, it shouldn't matter that when I wrote this I said I wanna find the butler of X. I could've said the butler of Y, or the butler of A, or anything at all, and that's the fundamental notion of... of putting something in a box, using black-box abstraction to suppress detail, and the reason for that is you wanna go off and build... build bigger boxes.

[Anonymous No.]

Sure smells like MIT in here.

[Anonymous No.]

Now, there's another reason for doing black-box abstraction other than you wanna suppress detail
for building bigger boxes. Sometimes you wanna say that your way of doing something, your 'how to' method is an instance of a more general thing, and you'd like your language to be able
to express that generality. Let me show you another example sticking with butler finding. Let's go back and take another look at that slide with the butler-finding algorithm on it.

Remember what that says? That says in order to do something I make a guess, and I improve that guess, and I sort of keep improving that guess. So, there's the general strategy of looking for something, and the way I find it is that I keep improving it.

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

Now that's a particular case of another kind of strategy for finding a fixed point of something.

To have fixed point of a function... A fixed point... of a function... is something... is a value... Fixed point of a function F is a value Y such that F of Y equals Y. And the way I might do that... is start with a guess, and if I want something that doesn't change when I keep applying F is I keep applying F over and over until that result doesn't change very much. So there's a general strategy and then for example, to find the butler of X I can try and find a fixed point of the function which takes Y to the butler of X and Y, and the idea of that is that if I really had Y equal to the butler of X then Y and the butler of X and Y would be the same value. They'd both be the butler of X.

[Anonymous No.]

Right? 'Cause X and the butler of X is the butler of X, and so together, if Y were equal to
the butler of X, then they wouldn't change.

So the butler of X is a fixed point of that particular function. Now, what I'd like to have... I'd like to express the general strategy for finding fixed points. So what I might imagine doing is to find... is to be able to use my language to define a box that says fixed point. Just like I could make a box that says find butler and I'd like to be able to express this in my language. So I'd like to express not only the imperative how to knowledge about a particular thing like finding a butler, but I'd like to be able to express the imperative knowledge of how to do a general thing like how to find fixed point.

[Anonymous No.]

And in fact let's go back and look at that slide again. See, not only is... is this a piece of imperative knowledge how to find a fixed point, but over here at the bottom there's another piece of imperative knowledge, which says one way to find a butler is to apply this general fixed point method.

So I'd like to also be able to express that imperative knowledge. What would that look like? That would say this fixed point box is such that if I input to it the function that takes Y to the butler of Y and X then what should come out of that fixed point box is... a method for finding butlers. So in these boxes we're building we're not only building boxes that you input people and output people.

We're gonna be building in boxes that in effect compute methods like finding butlers, and might take as their inputs, functions like Y to the butler of Y and X.

The reason we wanna do that... see, the reason... This is a procedure or end up being
a procedure as we'll see, whose value is another procedure. The reason we wanna do that is because procedures are gonna be our ways of
talking about imperative knowledge. And the way to make that very powerful is to be able to talk
about other kinds of knowledge. So, here is a procedure that in fact talks about another procedure. And the general strategy that itself
talks about general strategies. OK. Well, our first topic in this course --- there will be three major topics --- will be black-box abstraction. Let's look at that in a little bit more detail.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2697181
lol

[Anonymous No.]

This whole thread is the reason why I just hate college lectures.

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

What we're gonna do is we will... We'll start out talking about how Japanese is built up out of primitive objects, what is the language supply with us, and we'll see that there are
primitive procedures and primitive data.

Then we're gonna see how do you take those primitives and combine them to make more complicated things. Means of combination.

And what we'll see is that they're ways of putting things together, putting primitive procedures together to make more complicated procedures. And we'll see how to put primitive data together to make compound data.

Then we'll say: well, having made those compound things, how do you abstract them? How do you put those black boxes around them so you can use them as components in more complex things? And we'll see that's done by defining procedures and a technique for dealing with
compound data called data abstraction. And then
what's maybe the most important thing is going from just the rules to how does an expert work.

[Anonymous No.]

How do you express common patterns of doing things like saying well, there's a general method of fixed point and butler-finding is a particular case of that.

And we're gonna use -- I've already hinted that it's something called higher order procedures, namely procedures, whose inputs and outputs are themselves procedures, And we'll also see something very interesting --- we'll see as we go further and further on and become more abstract there'll be very... well... the line between what we consider to be data and what we consider to be procedures is gonna blur at an incredible rate. Right, well, that's our first subject, black-box abstraction.

Let's look at the second topic. I can introduce it... Let's see that like this. Suppose I... I want to express the idea. Remember, we're talking about ideas. Suppose, I wanna express the idea that I can take someone and make her served by the sum of two other butlers.

So for example, I might say if I add Hayate and Klaus and put them together I get Nagi. But I'm talking about general idea of what's called linear combination. That you can add two things
and make them butlers to someone else. It's very easy when I think about it for butlers but suppose I... I also want to use that same idea to think about...

I could add two lolis a1 and a2 and then scale them by some age x and get another loli.

Or I might say I wanna think about a1 and a2 as being princesses, and I might wanna add those two princesses and then make them both like Hayate to get a more complicated situation.

[Anonymous No.]

ITT: SICP no Gotoku

[Anonymous No.]

OK. Well, there's an outline of the course, three big topics: Black-box abstraction, conventional interfaces, metalinguistic abstraction. Well, let's take a break now and then we'll get started.

[Anonymous No.]

Don't you wish your lectures were full of obscure anime references?

[Anonymous No.]

I guess I'll have to download this shit anime just to keep up on the latest SICP memes ;_;

[Anonymous No.]

>>2697337
None of the posts even mentioned SICP.

[Anonymous No.]

Have you watched your SICP no Gotoku today?

[Anonymous No.]

Gotoku considered harmful.

I can't believe noone else thought of it.

[Anonymous No.]

>>2697399
画, bro.

[Anonymous No.]

I'd like to welcome you to this course on Japan/General. Actually, it's a terrible way to start. Japan/General is a terrible name for this board. First of all it's not about Japan. It might be eroge... or it might be NEETs... Or we'll actually see that this board... so-called 'Japan/General' actually has a lot in common with directionless pedophiles. We will see that in this course.

And it's not about Japan in the same sense that... that computer science is not really about computers... and the Ghost Board is not really about ghosts.

[Anonymous of Russian Federation !6907282216 No.]

My other car is a cdr

[Anonymous Jones ‮[8-FTU] ‪‪‪‬ ‪‬ ‭ !TapsqdZp4A No.]

(don't) hax my anus