The EEC Automatic Picture Gallery
By MIKE COOK
WELL, the commissioners of the European Economic Community have
done it again! With a stroke of genius that makes us gasp with
astonishment they have decided that they can take the cost of
running the community's art galleries, currently 3 million Euro-daubs,
and reduce it to a mere 2.9 million Euro-daubs.
The Euro-daub, by the way, is the community's international
currency of arts subsidy and is approximately equivalent to seven
French franks or three German alberts.
The only snag is that to instal the proposed automatic system
will cost the equivalent of six million Euro-daubs, and thus it
will take until AD 2043 to repay the investment.
That is not, of course, counting the cost of retraining the
staff and paying a high technology bonus to the members of the
Allied Union of Boilermakers and Curators.
To make matters even worse, they have decided to implement the
Dive Eclair Automatic Picture System. This is well known to be
the cheapest - but will it do the job?
For those of you who do not know the history of that master
entrepreneur, Dive Eclair, I will relate a little about him.
Dive started out making low-fi units for the home enthusiast.
He did this by advertising them as fi units of greater altitude
and when the money had rolled in he then sat down and actually
designed them.
One of the main selling points was their extraordinarily small
size, and not many people know that Dive used to scour the Belgian
Congo (as it then was) for tribes of very small pigmies to do
his design and manufacture.
Like all successful businessmen Dive began to diversify his
product range. It was here that he scored his biggest success
which brought him into the public eye. You see he managed to find
some Eskimos stupid enough to buy snowballs from him.
The idea of prefabricated snowballs caught the public's imagination,
and the major broadcasting corporations collaborated to make a
series of programs, "Making the Most of Your Snowballs".
They also decided that there should be a standard snowball to
go with the programs and asked for tenders.
Unfortunately for Dive Eclair he did not get the contract, although
he maintains, and quite rightly, that a lot of people would have
liked to throw his balls.
Instead the contract went to a rival company, Oaktree Snowballs
Ltd. They are perhaps best remembered for their excuse for late
delivery, which has become a bureaucratic standard in a remarkably
short time.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is: "Our subcontractors,
Ferruncle, are having trouble with the ULA".
The genius of this line was later uncovered when ULA was found
to stand for Unexpected Late Arrival.
This gave Dive little pleasure however as he reckoned he could
have come up with something even better on the grounds that he
has had more practice.
Undaunted by this setback, Dive's talent for homing in on the
more gullible and weakminded section of the population led him
inevitably to receive a huge contract from the EEC. This was to
develop the Automatic Picture Gallery.
The idea was that a lot of time spent putting pictures into
frames and then taking them out could be saved if the whole process
was automated.
All you would need to do was to press a frame's number on a
keyboard and the picture in it would automatically be removed.
Dive took this simple idea and adapted it so that you could
not only clear an exhibition but also set one up with no extra
controls. This, like most of his ideas, was very clever.
Unfortunately, like all of his ideas, it was not quite clever
enough. What he did was to incorporate the idea of interdependent
controls.
He first developed these on his low-fi units where altering
the bass control would also effect the treble. Likewise altering
the treble control would also effect the volume and so on.
In his new venture the idea was taken one step further. Pressing
any of the picture frame numbers would remove the picture from
the frame, but would also reverse the state of nearby frames,
thus eliminating the need for a remove/place switch on the console.
This saving, however, made the unit very difficult to operate.
The commissioners do not want people to know how difficult this
is to use, but at the same time must be seen to be doing something
about training.
So they have come up with a computer simulation of the gallery
that they hope will never be run by anybody. In order to achieve
this they have decided to publish the program as an error-free
listing.
It has long been known that an error free listing is one of
the safest ways of protecting a program from being run.
You see, if you add errors people can negate their effect by
the errors they introduce themselves. Only with an error-free
listing will the newly introduced errors be able to flourish.
The lines that the commissioners are hoping nobody will be able
to type in are lines 150 and 410. These contain strings of blank
spaces and you must type in exactly the right number for the program
to run — they need nine spaces in each line.
Don't worry, just because I have told you about this doesn't
mean that nobody will get it wrong. After all, who reads the words
in a computer magazine anyway?
There are two exercises for which the simulator can be used.
One is clearing all the frames, and the other is filling the frames.
Of the two, the first is the easier but the controls operate
the same way whichever exercise you are doing. The pictures in
the corners, the centre and the middle of each row affect the
surrounding pictures in various ways.
To help you in this simulator the red-faced bureaucrats in the
portraits wear different coloured bowler hats to give you an indication
of how they will affect the adjacent pictures.
Also, if a bureaucrat is out of a frame he gets quite flushed.
Those of you without a colour monitor can best operate this simulator
by going out and buying one. Second best is to note the shades
of grey.
In any event the position of the pictures determine how they
will behave, so not to worry.
Watch for a subtle effect in the exercise where you have to
fill up all the frames. If all the frames surround- ing the centre
are included then the centre frame will look like it is also included.
The way to tell if it is not included is to see if the bureaucrat
is ashen faced. If so there is no frame in that position.
When an exercise is set up you will be told the least number
of key strokes (turns) that can be used. It takes a real expert
to do it in this few, so do not get discouraged.
Remember that only if a picture is present can you press the
key to remove it. If you press a key and there is no picture the
only effect will be to add one to the number of turns you have
had.
Also, just to catch you out, if you leave your finger on the
key too long the auto repeat facility will make your score mount
even faster.
When one of the technocrats was asked how the program worked
I was told it was all held together by string, but I think that
should have been strings!
In any event, it is far too tedious to explain, even assuming
anyone would bother to read it. However if you do not want to
see a red-faced bureaucrat, and think that green is a colour more
likely to reflect their experience, then replace the number 145
in line 140 with 146. There, that should ensure even more errors!
Those of you with sharp eyes will have noticed that line 30
in the program is not needed at all. It has to be included, however,
to help reduce the Common Market's envelope mountain.
Finally, be forewarned. This is a very difficult gallery to
operate and should ensure that Dive Eclair receives another Beans
Award for Industry. At least that's what beans do for me!
