Quote from: 46:40On one level, design is about imagining things. [..] I have this set of problems, I have this set of constraints, and I know I can solve that. [..] and try not to get the first answer, but try to get a lot of answers, and then have them to choose from.

Quote from: 46:14There are people who can make music by waving their hands through the air. They don't need emacs or anything else. They don't need a million options or deep class hierarchies or anything else.

Quote from: 25:14If you look at the insides of some of what Coltrane is doing it just seems like the most emotional thing, but there's a tremendous amount of intellectual stuff going on there. It's the same thing with Bartok: you can listen to some piece that will make you cry, and then you can look at the score and it's full of fibonacci ratios.

Quote from: 21:12Some people think that improvisation is some genius just spontaneously emoting. It is not that. That is not the way it works. The best improvisers practice the most. (John Coltrane is a great example of somebody who practiced an amazing amount of time, and studied quite extensively.)

What you end up hearing when you hear an improvisation is an application of a lot of knowledge, and a tremendous amount of vocabulary.

Quote from: 20:28When you get to larger scales (like when Bartok does these larger compositions) you end up with this set of constraints at each level; larger works just have more structural components, but they're very stratified. [Bartok] has all kinds of techniques for dealing with harmony in the small and form in the large.

Quote from: 15:40The arts are not usually about solving real world problems at all, but if you look at any of the art forms where there's somebody like a composer (or a choreographer, etc) the first thing these people do is they make problems for themselves. They set up a set of constraints under which they're going to form an artistic work.

Holy shit lol this is nesting flawlessly with The Grasshopper and art as play etc

Quote from: 12:40People say "I can't do design, I don't have time. I don't have time to do design." But I will make the argument that design is the key to more efficiency. Because it's a lot easier to iterate a design than it is to iterate a solution or an implementation.

(p124-126) Open vs. closed games
Games = players trying to achieve a state of affairs 'using inefficient means' (or the most efficient means within constraints). A 'state of affairs' may be a conclusion (the end of the game) or a sort of continuing, active state. These are 'closed games' and 'open games': does the state of affairs end the game or not?

Quote from: p92-93games reverse the ends and means of other activities. [..]An impostor behaves like a Russian princess in order to be taken for Anastasia, but a player at make-believe chooses to impersonate Anastasia so that she can behave like a Russian princess. [..] a genuine surmounter of obstacles does so in order to get to other side, but a high-jumper tries to get to the other side only so that he can be surmounting obstacles.

Within game playing, the paradoxical twin drives to continue, and to conclude (to win).

"a good game is just the kind of game which avoids the 'paradox'" -p82

A good game is one that continues as long as you want it to continue but where you eventually want it to conclude (to be won) and that concluding occurs around that time

Quote from: p81The superior chess player cautions his inferior opponent against a bad move not because he wants his opponent to win but he does not want to win, let's say, too soon.

Hmm. Something about this is rubbing me the wrong way. Doesn't the superior players do this out of a shared appreciation of the game, of the system? "You've missed this, let me help you get to my level." But perhaps at a deeper level the motivation is nonetheless to 'not win too soon?'

Regarding Bernard Suits'
"The Grasshopper"

Quote from: Part 2, 36:00Avoid making experimentation frustrating