The Grid Myth

If asked to identify the first digital image, I would undoubtedly cite the cave paintings at Lascaux. To be clear, I’m not referring to the dynamic depictions of animals, but rather the grids present at their hooves.

The above image is housed at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno. When I first encountered the image by chance, I felt it linked us (surrounded as we are by bitmaps in the present day) to our early Cro-Magnon ancestors 20,000 years ago. What significance does the grid hold in the history of our species? It seemed this very ability to geometrically represent space is what makes us human. The grid is perhaps the forbidden fruit consumed by Adam and Eve.

The grid reveals a means by which we understand our world.

You selectively perceive the world based on light which hits your retina. From this array of light, you discern the faces of your friends, foregrounded against a landscape of manmade edifice and natural splendor. This system allows us to bestow names to the vast range of perceivable objects. The act of naming provides an index by which to refer to our world. We can compare, measure the merits, and seek identification with our surroundings. Thus is the power of the grid, as a tool.

Our civilization is founded on the grid.

Thought is powered by language. Language is in turn divisible by alphabets, classifying the smallest phonemes in a grid that orderly represents a given linguistic world. In English, this grid consists of 26 letters. In Japanese, it consists of a grid enumerating the 46 syllables in contemporary use. Similarly, the periodic table of elements is the scientific gospel, systematically listing the atomic structure of our physical world.

Moreover, the agrarian revolution allowed us to abandon our nomadic roots to instead take up residence on a specific plot of land. In Japan, this paradigm shift was made possible by the advent of rice cultivation in the Jomon Period (c. 14,000-400 BCE). Prehistoric man utilized a grid to irrigate and delineate their crops. Vestiges are evident in the character “田” – a pictogram meaning “rice paddy.”

Periodic Table:

Japanese Hiragana Syllabary:

Monetary technology also utilizes the grid. Astonishingly simple in design, vast fortunes are reduced to a competition of bar graph length in a 2D information space. Extrapolated to the 3D realm, this grid expands to envelop the globe, fitting snugly in metropolitan hubs such as Manhattan, where the victors enjoy the spoils from their penthouses.

Perhaps it isn’t an exaggeration to state our civilization was built in pursuit of the grid aesthetic.

If the brain can be defined as the organ responsible for thought, the grid has thus transfixed the human brain, and been a perpetual source of beauty that has attracted us like insects to a flame. As the ultimate concretion of this aesthetic, humanity has now created in gridded space a tool that calculates the optimal solution to nearly any problem. (The inescapable irony is that we ourselves are not intelligent enough to understand how our machines arrive upon their solutions.)

“This is just games, but it could be stock market data," Hassabis says. "DeepMind has been combining two promising areas of research -- a deep neural network and a reinforcement-learning algorithm – in a really fundamental way. We're interested in algorithms that can use their learning from one domain and apply that knowledge to a new domain."
Source: DeepMind: Inside Google's Super-Brain

(Translated by Daniel Jacob González)