Comments on: Adaptation and algorithmic complexity

By: olsenbloom

olsenbloom — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:23:52 +0000

Patrick – it is one of the seemingly less-essential parts of the book, but still, reading it:
It establishes a lot about Dan Dreiberg’s character – he’s a very timid man (paralysed with fear by the sound of the owl), but his very fear motivates him to want to re-experience action. He wanted to get back in the costume long before the events of Watchmen.
It serves as a comment on superhero comics fandom, and also on superhero comics themselves – saying that if we look at these things with fresh eyes, seeing them as gods rather than as things to be catalogues, we can rekindle the joy we felt in them as a child.
It shows that Dan Dreiberg kept in touch with other ex-superheroes.
And I think it also serves as a reminder from Moore to himself – he’s acknowledged that Watchmen is one of his most formalist works, one where he was ‘trying to be clever’, and it’s a reminder not to let the intricate structure and cleverness overwhelm the human moments in the story. It may well also be a reminder to fans to concentrate on those moments too…

By: Patrick C

Patrick C — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:34:30 +0000

Not really related to your main point, but to be honest I’ve never really “got” the essay about owls. I’ve read Watchmen maybe half a dozen times and I still can’t figure out why that was included. I’m not saying it *shouldn’t* have been, because obviously Alan Moore knew exactly what he was doing. I just could never wrap my head around it.

By: olsenbloom

olsenbloom — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:14:36 +0000

You could possibly get a minimal reduction in the size of FW by replacing a few keywords with single bytes, that kind of thing, but there aren’t the kind of patterns in there that you get in most text, due to the essential near-randomness of it. I don’t think you could get a *significant* reduction, though I could be wrong…

By: Gavin Robinson

Gavin Robinson — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:54:21 +0000

I'm not sure that I understand what you mean about not being able to compress Finnegans Wake. In terms of information it's a string of characters which could be compressed, isn't it? There's some exciting work going on in digital humanities using compression algorithms to see how similar or different texts are. For example, Bill Turkel has done some experiments which show that if you cluster articles from a biographical dictionary using a compression algorithm you end up with patterns that mean something to humans, even though the computer knows nothing of meaning.

By: olsenbloom

olsenbloom — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:38:02 +0000

Yeah – reading it back I didn’t make that clear. That’s why it’s an approximation rather than an exact relationship – thematic simplicity is related to quality, but not the same thing. You’re right.

By: Debi Linton

Debi Linton — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:30:38 +0000

But the film version is interesting, because it appears to be an illustration of a hypothesis I’ve had for a while now – that the quality of an adaptation is a function of the quality of the source material and the fidelity of the adaptation to it. The function in question being an inverse one. The worse the source material, and the less faithful the adaptation, the better the result.

Where ‘worse’; in terms of source material means ‘thematically more simple’, right? I wouldn’t call the terms synonymous.