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In 1726 Jonathan Swift described a fictionalized visit to the land of intelligent horses. The author transcibed the name of the horse race as Houyhnhnm, usually pronounced as 'whinam'. For our purposes, we shall refer to it as 'whinam' henceforth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houyhnhnm
Many such encounters followed, although none of them were documented as elaborately as the first. These attempts were thinly disguised as fiction, and were received with a lack of interest, largely owing to the lack of literary skills of the writers, or preoccupation with current events: world wars, famines, and pandemics.
Most people directly contacted with Whinam did not fare well, and often ended their lives in suicide or rotting in insane asylums, destitute and mocked. Some chose to keep this knowlege to themselves, while a few spent their lives desperately attempting to implement Whinam technology in obscurity. A working theory is that contact causes brain damage, and anectodal data suggests lesions in the temporal lobes. This correlates to the memory problems exhibited by contactees (and their desire to compensate by fabulistic details)
The subjects were definitely chosen by the Whinam, in a manner that is not random. Most of the chosen were not successful or influential people, when measured by the popular norms. The chosen were invariably curious, often artists.
The more interesting contacts were made with people involved in technology, revealing valuable details of the Whinam computing machinery. From these encounters, we learn that Whinam were interested in human computing hardware but considered most software written by humans to be a joke. In particular, they ridiculed human computing languages (the Whinam word 'blub' describes both excrement and human computing languages), with the exception of Forth, Smalltalk and Lisp, which they described as grossly incomplete but showing promise.
In early 1990's, a contact was documented by an American coder known as 7dreamer. His notes were invaluable in reconstructing many Whinam system principles. Some of the documents preserved will be posted here (most appear to be LSD-induced drivel).
The diary of functor12 (circa 2005) adds curious details, and will likewise be provided for reference. There is some speculation (based on the similarity of the writing style) that functor12 and Fare are one and the same, but that theory was largely abandoned by the experts. It is likely that they had communicated with each other.
In 2015, a French Lisp develper known as Fare had published a number of documents describing his 'fictionalized' encounter with intelligent horse-like Houyhnhnm (He pronounces it as 'Hunam'). Fare's papers are unique in the clarity of observations, conjectures, and conclusions. These notes shall be presented here with the permission of the author.
We observe that Fare's descriptions of Whinam systems are detailed yet conflicting with other contactees' accounts. It may be due to the questionable mental stability of contactees. But the differences themselves may provide a clue. It is possible that there is more than one way to describe the machinery of the Whinam.
Several theories emerged. One suggests that there is a multitude of Whinam tribes; each contact was perhaps with a different group, posessing a different set of technologies. Another whinologist proposed that there were parallel worlds, each with distinctly unique Whinam. Both theories compete for the name 'Many Whinam Hypothesis', or MWH. Like Ray Bradbury's Martians, the Whinam are hard to nail down.
Perhaps we shall never know the real answers, but in the meantime, it is worth taking a look at the body of knowlege accumulated so far.
Early this century I became aware of some of the Whinam accounts. I love a good conspiracy theory, and dismissed these as such. However, upon coming across 7dreamer's code and notes, I realized that there is more to the story. I've been collecting all Whinam-related writings ever since, although my particular interest is in the technological aspects of the Whinam.
I shall make available what little relevant material I had collected over the years, by posting it here, away from the noisy mainweb. It is not an accident that Gemini is where I choose to post - by virtue of being here, you, the reader, are already rejecting the Yahoo computing ideals, and are likely to appreciate what Whinam have to say about computing. I hope you will find these accounts as interesting and educational as I have (for they have truly altered the way I write code) -- or at least derive some small entertainment, if they do not strike you as profound.