‘Once upon a time Trurl the constructor built an eight-story thinking machine. When it was finished, he gave it a coat of white paint, trimmed the edges in lavender, stepped back, squinted, then added a curlicue on the front and, where one might imagine the forehead to be, a few pale orange polkadots. Extremely pleased with himself, he whistled an air and, as is always done on such occasions, asked it the ritual question of how much is two plus two’.
Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad (1965)
The Art of Coding
This project sets the problem of an art professor seeking to learn to code; to ‘think like a computer scientist’. Developed as a form of ‘open training’, the project involves using a custom ChatGPT, The Art of Coding, which acts as a Python ‘tutor’. A key text associated with the GPT is the book How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (PDF version). The book provides the necessary structure and framing for a ‘course’ in learning to code. It also offers some wider philosophical considerations, which the GPT is instructed to amplify.
A step-by-step approach of working with the GPT to learn to code is presented via a Google Colab Notebook. The idea is document the process akin to a diary, albeit not as regular collection of writings, but rather as a set of experiments in code – ideally giving rise to a collection of incrementally more complex programmes.
Follow the project via the ‘The Art of Coding’ Notebook:
To read more about project, see Index Note #14 The Art of Coding →
Notes on Structuralism & AI 