Algorithmic Walk II ⚙️

transcribed from a voice memo recording I took at the end of my walk when I finished following my instructions

Ok, so this is the end of my second algorithmic walk. I’m about a mile from home, about 12 or 13 minutes. I’ve also spun in a crude circle but in a different route than my previous walk. This time my instructions were to go forward two blocks, right one, choose a random direction, then go forward 3 blocks, left forward one, and choose a random direction. Then repeat that whole instruction a second time.

My walking algorithim

And my randomness function was…-this is going to sound so stupid- pick an interesting-looking direction to turn. In other words, an interesting street to go down essentially, which is actually pretty different from what i was going to do after my first walk. My first randomness function was to pick a block that seemed to have the least number of people on it and walk that way. And I was like…that’s too arbitrary so next time you should roll a four sided die. Also, because it’s snowing now, a blizzard, I was thinking maybe it would make sense to use the snow somehow to decide the direction to go but i can’t figure out what that would be. So instead I picked interestingness to figure out what direction to go, probably because I’m bored a little bit, and I thought a good way to distinguish between people and algorithms or automatons is to think about that. What is actually interesting? An automaton or software doesn’t care what’s interesting. It has no ability to think. It just executes. But as humans, obviously that’s a big distinction. We bring all the other things to bear that make us human. I won’t get into all of that now. One thinks or feels out the answer to the questions: am i bored? do i find this interesting? what am i getting out of this? And yes, I created this assignment and have been prepared to treat this like I’m an automaton but evidently i’ve introduced interestingness to my software for my algorithmic walk. Which of course a computer would not be able to do, or you’d have to introduce a definition of what interestingness means. But I’m a person, and I never defined it for this walk. I just did it. I picked, and it made my walk more interesting because of it. I think I basically chose directions by feel when I didn’t know what was on that street or what was down a block. Or buildings or spaces I wanted to see. Maybe it’s similar to how I take a ‘regular walk’ in the city and I’m looking for graffiti or strange buildings or spaces to check out and examine. It’s a similar thing and i introduced that process in a somewhat more formal way to my walk algorithm.

I still think it could be useful to do a purely random function similar to how a computer would, like not based off of human subjective matters. But subjectivity breaks into this anyway. For example, one part of my instructions say to go 3 blocks forward. But some streets are really long, And some streets are really short. And some might have a street that branches out on one side, like a 3 way intersection. Is that the end of a block, o is a block complete until it’s a 4 way intersection? I didn’t come to a conclusion on that but I didn’t have to deal with that this time because I didn’t come to any 3-way intersections. The other thing to consider is human fallibility. At some point I forget if I had gone 2 or 3 blocks and I just made a judgement call. So there’s always subjectivity when it comes to humans.

I’m walking home now trudging through the snow. I did have a good time. I saw streets and places i didn’t know. And this was a more fun walk than the first one because the interesting-ness helped. Not all walks need to be “interesting” but I was definitely drawn that direction.