
Student Solves Sol Lewitt Drawing Assignment in Pseudocode - qdot76367
http://cmuems.com/2013/a/golan/09/02/melanie-nailed-it/
======
foobarbazqux
He's really quite shameless and condescending about singling her out for
praise and elevating her above all of the other students:

> Melanie Nailed It

> (diagrams showing wrong answers of other students)

> (diagram labeled with "Lewitt" and "Melanie")

> If I were Pace Gallery, I know whom I would hire.

> each of the corners of Lewitt’s quadrilateral was reliably located by about
> a quarter of the students

> marvelous pseudocode system

> As far as I’m concerned, Melanie has earned the right to title her
> pseudocode as she did [SOLLEWITTFUCKYOU]. This document is really a gem

> (entire homework answer)

ick ick ick. It's like when a teacher photocopies your essay and hands it out
to everybody else in the class as an example of stellar writing, except now
it's on the internet.

~~~
s_q_b
What pedagogical purpose does this serve? I'm a fan of tough love from
teachers. I'd rather get a low grade and learn a great deal than a high grade
and learn nothing. For some instructors, part of that is being willing to say
the equivalent of "this is complete shit" when your work is, in fact good, but
not up to standards.

But the best ones do it in private, or in written feedback, or generally to
everyone as a motivational tactic. All of that I'm willing to tolerate, and
I've seen some (not many) user acerbic brutal feedback to achieve results out
of me I'd never find possible.

But never have I seen a teacher signal out particular students, compare their
work openly, while holding up other particular students as examples of what
not to do.

Is that good or bad? The principle of rewarding individual excellence is good,
and the attitude could even be forgiven in certain circumstances.

But there's a way to do that without being a dick. And if you're going to be a
dick, you better b the extremely rare person that knows how to be a dick
properly and effectively, usually with an undercurrent of good humor and in
the pursuit of ultra-high standards.

~~~
achivetta
Keep in mind: This class is part of a conservatory-style BFA program. These
students are already, or will soon be, custom to public critiques. And
learning how to accept public criticism, positive and negative, is explicitly
a goal of many such programs.

My two cents: While I would have hated such a thing in an engineering class, I
really appreciated public discussion and criticism of my work in the arts. I
found that such transparency, even when painful, was hugely valuable to me as
I grew as an artist.

~~~
s_q_b
Yes, that's a good point. I've certainly never examined the problem through
the lens of a BFA conservatory-style program. If a necessary part of the
skill-set a student wishes to learn is the ability to accept and process
public criticism, it certainly makes sense to emulate that in the classroom.

------
Camillo
I ran OCR over the text (using the first website I could find that takes image
urls directly), so you don't have to.

A quadrangle which is formed and enclosed by four lines, the first of which is
drawn from a point halfway between a point halfway between the center of the
wall and the upper left corner and the midpoint of the left side and the upper
left cor- ner to a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the
upper right corner, the second line from a point halfway between the start of
the first line and a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and
the upper left corner to a point halfway between a point halfway between the
center of the wall and the lower left corner and the mid- point of the bottom
side, the third line from a point halfway between a point halfway between the
start of the first line and the end of the second line and a point halfway
between the midpoint of the left side and the lower left corner to a point
which is on an axis between the lower left corner to a point halfway between
the midpoint of the right side and the upper right corner where a line drawn
from the center of the wall to a point halfway between the midpoint of the
right side and the lower right corner would cross that axis, the fourth line
from a point equidistant from the end of the third line, the end of the second
line and a point halfway between a point halfway between the center of the
wall and the midpoint of the bottom side and a point halfway between the
midpoint of the bottom side and the lower right corner to a point halfway
between the start of the second line and a point where a line would cross the
first line if it were drawn from the midpoint of the right side to a point
halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the upper left corner.

-Sol LeWitt, 1974

~~~
Camillo
BTW, the text as given on the page is incorrect and cannot be parsed. It also
doesn't match the solution.

------
srinivas26
I can't fully parse the first point of the first line, the part in quotes
below. I have added parenthesis on the parts that I can parse:

... from "a point halfway between (a point halfway between (the center of the
wall) and (the upper left corner)) and (the midpoint of the left side) and
(the upper left corner)" to ...

There are 4 points and only two operators, i.e., "a point halfway between".
The pseudocode given has used three "halfway between" operators on these four
points (on lines 5, 7 and 9). I don't know how that interpretation was arrived
at.

~~~
biot
The first line is given in the text as: "... first of which is drawn from a
point halfway between a point halfway between the center of the wall and the
upper left corner and the midpoint of the left side and the upper left corner
to a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the upper right
corner".

Given that the line has a FROM and TO point, we can extract those:

    
    
      FROM
        a point halfway between a point halfway between the center of 
        the wall and the upper left corner and the midpoint of the left
        side and the upper left corner
      TO
        a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the 
        upper right corner
    

The "halfway between" in each FROM and TO part must specify two points to be
between, so we can extract those:

    
    
      FROM
        a point halfway between:
          1. a point halfway between the center of the wall and the upper 
             left corner and the midpoint of the left side
          2. the upper left corner
      TO
        a point halfway between:
          1. the midpoint of the top side
          2. the upper right corner
    

We do this once again for the nested "halfway between":

    
    
      FROM
        a point halfway between:
          1. a point halfway between:
             a. the center of the wall
             b. the upper left corner
             c. the midpoint of the left side
          2. the upper left corner
      TO
        a point halfway between:
          1. the midpoint of the top side
          2. the upper right corner
    

This results in a nonsensical parsing ("between" can't have three parameters),
so we need to backtrack and reconsider other options. This is English and
unfortunately the specification isn't precise. The only one that makes sense
is therefore:

    
    
      FROM
        a point halfway between:
          1. a point halfway between the center of the wall and the upper 
             left corner
          2. [a point halfway between] the midpoint of the left side and 
             the upper left corner
      TO
        a point halfway between:
          1. the midpoint of the top side
          2. the upper right corner
    

This yields the final definition of the first line:

    
    
      FROM
        a point halfway between:
          1. a point halfway between:
             a) the center of the wall 
             b) the upper left corner
          2. a point halfway between:
             a) the midpoint of the left side
             b) the upper left corner
      TO
        a point halfway between:
          1. the midpoint of the top side
          2. the upper right corner
    

I leave this as an exercise to the reader to parse the English using greedy
vs. non-greedy regex statements and see which one results in the correct
outcome.

~~~
Guillaume86
I came to the same conclusion.

Now I'm expecting someone to make a parser/interpreter and a Sol Lewitt image
encoding format using the genetic algorythm that turn images into semi
transparent polygons :).

~~~
Guillaume86
Well I was a bit borred today, I made the Parser/Interpreter part, I can turn
the instructions to a SVG document:

[https://github.com/guillaume86/SolLewitt](https://github.com/guillaume86/SolLewitt)

------
kefs
I love the filename: SOLLEWITTFUCKYOU

[http://i.imgur.com/ZprOYsV.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZprOYsV.png)

------
jzelinskie
FOURTH LINE is missing a colon and there are dashes missing all over the
place! That pseudocode would never compile!

~~~
raverbashing
Well, as I like to say, pseudocode is for pseudoprogrammers

But in this case it it appropriate

------
minimaxir
That's just a normal school day at Carnegie Mellon University. :)

~~~
Camillo
She just analyzed the syntax tree of the sentence. Where I'm from, that's a
normal school day in middle school. Of course this is a long and convoluted
sentence, but the process is not more complicated, it's just longer.

~~~
cmsmith
Anything sounds trivial if you start the sentence with '(S)he just ...'. And
you say that as though a few dozen bright students didn't fail to accomplish
the same task.

~~~
Camillo
They failed because the instructions are incorrect and cannot be parsed
(assuming, as is reasonable, that they were given the instructions seen in the
blog post). It's quite possible that the only student who succeeded did so
because she misread the first sentence in just the right way. Note that the
assignment has "the first of which is drawn from a point halfway between a
point halfway between the center of the wall", while the student's version
repeats "halfway between a point" twice, which makes the sentence parseable.

What really surprises me is that nobody reported the mistake to the professor.

~~~
yohui
> What really surprises me is that nobody reported the mistake to the
> professor.

I think someone else in the class did:

> Michelle has asserted that the statement, as it appears in the Pace
> catalogue, only makes sense when an additional phrase is added.

Which linked to:
[http://cmuems.com/2013/a/michelle/08/29/quadrangle/](http://cmuems.com/2013/a/michelle/08/29/quadrangle/)

------
ronaldx
Worth noting that Lewitt had draughters construct his work from instructions,
as the students have done in this task.

I've stood in a gallery and followed a different Sol Lewitt location drawing
before and it had a similar error - an instruction missing.

I wonder, then, if these are deliberate omissions on the part of Lewitt?

------
Guillaume86
Here's an Irony Grammar [1] that can parse the proposed problem if the missing
"a point halfway between" is added. And a screenshot of the Grammar Explorer
[2] for the lazy ones.

It was fun to write :).

[1]
[https://gist.github.com/guillaume86/6423775](https://gist.github.com/guillaume86/6423775)

[2]
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/177896/SolLewitt.PNG](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/177896/SolLewitt.PNG)

------
ap22213
Could someone who understands art elaborate on why both the original work and
this are important?

~~~
theoh
The classic description of this kind of thing is "the idea becomes a machine
that makes the art", which is what Sol Levitt said about his work. It's a
conceptual art strategy: instead of being about subjectivity, skill or the
personal will of the artist, this kind of artwork is about rationality,
objectivity and a neutral, abstract kind of mental process. Nothing
particularly special about the pseudocode but it comes from Golan Levin's
class: he is a a leading algorithmic artist (using code to make visual art).
Lewitt's work could be seen as a forerunner or incunabulum in this field.
[http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/conceptual-
ar...](http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/conceptual-art/sol-
lewitt-and-instruction-based-art)

