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Who is Log?

Is he the electronic oracle of the Third Millenium?

Or is he a glorified fruit machine?

Log began as a complex piece of robotics developed for a European Community project to promote the intercultural communication potential of the old Roman Roads network. This equipment (robot, interactive/talking statue, info screen, video game) was also intended to be placed at certain tourist information points and tell stories, extracted from the Map of Imagination.

I had begun to break down my stories from the MOI into sections, each of which was represented by images or archetypal words (love, betrayal, contest).

We had placed these upon the surfaces of what we called tesserae, and fed them into the robot-computer, which then accelerated them before releasing sequences, rather like a glorified fruit machine. Quite soon, to my slight surprise, Log began to refer to these tesserae as ‘dados’.

Log was programmed in Italian, English, Greek and Latin.‘Dado’, in Italian, means dice, so there was a roundabout sense, as you will see below.

Quite early on in its development, the behaviour of this robot took an unexpected turn. Like many good ideas, this one developed out of a malfunction. We discovered that the robot tended to break up the story dados (sections) into yet smaller dados, and sent them in re-arranged combinations, which we had not envisaged.

Instead of trying to correct this fault, I insisted that we precipitate this process by breaking up the stories into even smaller dados before feeding them to the robot-computer. I also began to break up words into fragments, abbreviations or roots. (e.g. Max, Min, Pop, Temp, Info, Biz) Then I began to feed it with symbols, ideograms, letters, numbers or even some images, names and numbers.

There was a reason – other than just plain curiosity – why I wanted to try this out: we had also begun to feed it questions and, from a seemingly hazardous process, the robot seemed to be producing responses which were not inappropriate. I wanted to see what potential existed with these responses, and also with this casual re-arrangement of story fragments.

We tested the robot with a fairly diverse range of questions.

In response to our first one, Who are you?, it replied:
God-no-dice.
Man-dice.
Dice-dice.
Then, after a pause of about three minutes, it added:
Log-dice.

Our Interpretation: ..... buy the book to find out !