I don’t want to set up a vacation email auto-responder thing so I’ll just mention it here: I’m going to be in Switzerland from now until the 2nd. I probably won’t respond to email.
HOWEVER,
If you send me an email soonish, and you include your mailing address, I’ll send you a postcard.
I see Kate in two days!!
This is an early draft of a paper I’m working on. It’s late, unfortunately, but I want to post what I’ve got so far for my classmates to check out before our final presentations, so I’m posting it here.
The goal of this project is to design an ALife system that has a good chance of supporting open-ended evolution and to do so as simply as possible. This will hopefully lead to better understanding of what open-ended evolution is and how it happens. This paper presents a detailed specification of a system which was designed in order to support tighly coupled multi-scale evolutionary activity and encourage its emergence.
Background
Previous work, presented in my seminar paper Increasing Complexity in Artificial Life Systems, explored several definitions of complexity and ALife research that made some claims about complexity. It also made four guesses about ways to create ALife systems that would increase in complexity over time:
The current work, then, tries to put some of these into practice. As it turns out, it’s very difficult to define complexity and to work with it experimentally, so I’m focusing on a less abstract goal: an create an ALife system that supports tightly coupled evolutionary activity at multiple scales, where large scale structures are built out of the smaller scale structures. An example of this in biology is cells and organisms. Cells are evolving within organisms, and organisms are evolving their composition of cells. The holy grail of this project would be to see larger scale activity emerge from small: organisms evolving out of a population of cells.
The method being employed is to specify a candidate model in pictures and words, and then engage in thought experiments about how it would play out, how much computational power would be required, and its potential for meeting the goal of multi-scale evolution. This has led to a design specification for an ALife system which can now be built and experimented with.
Choice points in the design process
Just as important as the specification itself are the motivations behind its properties. Almost all properties of the model present a tradeoffs between richness and simplicity. I constantly fought a desire to make the model more and more like the physical substrate of the biological world: molecules with complex interactions emerging from their structure. But the goal is not to replicate the natural world, but to replicate its properties of complexity and evolutionary activity across scales, and so made great effort to get the model down to the bear bones that would meet my goal.
One of the first major concessions I made a was
Focus on Information
When it became clear that effective use of information was going to be a major incentive for the emergence of scale, I looked at classifier systems and their capabilities. Classifier systems are collections of input-output rules. They are presented encoded information from an external source, and the information is matched against the entire body of rules. If the information matches any rule’s input pattern, that rule either activates some kind of actuator, or puts out another message for the other classifiers to consume. The classifiers that get the most work are selected for by an external fitness function and are allowed to remain in the system, and are also used to create mutated copies.
Through this mechanism large-scale chains of classifiers can emerge, and high level classifiers can “evolve” alongside the low level ones. This is multi-scale evolution in an important sense, but it falls short of my goal for one important reason:
The Model
This model is named “Turducken”, after the kitchy practice of stuffing a turkey with a chicken and then jamming the entire thing into a duck and roasting it. It is hoped that the model outlined here will yield a similarly satisfying nesting of organisms, albeit a nesting of a very different kind.
Here are a few thoughts on where I think the free software desktop needs to go. Apologies to the non-geeks reading this. I’d love to write this up for a broader audience, but I don’t have time right now and I just wanted to get the ideas on paper.
GNOME, and most of the Free Software world is still very focused on offline computing. Everything’s an application that gets downloaded and run on our computers. But web-based software is taking over the world, for a handful of very good reasons:
1) It’s trivial to install
2) Someone else maintains it for the users (Google is responsible for keeping Google.com working, not me)
3) Your data is on a server somewhere, which means it’s safer and easier to access from multiple locations
4) It’s a lot easier to make software collaborative when it’s on a server somewhere
So instead of assuming that Free Software is on the desktop and that the web is just something we want to support, let’s start thinking of this a little differently. Let’s start thinking that all software is going to the web, and Free Software needs to adapt so that people will still have the Freedom that Free Software is all about when they ditch their old desktop software for their much more attractive web-based software.
This new way of thinking leads to two big ideas:
1) We need Free as in Freedom web infrastructure. That means organizations providing hosting and online software management in a way that users are guaranteed the freedom to run, change, and redistribute the software, and have complete control over their data and privacy.
2) The Free Desktop needs to move away from being an all-purpose desktop, and towards becoming a modern web bootstrapping environment. Instead of providing an interface between a user and their data, it needs to become a cradle for web use and a channel between the data locked in a user’s hardware and their web apps.
That means GNOME should be competing with Firefox. GNOME and Epiphany should become one, and the world of GNOME apps should be thinned and stripped down into browser components:
This approach ignores a lot of stuff you can’t do well on the web yet: listening to music, watching movies, graphic design, heck… any computer-intensive profession. But the web is catching up. There’s no doubt in my mind that within a few years there will be music-listening web sites that give iTunes a run for it’s money. But for the time being we’ll still need downloadable applications to do that stuff.
There are a few other developments I think GNOME needs to get on. Search needs to be FRONT AND CENTER. Beagle/whatever needs to be the centerpiece of the interface. Undo/redo/revision control are basically the same as they were in 1970. We need a modern undo/redo architecture. But the web is the 900 lb gorilla in the room, and the desktop that adapts to it first will be the one leading the way into the future.
I’m sick and feeling like crap, pretty depressed and stressed out, so here is a list of things I wrote about in my journal last week that I was feeling happy about.
Sigh.
Meeting with Rik on Friday. He was really excited about what I was doing, and he was a really good listener, and we found a great new direction for my project to go in (classifier systems!).
I used Marty’s glerb demonstration in my discussion section today. I don’t know if you’re still reading Marty, but thanks! They loved it! And that makes me feel good about my roots in Indiana. Kind of like wiggling your toes to remind you that they’re there.
Dinner at Sipz (one of the many awesome mostly vegan restaurants in San Diego) with the prospectives, and meeting the kids with the hotel. I felt like I did a good job making people feel comfortable, a good job representing our department. And I felt like the kids were really interesting… people I’d love to work with.
Dinner coops have been great lately. Last week when Matthew cooked (thai curry=delicious)… I was really excited that the other Matthew (from the Women’s Center) and his partner Anetti came. They haven’t been coming much, and I like them a lot because I learn a lot whenever I talk to them. And we inaugurated our donation jar, which Niko actually made! She blew the glass! She hasn’t even been to dinner coop (yet) and I felt really happy to have her contributing, even though it was kind of unwitting… she gave the jar to Matthew, and he donated it to the coop!
And then we had a really nice intimate small coop on Tuesday, and then last night was a nice raucous Thursday coop. Oh, and the front street girls haven’t been coming to a ton of coops lately, but Katie is wanting to host next Tuesday, and E lended the pizza stone. And Kaya biked to school with Liz (13 miles!) yesterday… so, I feel like we’re reaching out well to that group.
Working with Matthew on the Neuroscience quiz was really nice. We stayed up really late, to the brink of exhaustion, working together. It’s really rewarding to be working on something, and you help it along, then someone else helps it along, and you each help each other through stuff. It feels a lot nicer than just working on something alone.
Driving to campus with Kensy, and then walking from the glider port (overlooking the ocean) to campus in the morning was nice. It was just a nice walk.
Seeing the prospectives in the morning was good, even if I was only there for a half hour or so. I felt good about showing up and supporting them, and their orientation. Free breakfast burritos too.
Thinking about the next steps on the project with mostly Ed about scientists using their bodies to think. I’m going to be doing some more observations in science labs, and that project just feels really heavy with opportunity.
I’ve been mostly feeling excited about school, not anxious. It’s not true every day, but it’s true a lot of days.
And I’ve been really excited about my neuroscience class. It’s just that I have no emotional investment in it. There’s almost no work, it’s outside of my area of interest, and the professor is leaving the department anyway. So, there’s no need to be impressive. Which means I just sit and soak in the awesome lectures about how owls hear the direction of sounds, or how human beings are able to see lines move, and all this stuff. I just sit there with sparks flying in my head as I learn interesting stuff, anxiety free.
Having two little crushes today. Crushes always feel really exciting, and little ones are almost the best because you don’t even feel bad when they evaporate.