At Dynamicland, The Building Is The Computer
在动感地带，建筑就是计算机

Walking into Dynamicland, a computational research lab and communal computer in Oakland, the first thing I notice is the array of projects spread out across several work tables and the kitchen countertop. 3D printed math sculptures, stuffed animals, kids toys disassembled for parts, and a MIDI keyboard connected to a Raspberry Pi. There’s enough art supplies to rival any Kindergarten classroom: markers and crayons, glue sticks, silly putty, felt tokens, pipe cleaners. Giant posters line the walls, with titles like “Annotation of the Celera Human Genome Assembly” and “Outline of the Discussion Leading to Maxwell’s Equations.” Bret Victor, the engineer-designer who runs the lab, loves these information-rich posters because they break us out of the tyranny of our glassy rectangular screens.
走进位于奥克兰的计算研究实验室和公用计算机 "动感地带"（Dynamicland），首先映入眼帘的是铺满几张工作桌和厨房台面的各种项目。3D打印的数学雕塑、毛绒玩具、拆卸成零件的儿童玩具，还有连接到 Raspberry Pi 的 MIDI 键盘。这里的美术用品足以媲美任何一间幼儿园教室：记号笔和蜡笔、胶棒、腻子、毛毡代币、吸管清洁剂。墙上挂满了巨幅海报，标题分别是 "塞莱拉人类基因组组装注释 "和 "麦克斯韦方程讨论大纲"。实验室的工程师兼设计师布雷特-维克多喜欢这些信息丰富的海报，因为它们能让我们摆脱玻璃矩形屏幕的束缚。

In one corner of the building, there’s a library. The books are centered around STEM but reach well into the arts and humanities. A copy of A History of Engineering & Science in the Bell System sits on the coffee table, and on one wall there is a poster labeled “Every Representation of Everything (in progress),” showcasing examples of different musical notation systems, sign languages, mathematical representations, chemistry notations.
在大楼的一角，有一个图书馆。这里的书籍以科学、技术、工程和数学为中心，但也涉及艺术和人文学科。茶几上摆放着一本《贝尔系统工程与科学史》，一面墙上挂着一张海报，标注着 "万物的每一种表征（进行中）"，展示了不同的音乐符号系统、手语、数学表征和化学符号。

Dynamicland is a non-profit that resides somewhere between an academic research lab and a Silicon Valley startup, between physical and digital, and between computing’s distant past and its future. The researchers here are inventing a new computational medium.
动感地带是一家非营利机构，介于学术研究实验室和硅谷初创公司之间，介于物理和数字之间，介于计算的遥远过去和未来之间。这里的研究人员正在发明一种新的计算媒介。

What is a computational medium — and how is one invented?
什么是计算媒体？如何发明计算媒体？

Before we get into that, let’s look at an ancient medium: The map. Map reading is a complex and uniquely human skill, not at all obvious to a young child. You float out of your body and into the sky, leaving behind the point of view you’ve been accustomed to all your life. Your imagination turns squiggly blue lines and green shading into creeks, mountains, and forests seen from above. Bringing it all together in your mind’s eye, you can picture the surroundings.
在讨论这个问题之前，我们先来看看一种古老的媒介：地图。读图是一项复杂而独特的人类技能，对于年幼的孩子来说一点也不明显。你从身体中漂浮出来，飞向天空，把你一生中习惯的视角抛在脑后。你的想象力将蓝色的斜线和绿色的阴影变成了从高空俯瞰的小溪、山脉和森林。将这一切汇集到脑海中，你就能描绘出周围的环境。

Maps are so beautifully matched to our mental faculties. We train our minds around them. They shrink vast topographies to human scale so we can dream and reason about them in ways that were previously impossible — our street, our planet, distant moons.
地图与我们的思维能力如此契合。我们围绕地图训练思维。它们将广袤的地形缩小到人类的比例尺，这样我们就能以以前不可能的方式对它们进行梦想和推理--我们的街道、我们的星球、遥远的卫星。

It feels so natural, yet maps had to be invented, and the invention of the map transformed civilization. It greatly expanded our cognitive reach, giving us the ability to depict rich geographic information.
它给人的感觉是如此自然，然而地图却不得不被发明出来，地图的发明改变了人类文明。它极大地扩展了我们的认知范围，让我们有能力描绘丰富的地理信息。

And you don’t have to be a professional cartographer to draw a map. A kid with a crayon and a napkin can map their neighborhood, complete with secret hideouts, friends’ houses, parks, and skate spots. That’s the beauty of physical media, as opposed to digital media: You can create it with anything you can find. Draw on a napkin. Draw in the sand with a stick. The medium is open to a wide range of improvisation.
绘制地图不一定非得是专业制图师。一个孩子拿着蜡笔和餐巾纸就能绘制出他们的社区地图，包括秘密藏身处、朋友家、公园和滑冰场。与数字媒体相比，这就是实体媒体的魅力所在：你可以用任何你能找到的东西来创作。在餐巾纸上画画。用棍子在沙子上画画。这种媒体可以进行广泛的即兴创作。

Digital media, however, tend to be more rigid. Commercial apps force us into ways of working with media that are tightly prescribed by a handful of people who design them. For example, Instagram has exactly three brush tools for drawing on photos, and five typefaces. Creative flexibility beyond that is possible but requires a lot more effort.
然而，数字媒体往往更加死板。商业应用程序迫使我们使用由少数设计者严格规定的媒体工作方式。例如，Instagram 有三种画笔工具和五种字体。除此之外的创意灵活性是可能的，但需要付出更多的努力。

Of course, every medium has limits. What is at first liberating eventually becomes a prison that constrains our expression and our range of thought. Because every medium has limits, there’s always an opportunity to invent new media that will expand our ability to understand the world around us, to communicate, and to address major problems of civilization.
当然，每种媒介都有其局限性。起初的解放最终会变成束缚我们表达和思想的牢笼。正因为每种媒介都有局限性，所以我们总是有机会发明新的媒介，扩大我们了解周围世界、进行交流和解决文明重大问题的能力。

A lot of what we use today is extended from our analog past: email, digital books, and digital photos are more or less direct carryovers from physical letters, books, and photos. And this tendency has bled into hardware products: We’ve extended $0.05 pencils and $0.005 paper by creating $200 digital pencils and $1,000 digital tablets. By carrying forward some of the elegance of pencil and paper into the digital realm, we cheat ourselves out of discovering entirely new approaches.
我们今天使用的很多东西都是从过去的模拟技术延伸而来：电子邮件、数字图书和数字照片或多或少都是从实体信件、书籍和照片直接继承而来。这种趋势已经渗透到硬件产品中：我们将 0.05 美元的铅笔和 0.005 美元的纸张延伸到 200 美元的数字铅笔和 1000 美元的数字平板电脑。通过将纸笔的某些优雅元素带入数字领域，我们欺骗了自己，使自己无法发现全新的方法。

That’s what Dynamicland has been looking for: New approaches. Media that can only grow out of the substrate of computing and electronics.
这正是动感地带一直在寻找的：新方法。只有在计算机和电子技术的基础上才能发展起来的媒体。

The invention of a new medium is an iterative chicken-and-egg dilemma; a long-term push and pull between the medium and the work created with it. For the invention of the Smalltalk programming system in the 1970s at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), each 2–4 year research cycle followed the same steps:
新媒体的发明是一个反复出现的鸡生蛋、蛋生鸡的两难境地；是媒体与使用媒体创作的作品之间的长期推拉。20 世纪 70 年代，施乐公司帕洛阿尔托研究中心（PARC）发明了 Smalltalk 编程系统，每个 2-4 年的研究周期都遵循相同的步骤：

1. Build applications in the language
   使用该语言构建应用程序
2. Based on that experience, redesign the language
   在此基础上，重新设计语言
3. Build a new system based on the redesign.
   在重新设计的基础上建立一个新系统。

Over the course of a decade, researchers went through five of these cycles before issuing the first public release of Smalltalk. It became a seminal programming language, and the most popular modern languages like Python and JavaScript incorporate major ideas — like object-oriented programming and reflection — that began with Smalltalk. Smalltalk’s graphical user interface became the basis for the look and feel of the Macintosh.
在十年的时间里，研究人员经历了五个这样的周期，才发布了Smalltalk的第一个公开版本。它成为了一门开创性的编程语言，Python和JavaScript等最流行的现代语言都融入了Smalltalk的主要思想，如面向对象编程和反射。Smalltalk的图形用户界面成为Macintosh外观和感觉的基础。

The Smalltalk research team was led by computing pioneer Alan Kay. A man of big visions and the technical expertise to back them up, Kay is a natural teacher, charming and full of great stories and anecdotes about innovation. His lifelong work is to create a dynamic computational medium — and dynamic literacy — for children. In the late 1960s, Kay crafted an early prototype of a laptop/tablet computer out of cardboard, decades before it was feasible to produce, calling it “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages.”
Smalltalk研究团队由计算机先驱艾伦-凯（Alan Kay）领导。凯是一位具有远大理想和技术专长的人，他是一位天生的教师，魅力十足，充满了关于创新的精彩故事和趣闻轶事。他毕生致力于为儿童创造一种动态的计算媒介和动态的读写能力。20 世纪 60 年代末，凯用硬纸板制作了一台笔记本电脑/平板电脑的早期原型机，这在当时是不可行的，他称之为 "所有年龄段儿童的个人电脑"。

Over the decades, Kay has migrated between advanced research departments in large companies like Apple and HP, more recently via his own LA-based institute, Viewpoints Research. In his talks, he argues that the conditions for critical long-term research that can really benefit humanity rarely happen inside of corporations because of the market’s obsession with quarter-by-quarter financials. To make real progress, research needs to be protected from that.
几十年来，凯辗转于苹果和惠普等大公司的高级研究部门，最近又在洛杉矶成立了自己的机构--观点研究公司（Viewpoints Research）。在他的演讲中，他认为，由于市场对每季度财务数据的痴迷，企业内部很少有条件进行真正造福人类的关键性长期研究。要想取得真正的进展，就必须保护研究不受这种情况的影响。

In 2013, Kay began to partner with Vishal Sikka, the affable tech executive and Mr. Bean doppelgänger, to create a new lab to reinvent computing in the spirit of Xerox PARC. Sikka was committed to Kay’s vision, and as the CTO of SAP he had the resources to fund it. The lab was called The Communication Design Group (CDG). Kay hired three principal investigators: Dan Ingalls, Vi Hart, and Bret Victor, offering them space and time in San Francisco.
2013 年，凯开始与维沙尔-西卡（Vishal Sikka）合作，后者是一位和蔼可亲的技术高管，同时也是憨豆先生的化身。西卡致力于实现凯的愿景，作为 SAP 的首席技术官，他有足够的资源来资助这个实验室。该实验室被命名为通信设计小组（CDG）。凯聘请了三位主要研究人员：Dan Ingalls、Vi Hart和Bret Victor，并为他们提供了在旧金山的空间和时间。

For Victor, whose design work at Apple influenced the iPad and Apple Watch, the golden era of long-term research at Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, and other institutions in the 1960s and 70s had always seemed locked in the past. It was folklore to be shared among nerds over beer. But when Kay approached Victor and the other researchers to form CDG, it was clear that there was a torch to be carried forward, with each researcher bringing their own perspective into the mix.
维克多在苹果公司的设计工作影响了 iPad 和 Apple Watch 的诞生，对于他来说，上世纪六七十年代施乐 PARC、贝尔实验室和其他机构长期研究的黄金时代似乎已经成为过去。这只是书呆子们喝啤酒时分享的民间传说。但是，当凯找到维克多和其他研究人员组建 CDG 时，很明显，每个研究人员都要将自己的观点融入其中，将火炬发扬光大。

Inspired by Kay’s vision, Victor soon discovered that inventing new dynamic media was the work he was born to do. Over the years, Victor had come to the conclusion that people desperately need to be relieved of many of the basic assumptions about what programming is and who gets to have the privilege of doing it; assumptions that settled into the sedimentary layer of technology 40 years ago and have barely moved since.
受凯的愿景启发，维克多很快发现，发明新的动态媒体是他与生俱来的工作。多年来，维克多得出的结论是，人们亟需摆脱许多关于编程是什么以及谁有资格做编程的基本假设；这些假设在 40 年前就已沉淀在技术的沉积层中，此后几乎没有改变过。

If we want a future where everyone can program as easily as drawing a map on a napkin, where the full power of computing is available to more than just professional programmers, we may need to reimagine programming itself.
如果我们希望在未来，每个人都能像在餐巾纸上画地图一样轻松地编程，不仅是专业程序员，更多的人都能充分发挥计算机的威力，那么我们可能需要重新想象编程本身。

Traditionally, programming languages exist within a holy trinity: The language, the tools, and the operating system. The trinity allows programmers to become masters of a general-purpose toolset that works across many languages. As C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup writes in The Design and Evolution of C++, “The need for a programming language to be just a cog in a much larger machine is of utmost importance to most industrial users.” He attributes C++’s broad appeal to its ability to fit into the trinity. It’s very helpful to professional programmers when languages can play well together. The desire for interoperable languages and common tools is what holds the trinity in place, and any language that tries to break out has very little chance of becoming very popular.
传统上，编程语言是三位一体的：语言、工具和操作系统。三位一体让程序员成为通用工具集的大师，这种工具集适用于多种语言。正如 C++ 的创造者 Bjarne Stroustrup 在 The Design and Evolution of C++ 一书中写道："对于大多数行业用户来说，编程语言只是一台更大机器中的一个齿轮，这一点至关重要。他将 C++ 的广泛吸引力归功于其融入三位一体的能力。当语言能够很好地协同工作时，对专业程序员来说是非常有帮助的。对可互操作语言和通用工具的渴望是三位一体的基础，任何试图突破的语言都很难流行起来。

As a result, most professional programmers today spend their days editing text files inside an 80-column-wide command line interface first designed in the mid-1960s. And most people don’t even question it. But there is a subculture of programmers — with Victor as its natural center — who believe that programming is in a Dark Age because of this near-universal commitment to the trinity.
因此，如今大多数专业程序员整天都在 60 年代中期设计的 80 列宽的命令行界面中编辑文本文件。大多数人甚至对此不屑一顾。但是，有一种以维克多为中心的亚文化认为，编程正处于黑暗时代，原因就在于这种对三位一体的近乎普遍的承诺。

We need programming systems that break out of the trinity, that feel alive and fluid and that are situated closer to the domains most people care about. Spreadsheets hint at an alternative: They provide an environment that gives immediate feedback, where the code and the data live together in a graphical interface, with a language that is well-suited to common tabular data problems. Scratch, a popular programming system for children developed at MIT, is designed for play and creativity.
我们需要突破三位一体的编程系统，让人感觉有活力、流动性强，并且更贴近大多数人关心的领域。电子表格为我们提供了另一种选择：电子表格提供了一个可立即获得反馈的环境，代码和数据在图形界面中共存，其语言非常适合常见的表格数据问题。Scratch是麻省理工学院为儿童开发的一种流行编程系统，专为游戏和创造性而设计。

Learning programming is about learning problem solving while exploring the special kind of creativity that computers and software afford. Programming is where information becomes a living thing capable of movement, flowing through systems and adapting itself to various processes and models. It allows information to dance. And it could be so much more beautiful, playful, humane, and accessible than what the holy trinity affords.
学习编程就是学习如何解决问题，同时探索计算机和软件所带来的特殊创造力。在编程中，信息变成了能够运动的活物，在系统中流动，并适应各种流程和模型。它让信息翩翩起舞。它可以比神圣三位一体所提供的更加优美、有趣、人性化和易于获取。

Working with Sikka and his team at SAP, CDG spent all of 2013 putting an insulating layer between themselves and SAP so that the research could happen. Many of the decisions they made required exceptions and workarounds to SAP policies: They wanted their own office space, they wanted the researchers to retain IP rights, and so on. In a company of SAP’s size, even with the blessing of the CTO, cutting through the red tape was exhausting for Victor, who took on a lot of the work. And simultaneously, he had to figure out how to create a research lab, find and design a space, build a team, and plan the research itself.
CDG 与 Sikka 及其 SAP 团队合作，在 2013 年全年都在他们与 SAP 之间建立了一个隔离层，以便开展研究。他们做出的许多决定都需要对 SAP 的政策采取例外和变通办法：他们希望拥有自己的办公空间，希望研究人员保留知识产权，等等。在 SAP 这样规模的公司里，即使有首席技术官的支持，但对于承担了大量工作的维克多来说，要克服繁文缛节也是一件非常累人的事情。与此同时，他还必须想办法创建一个研究实验室，寻找和设计空间，组建团队，规划研究本身。

The work paid off, and 2014 was a very fruitful year. Victor hired four researchers to work with him, and he gave them autonomy to work on their own individual projects within a broad agenda. Early projects included ShaderShop by Toby Schachman, which allows people to create low-level graphics programs visually rather than in code; and an experiment in active video by Glen Chiacchieri, using the PBS civil rights documentary “Eyes on the Prize.”
功夫不负有心人，2014 年硕果累累。维克多聘请了四位研究人员与他一起工作，他给予他们自主权，让他们在广泛的议程内开展各自的项目。早期的项目包括：ShaderShop 作者Toby Schachman，它允许人们以可视化而非代码的方式创建低级图形程序；Glen Chiacchieri利用公共广播公司的民权纪录片 "Eyes on the Prize "进行的主动视频 实验。

The researchers believed they had at least 5–7 years of funding. With plenty of money in the bank, the research could be exploratory and playful. There was no pressure to make anything marketable. The researchers could drop the performance of fast-paced productivity that pervades startup culture, and work at their own natural tempo. They could follow intuitive hunches that were unlikely to lead to anything. They could spend long, quiet days reading and doing uninterrupted deep work in a direction of their choosing. And, when inspiration struck, they could work all night — or weeks on end — on a new prototype.
研究人员认为，他们至少有 5-7 年的资金。有了充裕的资金，研究工作就可以是探索性和游戏性的。他们没有任何压力去做任何市场化的东西。研究人员可以放弃初创企业文化中普遍存在的快节奏生产力，以自己的自然节奏工作。他们可以凭直觉做事，而这些直觉不可能带来任何结果。他们可以在漫长而安静的日子里阅读，在自己选择的方向上进行不间断的深入研究。当灵感迸发时，他们可以通宵达旦地工作，甚至连续数周制作新的原型。

All that space and openness triggered at least one existential crisis. For Chiacchieri, a young software engineer recruited from MIT’s Media Lab, working for Victor seemed like a dream job at first. But knowing that he could work on absolutely anything at all led him to deeply question his values. It created a lot of anxiety and eventually depression, and in his second year at the lab he spent several despairing months spinning around in circles. “With no one telling me what to work on, I had to decide for myself what was meaningful in this life. Because of how seriously I took my work, this process was very difficult for me,” he wrote in a recent essay. Ultimately, after a series of psychedelic journeys with LSD, and existential conversations with his colleagues, Chiacchieri chose to quit tech and became a psychotherapist.
所有这些空间和开放性至少引发了一次生存危机。对于从麻省理工学院媒体实验室招聘来的年轻软件工程师 Chiacchieri 来说，为 Victor 工作起初似乎是一份梦寐以求的工作。但当他知道自己可以从事任何工作时，他对自己的价值观产生了深深的质疑。这让他感到焦虑不安，最终导致抑郁，在实验室工作的第二年，他花了几个月的时间在原地打转，感到绝望。"没有人告诉我该从事什么工作，我不得不自己决定什么才是人生的意义所在。他在最近的一篇文章中写道："由于我对工作非常认真，这个过程对我来说非常艰难。最终，在经历了一系列迷幻的迷幻药之旅以及与同事的存在主义对话之后，Chiacchieri 选择放弃技术，成为一名心理治疗师。

The exploratory openness of the lab was hampered in the summer of 2014, just a few months after CDG’s opening party, when Sikka left SAP abruptly. Having lost their internal champion at SAP, CDG’s longer-term future was looking unclear.
2014 年夏天，就在 CDG 开幕派对几个月后，锡卡突然离开了 SAP。由于失去了 SAP 的内部支持者，CDG 的长期前景并不明朗。

Kay largely protected the researchers from this disruption. At the time, Victor’s team was creating a prototype system called Hypercard in the World, which allowed people to attach hyperlinks to physical objects.
凯在很大程度上保护了研究人员免受这种干扰。当时，维克多的团队正在创建一个名为世界超级卡的原型系统，该系统允许人们将超链接附加到实物上。

Victor, and researcher Robert Ochshorn, turned all of the past work of the lab into a Hypercard in the World research gallery. Point to a project or paper listed on a big “index poster” using a laser pointer, and an adjacent display would show more information about the project. Another project by May-Li Khoe, called Serengeti, used animal cut-outs to make a dynamic diorama about desert animals. Visitors could point to an animal with the laser pointer to learn more about it.
维克多和研究员Robert Ochshorn将实验室过去的所有工作变成了世界超级卡研究展厅。用激光笔指向大 "索引海报 "上列出的项目或论文，旁边的显示屏就会显示有关该项目的更多信息。May-Li Khoe的另一个项目名为Serengeti, 使用动物剪纸制作了一个关于沙漠动物的动态透视图。参观者可以用激光笔指着一种动物，了解更多有关它的信息。

In late summer 2014, CDG hosted a Game Jam that was a real shining moment of fast-paced collaboration and prolificacy. Friends of the lab came over and made a dozen Hypercard in the World projects. Chiacchieri made a party game called Laser Socks using laser pointers, projectors pointed at the floor, and people jumping around in socks.
2014 年夏末，CDG 举办了一场 Game Jam，这是快节奏合作和多产的真正闪光时刻。实验室的朋友们来到这里，制作了十几个世界上的超级卡牌项目。Chiacchieri 制作了一个名为激光袜子的派对游戏，使用激光指示器、投影仪对准地板，人们穿着袜子跳来跳去。

Over the next year, more exploratory prototypes were built. “I would do these weird art projects,” Schachman said. He hosted a Mirror Hacking Workshop where he invited people to create sculptures using laser-cut mirrors. At the time it seemed unrelated to the research, but upon reflection he had a big insight about collaboration and the power of eye contact, and working with physical materials, and allowing people to see what others are doing. And he began to ask, why can’t computing be more like this?
在接下来的一年里，更多的探索性原型被制造出来。"我会做一些奇怪的艺术项目，"沙赫曼说。他举办了镜子黑客工作坊，邀请人们用激光切割的镜子制作雕塑。当时，这似乎与研究无关，但经过反思，他对合作、眼神交流的力量、使用物理材料以及让人们看到其他人正在做什么有了很大的启发。他开始问，为什么计算不能更像这样呢？

Meanwhile, the relationship with the corporate overlords at SAP gradually broke down, and by early 2016 it was clear that CDG needed a new home. Around the same time, Victor made it clear to his group that they needed to come together and build a single system, rather than work primarily on individual research projects. Several researchers didn’t want to go along for the ride, and left.
与此同时，与 SAP 公司霸主的关系逐渐破裂，到 2016 年初，CDG 显然需要一个新家。大约在同一时间，维克多向他的团队明确表示，他们需要团结起来，建立一个单一的系统，而不是主要从事单个研究项目。有几位研究人员不愿意搭这个顺风车，于是离开了。

By May 2016, Kay was able to charm Y Combinator’s president and A-type startup whisperer Sam Altman. They created Human Advancement Research Community (HARC) inside of YC Research and absorbed the CDG researchers there. Altman generously agreed to fund HARC out of pocket while they waited for other promised funding to come through.
2016 年 5 月，凯成功地迷住了 Y Combinator 的总裁、A 型创业者萨姆-奥特曼（Sam Altman）。他们在 YC Research 内部创建了人类进步研究社区（Human Advancement Research Community，HARC），并吸收了 CDG 的研究人员。阿尔特曼慷慨地同意自掏腰包资助 HARC，而他们则在等待其他承诺的资金到位。

That arrangement lasted a little over a year. In July 2017, just a few months after HARC moved into a beautifully renovated building in old Oakland, Altman abruptly defunded the lab.
这种安排持续了一年多一点。2017 年 7 月，就在 HARC 搬进奥克兰老城区一栋装修精美的大楼几个月后，奥特曼突然对实验室进行了撤资。

It’s unclear why he pulled the plug. In his Y Combinator annual letter in February 2017, he said that the work coming out of Victor’s lab “remain one of the new technologies I think most about.” But a person close to Altman told me that by July his excitement had shifted from HARC to OpenAI, another YC Research project where he is now CEO. Amidst the ashes, a burned-out Kay left for London, and the research groups disbanded.
目前还不清楚他为什么要撤资。他在 2017 年 2 月的 Y Combinator 年度信中说，维克多实验室的工作 "仍然是我最关注的新技术之一"。但一位与奥特曼关系密切的人士告诉我，到了 7 月份，他的兴奋点已经从 HARC 转移到了 OpenAI，这是他现在担任首席执行官的另一个 YC Research 项目。在一片灰烬中，心灰意冷的凯离开了伦敦，研究小组也随之解散。

Victor’s group, however, had one thing keeping them going: Just two weeks before they learned about HARC’s demise, the group’s new programming system — Realtalk — had taken its first baby steps. Operating at about one frame per second it was more of a crawl, but it was a very exciting crawl.
不过，维克多的小组有一件事让他们坚持了下来：就在他们得知 HARC 倒闭消息的两周前，他们的新编程系统 Realtalk 已经迈出了第一步。它的运行速度大约为每秒一帧，更像是一种爬行，但却是一种非常令人兴奋的爬行。

The ideas behind Realtalk incorporated all of the lessons learned from past projects like Hypercard in the World. The researchers — Josh Horowitz, Luke Iannini, Toby Schachman, Paula Te, and Bret Victor, along with producer Virginia McArthur — had spent a year designing the new system and two months bringing it to life.
Realtalk 背后的理念包含了从过去的项目（如世界超级卡）中吸取的所有经验教训。研究人员--Josh Horowitz、Luke Iannini、Toby Schachman、Paula Te和 Bret Victor，以及制作人Virginia McArthur--花了一年时间设计新系统，两个月时间将其付诸实施。

Inspired by the potential of their new system, Victor’s research group opted to go out on their own, take over HARC’s Oakland space, and start fundraising for themselves.
受到新系统潜力的启发，维克多的研究小组选择了独立创业，接管了 HARC 在奥克兰的办公场所，并开始为自己筹集资金。

In a talk he gave last year at Harvard, Victor laid out three major design principles from the research that were incorporated into Realtalk:
去年，维克多在哈佛大学发表演讲时，阐述了研究中的三大设计原则，并将其融入到 Realtalk 中：

• The medium should be communal and accessible. People should learn and collaborate through awareness, with no assumption of a single, isolated user sitting at a laptop with a keyboard and mouse.
  媒介应该是公共的、无障碍的。人们应该通过感知来学习和协作，而不是假设只有一个人坐在笔记本电脑前，拿着键盘和鼠标，与世隔绝。
• The medium should allow people to think with their bodies, because we are more than fingers and hands.
  媒体应允许人们用身体思考，因为我们不仅仅是手指和手。
• The medium should expand people’s agency and liberate their creativity; rather than being an app with a limited set of features defined by a corporation and imposed on people.
  这种媒介应该扩大人们的能动性，解放他们的创造力；而不是成为一个由公司定义并强加给人们的功能有限的应用程序。

Instead of simulating things like paper and pencils inside a computer, Realtalk grants computational value to everyday objects in the world. The building is the computer. Space is a first-class entity — a building block of computation. Digital projectors, cameras, and computers are inconspicuously attached to the ceiling rafters, creating space on tables and walls for projects and collaboration. Most of the software is printed on paper and runs on paper. But the deeper idea is that when the system recognizes any physical object, it becomes a computational object.
Realtalk 并非在计算机中模拟纸张和铅笔等物品，而是赋予世界上的日常物品以计算价值。建筑就是计算机。空间是一流的实体，是计算的基石。数字投影仪、照相机和计算机被不显眼地安装在天花板的椽子上，在桌子和墙壁上为项目和协作创造了空间。大部分软件都打印在纸上，并在纸上运行。但更深层次的想法是，当系统识别到任何实物时，它就会成为一个计算对象。

Several of the researchers had never created such a complete, low-level system before. It narrowed their focus and brought a sense of alignment to the team just in time to start fundraising.
几位研究人员以前从未创建过如此完整的底层系统。这缩小了他们的关注范围，并为团队带来了一种协调一致的感觉，而这正是开始筹款的好时机。

With only a few months of cash in the bank, trade-offs were made. Instead of perfect conceptual purity and deep flexibility, the team focused on polishing up what they had for funders.
由于银行里只有几个月的现金，他们不得不做出取舍。团队不再追求完美的概念纯度和深度灵活性，而是集中精力为资助者打磨他们所拥有的一切。

Today, Realtalk projects have taken over most of the building — each one a little constellation of paper and light. The tables and walls are lit up with radiant multicolored comets, rain and frogs and octopi, puzzles and graphs, clocks and maps. A music sequencer by Te called Beats of the World lets you design rhythmic loops with felt tokens. GeoKit by Omar Rizwan is a giant interactive wall map.
如今，Realtalk 项目已经占据了大楼的大部分空间--每一个项目都是由纸张和灯光组成的小星座。桌子和墙壁上点亮了光芒四射的五彩彗星、雨点、青蛙和章鱼、拼图和图表、钟表和地图。Te 公司推出的一款名为世界节拍的音乐编曲器可以让你用毛毡代币设计有节奏的循环。Omar Rizwan 的 GeoKit 是一个巨大的交互式挂图。

I sit at a table and point a keyboard at a page labeled “Code editor.” An editor appears.
我坐在桌前，将键盘对准标有 "代码编辑器 "的页面。一个编辑器出现了。

I press Control-P, and a laser printer spits out a page with my program written on it.
我按下 "Control-P "键，激光打印机就会打印出一页纸，上面写着我的程序。

Here’s what the page for “Hello, World” looks like:
下面是 "Hello, World "页面的样子：

Place this page onto any surface and you will see its output projected on top:
将该页面放在任何表面上，都能看到其输出结果：

As long as it is on the table, it’s running. Flip it over and it will stop.
只要它在桌子上，它就在运行。把它翻过来，它就会停止。

Paper can be cut, glittered, stamped, torn, taped, stapled and scrawled upon. It can be glued to spinners, made into miniature books, or folded into origami and flicked across the table. It’s a great format for prototyping. Kids love it. Everyone loves it. It immediately invites new ideas.
纸可以剪裁、闪光、盖章、撕扯、粘贴、装订和涂鸦。它可以粘在旋转器上，做成微型书本，或折成折纸在桌上轻弹。它是制作原型的绝佳形式。孩子们喜欢它。每个人都喜欢。它能立即激发新的创意。

Realtalk projects come to life by writing one or more programs on pages, and physically arranging them on a table. Pages can easily communicate with each other, making composition and interactivity easy.
Realtalk 项目通过在页面上编写一个或多个程序，并将它们实际排列在桌子上而实现。页面之间可以轻松交流，使合成和交互变得容易。

Aside from paper, there are also dots. The computer vision algorithm recognizes M&Ms, little felt tokens, even painted fingernails as dots. Want a slider control? Draw a straight line with a marker, place a dot onto the page, and slide it with your finger. Or glue a dot onto the end of a popsicle stick.
除了纸，还有点。计算机视觉算法可以将 M&M、小毡垫，甚至涂了指甲油的指甲都识别为点。想要滑块控制？用记号笔画一条直线，在页面上放一个点，然后用手指滑动。或者在冰棒棍的末端粘上一个点。

The entire source code for Realtalk is printed and posted across several rolling whiteboards. Developer tools for printing and debugging hang from a pegboard that would look at home in a woodshop. Projects are stuffed into binders and plastic cases labelled Dinner Party Games, Rainbow Canvas, Shape Cycle, and Radial Animation. People learn by example, reading the pages that are posted around the space, and flipping through little ring-bound tutorial zines that can be run on any surface.
Realtalk 的全部源代码都打印出来，张贴在几块滚动白板上。用于打印和调试的开发工具悬挂在木工车间的挂板上。项目被塞进活页夹和塑料盒中，分别贴着 "晚宴游戏"、"彩虹画布"、"形状循环 "和 "径向动画 "的标签。人们以身作则，阅读张贴在空间四周的网页，翻阅可以在任何表面运行的环形装订的教程小册子。

When you place a page on the table, the code on it is continually running. When you make changes, the feedback is immediate. There’s a feeling of dancing with code that’s hard to describe. It’s easy to find the satisfaction of quick progress. It maximizes the flow of ideas. I’m constantly surprised by the new ideas that emerge from bugs and quirks. I let go of “How should it work?” as I feel my way toward what I want, allowing for happy accidents along the way.
当你把页面放在表格上时，页面上的代码会持续运行。当你进行修改时，反馈是即时的。这种与代码共舞的感觉难以言表。很容易找到快速进步的满足感。它能最大限度地促进想法的流动。从错误和怪异中产生的新想法不断给我带来惊喜。当我朝着自己想要的方向摸索时，我就会放下 "它应该如何工作？"的顾虑，让快乐的意外一路相伴。

Realtalk programs are constantly remixed and passed around. They become physical memes and are reprinted and copied and modified. I had this happen with a simple Magic 8 Ball page attached to a spinner. I wrote it without much thought, left it out on a table, and when I came back a couple weeks later I found several remixes of it around the space. Pages with emotional power or universal utility seem to proliferate.
Realtalk 节目不断被重新混音和传播。它们变成了有形的备忘录，被翻印、复制和修改。我就遇到过这样的情况，一个简单的 "魔力8号球 "页面附在一个旋转器上。我不假思索地写下了它，把它放在桌子上，几周后当我回来时，发现空间里到处都是它的翻版。具有情感力量或普遍实用性的页面似乎越来越多。

The “communal and accessible” principle is where the lab still has a lot of work to do. It’s a hard problem. Most of the major projects on display were made by individual researchers, not a group. Several of the researchers are programmers who grew up coding by themselves, and it’s a tough habit to break. Solo flow is very seductive.
在 "共用和无障碍 "原则方面，实验室还有很多工作要做。这是一个难题。展出的大多数重要项目都是由研究人员个人而非团体完成的。几位研究人员都是程序员，他们从小就独自编码，这种习惯很难改掉。单打独斗非常有诱惑力。

It makes sense that they’re selective about who they invite to the lab and when (and how) to share the research itself. They are sensitive to their language and working style being polluted by Silicon Valleyspeak and brogrammer culture. And there’s a tension between containing the research so it can develop in the safety of the lab environment, and creating a community space so that the medium can be designed in conversation with many kinds of people. “We have to open the research to letting more people come in and help us shape it, so that it’s not just benefitting the same kind of people who have had the privilege to become programmers,” Te said. “As someone whose perspective as a non-white non-male has always been underrepresented, my goal is to empower those who aren’t represented by dominant culture be a part of inventing new mediums.”
他们对邀请谁来实验室以及何时（和如何）分享研究本身都是有选择性的，这也是合情合理的。他们非常担心自己的语言和工作方式受到硅谷语言和兄弟程序员文化的污染。一方面，他们要在实验室的安全环境中开展研究；另一方面，他们又要创建一个社区空间，以便在与许多人的对话中设计媒介，这两者之间存在着矛盾。"我们必须开放研究，让更多人参与进来，帮助我们塑造它，这样它就不会只惠及那些有幸成为程序员的人，"Te 说。"作为一个非白人非男性的人，我的观点总是代表性不足，我的目标是让那些不被主流文化所代表的人能够参与到新媒体的发明中来。

One element that encourages community: Dynamicland is the only place you can go to work on Realtalk projects. I can’t work on projects alone at home. There’s no GitHub for Realtalk. My time at Dynamicland feels precious, and that preciousness seems to elevate my creativity. Maybe this is what it felt like to have to schedule a block of time at a university computer before the PC era.
一个鼓励社区的元素：动感地带是您唯一可以参与 Realtalk 项目的地方。我不能一个人在家做项目。Realtalk 没有 GitHub。我在动境的时间非常宝贵，而这种宝贵似乎提升了我的创造力。也许这就是个人电脑时代到来之前，在大学电脑前安排时间的感觉。

Is Realtalk the future? No. In the larger arc of the research, it’s just a single iteration. It’s a suggestion: Maybe by going back to the drawing board, and redesigning things further down the stack, we can escape the Dark Age of the command line, and computational literacy itself can become more accessible and communal.
Realtalk 是未来吗？不。在更大的研究范围内，它只是一次迭代。这只是一个建议：也许回到绘图板上，重新设计堆栈中更底层的东西，我们就能摆脱命令行的黑暗时代，而计算素养本身也能变得更易获取、更有共性。

Victor’s dream is to be able to experience an entire scientific paper — or the entire global supply chain — in a computationally-driven room. To explore the data with more richness and depth than would be possible on a single screen. And on the most existential level, his hope is that the research might help to avert human extinction. If we can understand the complexity of our world more broadly, we’ll be in a better long-term position to mitigate risks that may threaten civilization.
维克多的梦想是能够在一个计算驱动的房间里体验整篇科学论文或整个全球供应链。以比在单一屏幕上更丰富、更深入的方式探索数据。在最基本的生存层面上，他希望这项研究能够帮助避免人类灭绝。如果我们能更广泛地了解我们世界的复杂性，我们就能更好地长期降低可能威胁人类文明的风险。

It’s early 2019 and I’m walking to meet Bret Victor at his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the coldest day of the year. I walk past IDEO’s Cambridge office, situated right between Harvard and MIT. Design firms like IDEO sell a flavor of research that promises to deliver fresh ideas to blue chip clients. The exterior is painted with geometric shapes and bright colors that signal an appropriate amount of creativity. It says, we’re playful but serious. We’ll help you feel safe moving into some new creative territory. We’ll bring the best of Design Thinking and rapid prototyping. And we promise not to be too wild.
现在是 2019 年初，在一年中最冷的一天，我步行去马萨诸塞州剑桥市布雷特-维克多（Bret Victor）的公寓见他。我走过 IDEO 的剑桥办公室，它位于哈佛大学和麻省理工学院之间。像 IDEO 这样的设计公司销售的是一种研究味道，承诺为蓝筹股客户提供新鲜的想法。IDEO办公室的外观涂满了几何图形和鲜艳的色彩，彰显出适度的创造力。上面写着：我们俏皮而严肃。我们将帮助你安全地进入新的创意领域。我们将带来最好的设计思维和快速原型。我们保证不会太狂野。

Dynamicland, in contrast, seems to cherish total intellectual freedom. When I first visited the lab at an open house in early 2018, I thought of Children’s Television Workshop in its heyday: Countercultural, research-backed, subversive, experimental, sometimes brilliant, always underfunded. A few tireless inventors pour themselves into the work, day and night. Open a random drawer, and it would be no surprise to find a collection of toy eyeballs rolling around inside.
相比之下，动感地带似乎更珍视完全的知识自由。当我在2018年初的开放日上第一次参观实验室时，我想到了全盛时期的儿童电视工作室：反文化、研究支持、颠覆性、实验性，有时才华横溢，但总是资金不足。几位不知疲倦的发明家日以继夜地倾注心血。随便打开一个抽屉，就会发现里面滚动着一系列玩具眼球。

Victor left the Bay Area last fall and is taking a sabbatical to recover from the intensity of years of fundraising and management of the lab. He greets me at his front door with a warm smile. Though he grew up in the Bay Area, Victor seems at home right here, steps from MIT’s campus.
维克多去年秋天离开了海湾地区，现在正在休假，以便从多年的筹资和实验室管理的高强度工作中恢复过来。他在家门口迎接我，脸上带着温暖的微笑。虽然维克多在海湾地区长大，但他在这里似乎就像在家一样，离麻省理工学院的校园只有几步之遥。

He chugs away at a bottle of water while we talk. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of computer history and he loves to tell those stories. He told me about the hacker culture that emerged around the TX-0 computer at MIT in the mid-1950s. The TX-0 was down the hall from the Model Railroad Club, and some of the railroad nerds discovered that they could have the computer to themselves late at night, when researchers frequently overslept and missed their timeslots. The first known word processor was created there — it was dubbed “Expensive Typewriter” because everyone thought it was absurd to use a $3 million computer to write a term paper.
他一边喝水，一边和我们聊天。他对计算机历史有着百科全书式的了解，他喜欢讲这些故事。他向我讲述了 20 世纪 50 年代中期围绕麻省理工学院 TX-0 计算机而兴起的黑客文化。TX-0 计算机就在铁路模型俱乐部的走廊尽头，一些铁路迷发现，他们可以在深夜独享这台计算机，而当时研究人员经常睡过头，错过了时间段。第一台已知的文字处理机就是在这里诞生的--它被戏称为 "昂贵的打字机"，因为每个人都认为用一台价值 300 万美元的电脑来写学期论文是荒谬的。

As a lifelong software engineer listening to Victor’s stories, I felt a tinge of embarrassment, having never studied the history of computer science very deeply.
作为一名终身软件工程师，听着维克多的故事，我感到一丝尴尬，因为我从未深入研究过计算机科学的历史。

We end up talking for several hours. As he starts telling me the story of the lab, I get the sense he has been looking for a sympathetic ear. Some catharsis after a six-year rollercoaster ride.
我们聊了好几个小时。当他开始向我讲述实验室的故事时，我感觉到他一直在寻找一个富有同情心的人。在经历了长达六年的过山车般的旅程之后，他需要一些宣泄。

He seems tired. CDG was his first management role. For a prolific maker, that’s a big shift that requires a lot of energy and personal growth. He has to own the context for context-making (Dynamicland) and contribute to the context itself (Realtalk), all while dreaming about — but having almost no time left over to make — projects within the context.
他似乎累了。CDG 是他第一次担任管理职务。对于一个多产的制作人来说，这是一个需要大量精力和个人成长的重大转变。他既要拥有情境制作的情境（动感地带），又要为情境本身（Realtalk）做出贡献，同时还要梦想着--但几乎没有时间去制作--情境中的项目。

This is clearly his life’s work. He often flashes a sly grin as he tells stories about Dynamicland, looking like a little boy who knows he’s gotten away with something very clever. We talk a lot about the context-building work he did, and he says he has tried to treat Dynamicland like a biological containment facility. He’s concerned that there’s been so much damage done by half-baked ideas stolen from research labs by entrepreneurs. “The thing about taking a deep idea and making a mass-produced, superficial treatment of it, is that after that point it becomes impossible to see the deep idea,” he says.
这显然是他毕生的事业。在讲述 "动感地带 "的故事时，他经常会露出狡黠的笑容，看起来就像一个知道自己做了一件非常聪明的事情的小男孩。我们经常谈论他所做的背景构建工作，他说他一直试图把动感地带当作一个生物隔离设施来对待。他担心，创业者从研究实验室窃取的半生不熟的想法会造成巨大损失。"他说："把一个深奥的想法做成批量生产的肤浅处理，这样做之后，就无法看到深奥的想法了。

He told me the story of Steve Jobs lifting the idea for the graphical user interface from the Smalltalk team for use in the Macintosh. In Smalltalk, the GUI was used for programming the computer. The original concept of object-oriented programming was entirely graphical — objects on the screen represented objects in the program. That was the deep idea. But in the Macintosh, the GUI didn’t allow for programming the computer at all. Jobs made a shallow clone of Smalltalk’s deep ideas in order to get the first Macintosh onto the market.
他给我讲了这样一个故事：史蒂夫-乔布斯从 Smalltalk 团队那里获得了图形用户界面的创意，并将其应用于 Macintosh。在 Smalltalk 中，图形用户界面用于计算机编程。面向对象编程的最初概念完全是图形化的--屏幕上的对象代表程序中的对象。这是一个深刻的理念。但在 Macintosh 中，图形用户界面根本不允许对计算机进行编程。为了让第一台 Macintosh 上市，乔布斯对 Smalltalk 的深层理念进行了浅层克隆。

Victor’s commitment to treasuring deep ideas is his greatest strength and greatest weakness. It gives him the purpose and energy to create the context for Dynamicland, and to commit to his own deep ideas for long enough to bring them to life in beautiful ways. The risk, however, is that nothing is ever considered done and therefore nothing is ever shared. Or that every share is provisional. He seems to want to be understood so deeply that no expression of his ideas is ever quite deep enough.
维克多对深邃思想的珍视是他最大的优点，也是最大的缺点。这使他有目标、有精力为 "动感地带 "创造环境，并长期致力于他自己的深刻理解，从而将它们以美妙的方式变为现实。然而，这样做的风险在于，他从未考虑过完成任何事情，因此也从未分享过任何东西。或者说，每一次分享都是暂时的。他似乎太想被人深刻理解，以至于他的想法表达得不够深刻。

Usually, one person doesn’t play both inventor and virtuoso. Les Paul invented the electric guitar to bring more warmth to his smooth jazz, and he could never have foreseen how Jimi Hendrix would use it. “The overload of the guitar comes to connote the idea of breaking the frame of the equipment — doing something that can’t be contained — and this adds a whole new side to one’s expressive palette, because one can now juxtapose things that can be contained against things that ‘can’t’,” wrote Brian Eno in his 1996 diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices.
通常，一个人不会既是发明家又是演奏家。莱斯-保罗（Les Paul）发明电吉他是为了给他的流畅爵士乐带来更多的激情，而他永远无法预料吉米-亨德里克斯（Jimi Hendrix）会如何使用它。"布莱恩-埃诺在 1996 年的日记《附录肿胀的一年》中写道："吉他的超负荷意味着打破设备的框架--做一些无法控制的事情--这为一个人的表现力增添了全新的一面，因为他现在可以将可以控制的事情与'无法控制'的事情并置起来。

Victor is Jimi Hendrix playing the role of Les Paul, and there’s a tension here that makes him well suited to endure cycles of making and breaking the medium as it evolves.
维克多是吉米-亨德里克斯（Jimi Hendrix）在扮演莱斯-保罗（Les Paul）的角色，这里有一种张力，使他非常适合随着媒体的发展而承受创造和破坏的循环。

He doesn’t mitigate the never-ending nature of the work by looking to the horizon for market potential, as a startup founder would. The pressure on a non-profit research lab is different: They need to showcase the research in a way that invites collaboration and funding. But Victor and his team have been burned out on fundraising, which requires an incredible amount of time and energy. Also, he has his own sense of when a research cycle is done, and he doesn’t want funding to dictate that.
他不会像初创企业的创始人那样，通过展望未来的市场潜力来减轻工作的永无止境性。非营利性研究实验室面临的压力则不同：他们需要以吸引合作和资金的方式展示研究成果。但维克多和他的团队在筹资方面已经疲惫不堪，这需要花费大量的时间和精力。此外，他对一个研究周期何时结束也有自己的判断，他不希望由资金来决定。

It may be what he needs, however. The funding rollercoaster has been an instrumental driver at Dynamicland. The lab has benefitted from external accountability to reign in the very personal creative research work, and Dynamicland has a strong record of creative output since 2013, even though Victor doesn’t seem to relish being the limelight for a big demo or presentation. The work shows itself off in the tech community. Dynamicland is social media candy, and visitors can’t help posting about how amazing Realtalk is, so the project has a life of its own on the internet.
不过，这也许正是他所需要的。资金的过山车式增长对动感地带的发展起到了推动作用。自2013年以来，尽管维克多似乎并不喜欢成为大型演示或介绍的主角，但动感地带在创造性产出方面的成绩斐然。作品在科技界大放异彩。Dynamicland 是社交媒体上的糖果，访客们会情不自禁地发布关于 Realtalk 有多么神奇的帖子，因此该项目在互联网上拥有自己的生命。

But how will the research reach a larger audience? Can the impact of it be designed or even steered, or is it completely out of their hands?
但是，如何让更多人了解这些研究？能否设计甚至引导其影响，还是完全不在他们的掌控之中？

“I don’t know what the solution to reaching a large audience is,” he says. “Maybe it takes a hundred years. It was a hundred years from the invention of the printing press to books being part of the general culture.”
"他说："我不知道有什么办法能让大量受众接受我的作品。"也许需要一百年。从发明印刷术到书籍成为大众文化的一部分，也就一百年的时间。

Later, he told me they have plans. In July 2019, Dynamicland started working on Realtalk-2020 — the next iteration of their programming system.
后来，他告诉我，他们已经有了计划。2019 年 7 月，Dynamicland 开始研发 Realtalk-2020（下一代编程系统）。

In the purview of a venture capitalist, technological innovation happens through the evolutionary process of the entire startup ecosystem. Through many cycles of birth and death and acquisition. But, if every startup operates under exactly the same set of constraints of runway and product-market fit and single-origin espresso, it puts a damper on exactly the kind of deliberate creativity that Dynamicland fosters. We need more organizations like Dynamicland, occupying the space between startups and academic research labs. Places designed to dream in longer timelines.
在风险资本家看来，技术创新是在整个初创企业生态系统的演变过程中发生的。经过许多次诞生、死亡和收购的循环。但是，如果每家初创企业都在完全相同的跑道、产品与市场契合度和单一原产地特浓咖啡等一系列限制条件下运营，就会阻碍动感地带所培养的那种有意识的创造力。我们需要更多像动感地带这样的组织，占据初创企业和学术研究实验室之间的空间。我们需要更多像动感地带这样的机构，占据初创企业和学术研究实验室之间的空间。

Back home in San Francisco, I can’t help but wonder about the inner motivations that the researchers bring to the work. If the research is very open-ended, then perhaps a researcher’s work is only “done” once they resolve a core dilemma within themselves. Chiacchieri wants to help people feel happier, and this discovery has led him to psychotherapy training. Schachman cares so much about eye contact and playful collaboration in Realtalk, because he wants to feel more connected. Te hopes to create a medium that truly honors diversity, because she wants to feel a greater sense of belonging in the world of computational research.
回到旧金山的家中，我不禁想知道研究人员工作的内在动机。如果研究具有很强的开放性，那么也许只有当研究人员解决了自己内心的核心困境后，他们的工作才算 "完成"。齐亚切里希望帮助人们感到更快乐，这一发现促使他接受了心理治疗培训。Schachman 在 Realtalk 中非常注重眼神交流和游戏性合作，因为他想让人们感觉更紧密地联系在一起。Te 希望创造一种真正尊重多样性的媒介，因为她希望在计算研究领域有更多的归属感。

And Victor? 维克多呢？

Through the millennia, empirical evidence and bottom-up scientific discovery has gradually claimed territory from traditional top-down religious doctrine. What we consider unknown or mysterious continues to shrink, even if the scale of the cosmos means that the shrinkage takes the form of ∞ - x, where ∞ is the vast unknown and x is all of human knowledge.
千百年来，经验证据和自下而上的科学发现逐渐从传统的自上而下的宗教教义中夺回了领地。我们认为未知或神秘的东西在不断缩小，即使宇宙的尺度意味着缩小的形式是∞-x，其中∞是巨大的未知，x是人类的全部知识。

From the outside, Victor seems most excited about expanding x, following in the footsteps of the great scientists and researchers. But what are his inner motivations?
从外表上看，维克多似乎对拓展 X 领域、追随伟大科学家和研究人员的脚步最为兴奋。但他的内在动机是什么呢？

A desire to expand awareness. To be more “in the world.” To experience the full complexity of reality just as it is. To explore the creative potential of empty space. To be free of the conditioned thinking of peers. To break out of prisons of representation.
渴望扩大认知。更加 "融入世界"。体验现实的全部复杂性。探索空旷空间的创造潜力。摆脱同龄人的思维定势。冲破表象的牢笼。

Coincidentally, these are major themes of the Indian spiritual philosopher J. Krishnamurti’s discourses on spiritual enlightenment in the mid-20th century.
巧合的是，这些都是印度精神哲学家克里希那穆提（J. Krishnamurti）在 20 世纪中期关于精神启蒙的论述的主要主题。

Krishnamurti had the difficult job of speaking for the ∞ side of the divide. He had a hyper-rational perspective on spirituality, he distrusted religion and ideology, and he promoted rigorous empirical self-inquiry. While Victor explores representation, simulation, and modeling of the external world, Krishnamurti asks that we methodically, internally let go of all representations and concepts.
克里希那穆提肩负着为分歧的"∞"一方说话的艰巨任务。他从超理性的角度看待灵性，不信任宗教和意识形态，提倡严格的实证自我探究。维克多探索的是外部世界的表象、模拟和建模，而克里希那穆提要求我们有条不紊地从内心放下所有表象和概念。

“[Is the mind] capable of being free, empty?”, writes Krisnamurti. “It can be empty only by understanding all its projections and activities, not off and on, but from day to day, from moment to moment. Then you will find … that the state of creative emptiness is not a thing to be cultivated — it is there, it comes darkly, without any invitation, and only in that state is there a possibility of renewal, newness and revolution.”
"克里斯那穆提写道："[心灵]能够自由、空虚吗？"只有了解它的所有投射和活动，不是断断续续的，而是日复一日、每时每刻的，它才能空。然后，你就会发现......创造性的空虚状态并不是一种需要培养的东西--它就在那里，不请自来，只有在这种状态下，才有更新、新生和革命的可能。

Victor wants to experience the revolutionary ∞. He seems to be on a spiritual quest, seeking an insight that Alan Kay calls “a kerpow.” An opening into a new dimension. Because deeper than any deep idea, somewhere beyond the land of ideas entirely, there is a rich and boundless terrain that has never been mapped, though we have tried for thousands of years.
维克多想要体验革命∞。他似乎在进行精神探索，寻求一种被艾伦-凯称为 "kerpow "的洞察力。一个通向新维度的开口。因为在比任何深邃思想更深邃的地方，在完全超越思想国度的某个地方，有一片丰富而无边无际的土地，尽管我们已经尝试了数千年，却从未有人绘制过地图。

Thanks to Siobhán Cronin, Matt Hackett, and Xiaowei Wang for your feedback and support.
感谢 Siobhán Cronin、Matt Hackett 和 Xiaowei Wang 的反馈和支持。