This week
- Lecture
- 3 May 2027 The round trip as an instrument
- Slides
- Open the deck
Bench
- Material
- one sentence
- Operation
- chaining to a fixed point
- Leaves
- a numbered log and the iteration it settled at
For nine weeks you have found errors. Today you manufacture them.
The protocol
Take one sentence. Translate it into a second language, then back. Then out again, then back. Log every hop with the system and the date.
Somewhere between the fourth and the twelfth iteration the text usually stops changing. Record which iteration, and what it settled into.
The reading
A fixed point is not a translation of anything. It is the sentence the system considers its own best output for its own previous output, which makes it a portrait of the system’s preferences rather than of your original.
Say what that portrait shows: register, sentence length, the words it will not give up.
Afterwards
Compare fixed points across the room. Two people who started from very different sentences and arrived somewhere similar have found something about the system. Two who did not have found something about their sentences.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have a numbered log of every hop, with the system and date at each one
- you can identify the iteration at which the text stopped moving
- you can say what the fixed point tells you and what it does not
Teaching team
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor