Much ado about man versus machine

NET RESULTS: It's a strange place, a place of poise and beauty, which still - hallelujah - belongs to the creative human brain and not the programmed machine mind. It demolishes our sense of our own uniqueness if a computer can unpick the subjective

In the middle of last month, up popped one of those eternal conflicts journalists love. No, not little guy versus big guys, or underdog sports team versus champions, or Enron versus lawyers, or even Microsoft versus anyone but Microsoft. This was about one of those ultimate face offs: human versus computer.

The computer, of course, has got to lose for this to be a heart-warming tale of the triumph of truth and goodness, rather than a dour vision of a future dystopia. In this case, the human did indeed win - at least this time around - which prompted a rash of articles that sounded at once both relieved and gleeful. The human brain has not yet reached the point of obsolescence, they suggested.

Who were our contenders in this battle? Well, in one corner of the ring, we had a computer that performed some textual analysis on a lengthy and obscure early 17th century elegy, eventually concluding that it was written by William Shakespeare. Throwing the punches on behalf of the computer was a well-known literary scholar-sleuth, Prof Don Foster of Vassar College in America, who delights in conducting what he calls "forensic linguistics".

In the other corner, we had another professor who, after doing a brain-powered, close textual reading of his own, countered that the elegy was instead the work of Shakespeare's contemporary John Ford. Ford, primarily known as a dramatist, has provided generations of bored students with the chance to snigger openly in class by penning a widely studied play called 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

Prof Foster made his claim in a controversial article in 1995, which got up the nose of no end of Shakespearians - a simple pleasure that I'm sure he would recommend to all. He's an interesting character who, notably, used his computer forensics to successfully unveil the then-anonymous author of the political satire Primary Colours as Joe Klein. He's also written a book about his methods and the challenges of trying to resolve various authorship mysteries, called Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous.

In the middle of last month, he posted an acknowledgement on an internet Shakespearian discussion list that he believed his analysis of the elegy was wrong. Now, he said, he supported the Fordian hypothesis, put forth in the May issue of the Review of English Studies by Prof Gilles Monsarrat, a professor of languages at the University of Burgundy in France and an expert on both Shakespeare and Ford.

I like what Prof Foster said in his e-mail recantation: "No-one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar." Not "accept" but "rejoice" - in that choice of words exists a wonderful balance between the cocky exuberance of the star scholar and scholarly self-effacement.

I also like the seemingly cheeky, but actually hard and exhaustive analysis he does on texts using a computer. A PC can do much of the dull and repetitive analysis a human would do when examining a literary work - looking for telling phrases, repeated words and word clusters, distinctive use of a noun, a verb tense, a favoured adjective. And of course, a human has to conceive of the ways in which a computer will conduct its digital investigations. The PC is really more of a gumshoe sidekick than a Sam Spade in its own right.

And yet. There is something that makes the heart glad that a traditional, close textual reading - one alive to the subtleties and nuances of language and the very human imprint of a writer's individual quirkiness, revealing as a fingerprint - produced the goods this time around.

Which suggests that what we're talking about is not really man versus computer at all, human mind against machine mind, but an attempt to define acts of human creativity and ingenuity. It demolishes our sense of our own uniqueness if the cool indifference of a computer can unpick the subjective, mysterious features of writerly style. So we make the computer the bad guy in these kinds of contest.

But the computer's cool indifference, that ability to only do what it is told, is a bit of a - well, a front. What we see is a desktop box that toils away quietly at tasks that would take us hours, days; sometimes months or years to perform. It's easy to forget that the mind inside that box is itself a work of masterful art, as writer Tracy Kidder makes so beautifully clear in his classic book, The Soul of a New Machine.

Behind the brain of a computer lie hundreds of hours of intensely creative work by programmers, writers themselves, whose language is the precise but intricate whorls of computer code. As in literary writing, an idea in code can be expressed in many ways - the clumsy and obtuse or the lean and subtle. The best coders are fine stylists of computer language, transmitting their ideas to the machine with grace.

I love the word that programmers use to describe beautifully written code: "elegant". Elegance captures the clarity and polish of a well-turned piece of prose or code. The word also correctly celebrates the innate artistry of those who can take what they do to a higher plane. Over the years I've spoken to writers and I've spoken to programmers and engineers and the similarities rather than the differences are what stand out. Like all deeply creative people in the arts or sciences, when at work they enter into a wonderfully still place in which the mind's synapses fire and time vanishes.

Such paradoxical moments of merged effort and effortlessness seem common to those who can hammer together thought out of nothingness, order from chaos - whether by programmer or artist, writer or inventor. The US poet Wallace Stevens describes this profound place well when he imagines a stately palm tree, branches waving slowly in a silent breeze as a lone bird sings: "the palm at the end of the mind, / Beyond the last thought."

It's a strange place, a place of poise and beauty, which still - hallelujah - belongs to the creative human brain and not its servant, the programmed machine mind.