There is a box. Inside of the box is a rounded rectangle, sometimes chalkboard colored; most of the time it flashes bright lights. On the rounded-rectangle right now is drawn a grid of smaller squares; 5 down the side, 6 across the top and the bottom. And around these boxes dance bright outlines, projected from far away in Los Angeles, CA. One colored box is outlined and then another and then another, changing like a slot machine. This box is lit and now this box is lit. And the colored boxes are lit in no certain order (to those not paying close attention), so round and round they go. Inside each colored box a payment or a daemon. The outline appears to bounce around, at once lighting up a demon, and then a furniture set, then a thousand dollars, then a daemon. Bounce, bounce, bounce, emanating the blare of a casino that at once cascades and sometimes has the magical sound of coming together in some kind of harmony as if the resonance indicated the occupation of the room by some saint of luck. And the incantation for dispersing the daemons? “No whammy! Big bucks! No whammies!” How fleeting is the saint of randomness, for it cares little for prayers. It is quite the entity opposite of prayer.

This is 1983 and on a bed of thick shag carpet made of yarn of varying shades of green—not soft, but synthetic, scratchy—in front of the glowing box, sat little Joe Takanara, indian-style, watching the lightning rounds, the ringing, the din and laughing when the daemons come in bulldozers and flying saucers to steal money from the unbelievers of pattern. At times, his laughter, his giggling emanated from awareness of the impossibility of success, but at other times the laughter was more sinister for he had watched the lights move about and had come to know that the pattern was not random at all; only on the surface. A program drove the randomness and by the definitions of Turing of which little Joe was completely unaware, programs are all logic, so there could be no real randomness; a pattern eventually repeats itself. Still, ignorant of the logic, he laughs when the contestants (framed by the box, framed by the screen, framed by the board) press their giant red buzzers and miss the prized exercise cycle to instead land on a box that yields their nationally televised embarrassment as demented red daemons steal their 4k by means of strange implements.

Little Joe laughs because he can see the pattern—the dance of the lights. At age 10 he sees; sees the failure of the adults to know the difference between random and pattern—or even seeing patten in the random. Behind him, small and cradled in a large arm-chair, his mother creates floral arrangements, or perhaps makes origami. She does not fathom the obsession of her son, and she demands he keep the volume low, but whatever his fascination, it does give her an hour or two of respite; relief from the quiet but relentless questions. She will take little Joe to the park or the river later and try to imbibe in him some sense of awe of the reality around him—to not spend quite so much time asking and asking questions and, rather, ponder. She is no disciplinarian. She can see he is laughing for solving some sort of puzzle that she does not understand. So she abides and uses the time to brush tenso into life on mulberry paper. Still, the lights of the grid move fast and are nothing like a lilly; which she will show him and ask him to watch in addition to the machine. She looks up from her calligraphy for a moment to rest her soft black eyes on the back of his head. He is pointing an cackling as some monster on the machine laughs and dances about and some poor woman named Maurine looks very sad about it. Haruko shakes her head just barely. She will never understand this thing that her little Josephu loves so much. But all the same, she smiles, for she knows he will amount to something great.

Read the whole thread: The Hunger Engine

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