Innocent Game Research Articles

Multiple organ failure after an innocent game with the dog: A diagnostic challenge

Multiple organ failure after an innocent game with the dog: A diagnostic challenge

La vérité dans le sang : roman policier et connaissance

The traditional detective novel is presented as the archetype of the literature of access to knowledge, the extreme point of the claim to telling the truth and giving sense by a tale which goes back meticulously and scientifically to the beginning : it is ratio which has the last word, in the assertion of the absolute autonomy of the rational process, which is posed as origin and unique finality, driving back the major interrogations of mankind behind what is presented in the form of an innocent game of chess. The contemporary form of the detective novel has re-modelled this vision considerably. What modern authors dispute, to different degrees, is traditional coincidence with a closed form, i.e. one which is completed, with a closed meaning and clearly formulated. For them, the experimentation on form goes along with that on significance, going through a modification of the relation to the meaning. The end will not always explain the beginning, so that the reader becomes aware that a question is always answered by another question, and that the first is only the start, in the spiral of generalized suspicion, of the questioning of original certainties.

The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter

author Marjana Gaponenko explained her authorial intentions, stating: “I am looking for my own romanticism and find it in the midst of reality, in irony.” Although initially confounding, this statement is a particularly apt distillation of her approach to the hilarious, beautiful, and compassionate portrait of ninety-six-year-old Luka Levadski . In the midst of a cynical age in which irony often serves to distance us from the outside world, Gaponenko sees great beauty within the curious, sometimes-uncomfortable juxtapositions that comprise life’s mosaic of realities. Her exploration of this beauty, far from alienating her readers, draws them closer to the world of life outside themselves. We meet Levadski just after he learns that he has cancer. Unwilling to undergo the grueling process of chemotherapy, the solitary retired ornithologist considers his financial situation on the cusp of his final days and sees, with glee, his chance to live sumptuously. He accepts this opportunity with a singular energy, dressing himself up in expensive clothing and parading about Berlin like a now-genteel, now-curmudgeonly dandy. As he reflects on certain tenderly recalled moments of his childhood and successful career, however, he comes to envision his final days, not in Berlin, but in the extraordinary luxury of the Hotel Imperial in Vienna. Despite this concern with material comfort, the unlikely relationships he develops during his stay turn out to be the most vital acquisitions of his late life. Levadski’s life is rife with irony. He is a Ukrainian Jew who spent most of his life in the nation that had put his life in grave danger. He is utterly enchanted by music and the language of birds, though he neither sings nor spent much of his life conversing. And most saliently, his life of luxury and pleasure begins as his body and mind lapse into decay. Gaponenko does not explicitly identify the tensions— between the personal and the political, life and death, inelegance and dignity, ephemerality and timelessness—underlying these ironies. Rather, their existence is revealed indirectly through the witty, quirky, and beautiful prose—exquisitely rendered in English by Arabella Spencer—with which she realizes her character’s simultaneous frustration and wonder. The novel does not allow the historical and political to overwhelm its narrative. Nor do Levadski’s memories of the distant past take center stage. Rather, the novel and its protagonist revel in the present moment. Gaponenko’s formal freedom and pure energy reveal a love of writing befitting her subject and comprise an expression of human emotion that is as nuanced as it is powerful. Levadski marvels at how quickly those around him can become “the special people” of his life. By the end of this brief novel, there is no question that he has become a special person to the readers who sojourn with him within its pages. Ethan Holaday University of Oklahoma Aislinn Hunter. The World Before Us. New York. Hogarth. 2015. isbn 9780553418521 Our imagination “takes what it knows from one set of experiences and sinks them into another to create some semblance of truth, bridge time.” This is exactly what Aislinn Hunter has done in this intricately woven novel connecting the present, the past, and the imagination. When Jane was fifteen, she took up a temporary position as caretaker of a five-year-old named Lily. One day, Jane accompanied Lily and her father, William, on one of William’s botanical expeditions. Jane’s only duty there was to watch after Lily. But an innocent game with Lily amid flowers and trees turned into a frantic search for the missing five-year-old. As Jane turned around for a moment to James Edgecombe The Art of Kozu Sandstone Press Spanning different time periods and continents, James Edgecombe’s novella about an artist and his paintings investigates whether an image can really tell the whole story and what that story might be. Steeped in the culture of Japan and written in an elegant style that doesn’t waste time with unneccessary description, this book is a fitting testament to Yuichiro Kozu’s work. Belinder Dhanoa Echoes in the Well Zubaan Books Rich language evokes intense emotion in this novel about family, sisterhood, and...

Combinatorial structure of type dependency

We give an account of the basic combinatorial structure underlying the notion of type dependency. We do so by considering the category of generalised algebraic theories in the sense of Cartmell, and exhibiting it as the category of algebras for a monad on a presheaf category. The objects of the presheaf category encode the basic judgements of a dependent sequent calculus, while the action of the monad encodes the deduction rules; so by giving an explicit description of the monad, we obtain an explicit account of the combinatorics of type dependency. We find that this combinatorics is controlled by a particular kind of decorated ordered tree, familiar from computer science and from innocent game semantics. Furthermore, we find that the monad at issue is of a particularly well-behaved kind: it is local right adjoint in the sense of Street–Weber. In future work, we will use this fact to describe nerves for dependent type theories, and to study the coherence problem for dependent type theory using the tools of two-dimensional monad theory.

A Short Statement and an Innocent Game: James Joyce and Stephen Dedalus in Samuel Beckett's Watt

This article takes P.J. Murphy's Beckett's Dedalus: Dialogical Engagement with Joyce in Beckett's Fiction (2009) as a useful if incomplete platform from which to mark the intertextual points of contact between Samuel Beckett's novel Watt (1953) and the aesthetics of epiphany articulated by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917). By expanding the passages under analysis beyond those proposed by Murphy, Watt emerges as a tipping-point in Beckett's transition from an aesthetics inflected by Joyce's transcendental verbosity to one that accepts language as suspect, and marks gesture as beautiful.

Games characterizing Levy–Longo trees

We present a simple strongly universal innocent game model for Levy–Longo trees, i.e. every point in the model is the denotation of a unique Levy–Longo tree. The observational quotient of the model then gives a universal, and hence fully abstract, model of the pure Lazy Lambda Calculus.

Adapting innocent game models for the Böhm tree λ-theory

We present a game model of the untyped λ-calculus, with equational theory equal to the Böhm tree λ-theory B , which is universal (i.e. every element of the model is definable by some term). This answers a question of Di Gianantonio, Franco and Honsell. We build on our earlier work, which uses the methods of innocent game semantics to develop a universal model inducing the maximal consistent sensible theory H ∗ . To our knowledge these are the first syntax-independent universal models of the untyped λ-calculus.

A Mathematical Excursion: From the Three—door Problem to a Cantor-Type Set

2. STARTING POINT: THE THREE-DOOR PROBLEM. Mathematics has always been enriched by a- diversity of games and intellectual curiosities. These have provided an endless supply of problems that have acquired a life of their own, far removed from the recreational aspect of their origins. For example, the first building blocks of probability owe their existence to the analysis of gambling games carried out by Fermat and Pascal in the beginning of the XVIIth century. Undoubtedly Fermat himself was much attracted to mathematics thanks to Bachet's Problemes plaisants et delectables of 1612 [1], which was an introduction to Bachet's most famous book: the Latin translation of Diophantus' Arithmetica, in whose margins Fermat wrote the note that made his major theorem famous. Another important instance, E. Lucas' Re'cre'ations Mathematiques [15], was a source of interesting problems at the beginning of the present century. Let us start our excursion by setting a simple problem in the form of a seemingly innocent game.

Time-Scale Invariance in Transport and Relaxation

An early theme in probability was calculating the fair ante for various games of chance. Nicolas Bernoulli introduced a seemingly innocent game, first published in 1713, that yielded a paradoxical result. The result has become known as the St. Petersburg paradox, because of an analysis written later by Daniel Bernoulli in the Commentary of the St. Petersburg Academy.

Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie

One of the most telling and significant passages in all of the complex fiction of Salman Rushdie occurs in his discussion of the game of Snakes and in Midnight's Children. For one thing, this passage illustrates Rushdie's ability to evoke memories of childhood with a tenderness and nostalgia that rivals a Proust or a Nabokov. For another, it shows the way in which he so effectively employs images from popular culture in the construction of his highly literary fictions, since Snakes and itself is of central thematic importance to the structure of Midnight's Children. In this simple children's game, alternatives are clear and unproblematic. Ladders lead upward and are good; snakes send one sliding downward and are bad. But Rushdie's narrator, the harried Saleem Sinai, notes the way in which this apparently innocent game figures a much less innocent tendency toward dualistic thinking: implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil . . . metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother.' In the world of Rushdie, however, things are never quite so simple, and Sinai finds that such neat polar oppositions inevitably fall apart: I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity ... it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake(167). This crucial element of ambiguity and multiple possibilities, emphasized as it is by the self-contradictory Shandean narrative excesses of Sinai himself, becomes in fact a central thematic element of the entire book. But, like Tristram Shandy, Sinai is actually quite charming in his contradictoriness, and, as Mario Couto points out, his inconsistency enhances one of the novel's most engaging qualities-its pervasive tone of uncertainty.2 In the case of Midnight's Children this theme is linked in an obvious way to the use of Tristram Shandy as a narrative model, but in fact all of Rushdie's narrators operate much in the same way.3 For example, the narrator of Shame explains his ability to be unbothered by apparent contradiction: The inconsistency doesn't matter; I myself manage to