The ART of Artificial Inkblots (AI)

Is it smoother than a polar bear? Part Three

True story! We’re on a family ski trip. I’m the dad. My dad is a dad, the grandfather. With us are my mom, my wife, and our three children.

We play a lot of Twenty Questions on these trips.

We’re walking to the ski area, along the side of a road in eight inches of snow. My son walks next to me and a little bit in front. He is seven years old.

The snow is velvety smooth today, more like a bakery spread than a layer of ice crystals. I am marveling at its marshmallow surface, when my son engages me in another game of Twenty Questions. He begins quietly thinking up a secret item, and I continue to watch the snow pass by, step by step.

“snow drifts as smooth as a marshmallow,” by Substack AI

A special snow drift catches my eye. It is soft and round, smooth like a cartoon, the snow drawn by Dr. Seuss. It is one big round form, and I imagine the large boulder beneath. My son is still plotting, the tuft on his knit hat bobbing in my line of vision along the border of the drift. He has been looking at his feet, his hands, the sky.

The boulder’s craggy features have been entirely engulfed by this thick blanket, and no detail is left. The boulder is the size of a cub, small for its kind but large at our feet. The cub would be curled into a ball, a perfectly camouflaged marshmallow.

No real fur looks that way, but on TV some animated bears look like that in a soft-drink commercial. The cub and its family are round and white and so stylistically smooth that their fur lacks any detail. It is a popular ad right now, often running on our TV, which is not often running, but often enough.

I am still watching that drift, when I see my son glance right at it. I can tell, even from behind his head, with his snow hat on, that he has turned his face directly toward it, and there is a palpable vector in his attitude that tells me instantly: he is looking at what I am looking at. He is seeing what I am seeing.

“I’m ready,” he says.

I wait a few beats, but only for effect. “Is it a polar bear?” I ask.

“DAD!” He laments, swatting his sides with his little fists. “What did you do??”

Simple: I watched my son think of a polar bear.

It’s an ART

I used Awareness Recursion Theory. Only Level One, but often that’s all you need.

I simply imagined being in my son’s little boots, seeing what he was seeing, sensing what he was sensing. It was not hard to invert that model, to guess its inner state from its outer, especially since I had been raising him for all of his seven years. That move of his head, its vector, the immediacy of his announcement—they told me that his inner vision held the first image triggered by seeing a snow drift that looked exactly like the Coca Cola bears on our TV set in our living room.

Technically, I didn’t know for sure, and I didn’t think about it in words or discrete steps. Awareness Recursion Theory is never a science, always an ART, the reading of tea leaves and inkblots. But of course I knew what I was seeing, as surely as you can tell a dog from a cat (statistically based neural recognition, harrumph!). It was obvious.

Level Two is where the recursion begins. That’s when you know that your dad knows that you picked a polar bear, because you noticed him noticing you looking at the snow drift, so you change your pick. We invert each other’s models, layer them, and compare inner and outer states, in real time.

I made up Awareness Recursion Theory (ART) in 1992 while studying machine learning and adaptive algorithms at Stanford University, and I have mostly kept it to myself.

I’ll start explaining it, next post in this series.

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