Sravya Gurram received her MS Dual Degree in Exact Humanities (EH). Her research work was supervised by Dr. Aniket Alam. Here’s a summary of her research work on Art or Not: An Analysis of Sport Using Automata Theory:
This thesis revolves around a rather simple question – Is Sport Art or Not? We discuss some of the scholarly works that debate this question before we charter our own course of answering this question. We engage with this discourse by keeping Sport at the center of our analysis. We discuss the Idea of Sport and the concepts that are central to it before analyzing the structure of Sport.To analyze the Idea of Sport, we study the historical transformation of Play and how it degraded to be something else. We also analyze social structures that replicate the structure of a Game to further understand the position of Sport relative to Play and Game. For analyzing the structure, we selected the following sports – Track, Hurdles, Shot Put, Long Jump, Bowling, Weightlifting, Pacman, Badminton. These sports were selected as they display a serial logic in how their events are arranged. We construct the graphical representation of these sports by listing out the events and the rules that render the events their serial causality. We propose a method of construction grammars for serializable sports and provide a prototype of a classification of sports based on the grammar generated. Based on our observations of the above-mentioned exercise, we arrive at a conclusion that Play leads to Art and that Sport is not Art.