Month: January 2002

Generative Poetry

John Winkelman

Had a long, interesting conversation with Scott today, regarding the problems inherent in duplicating the creative process. He is building an application which, he hopes, will be able to write poetry based on an understanding of the concepts behind language. I cannot imagine a more difficult task than to teach a computer to ‘think’ in metaphors. There is so much we don’t understand about our own thought processes when it comes to recognition and cognition, that modeling such behavior can easily devolve into educated guesswork. Questions come up; hard questions, like: What does it mean to ‘perceive’? To ‘conceive’? To ‘recognize’?

Isaac Asimov once stated that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. Borrowing this idea, could it be said that any sufficiently complex pattern of behavior would be indistinguishable from intelligence? Computers do not ACT. They await input, in whatever form it may be, and then do what they are told to do with that input. They do not autonomously decide what to do with unfamiliar data. They can search for patterns which match patterns of familiar data, but they will not search for patterns which we have not told them to search for. It goes back to my comment regarding Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies : a computer will not try to creatively figure out a problem. It does not care that {1,4,9,16,25} is a series of perfect squares. It will spend eternity trying to untie the knot where Alexander would simply cut it with his sword.

The questions about intelligence which arise from this train of thought tend toward the unsettling. Is there such a thing as action, or is there only re-action? Is human behavior a reaction to a profoundly complex set of behaviors, or, in being self-aware, do we transcend re-action to the point that we behave autonomously?

Throwing in the question of free will vs. predestination complicates the process of teaching a computer to recognize poetry. But without teaching a computer to think symbolically, the best machine-written poem will, in reality, be the result of complex pattern-matching.

My project is, for the near future, much less complex than Scott’s. I am building a machine to model evolution and genetic drift. Ultimately I plan to explore the question of emergent behavior and hive-mind patterns. I say ‘less complex’ because the a-life I work with does not need to think; it only needs to re-act.

Cold Photos

John Winkelman

Today I went to the beach and took pictures. The weather was wonderful, wind from the west at 5-10 mph, sunlight from the south at 186,280 miles per second. Slight, wispy clouds in the sky, and perhaps a dozen other people in the entire park.

I watched PI a couple of days ago, so I was particularly sensitive to patterns in waves, wind, sound, sand, light … Perhaps it was my unfamiliarity with photography, or perhaps it was just that a static picture of a dynamic subject will always feel flat. Regardless, I was proud of some of my dozens of pictures, and have posted them here . There are eleven photographs weighing at a total of around 650k.

Ellipsis

John Winkelman

I have been crazy busy at work. A project which we started this past Thursday needs to be finished tomorrow night. This will not be a problem. I am just that good.

Nothing new to report of the memetics front, other than this: Have you ever noticed that when you develop an interest in something, that something seems to pop up all over the place? I am reading The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod, wherein memetic viruses are used as a kind of instant post-hypnotic suggestion to either frighten enemies or keep servants in line. And get this: They seem to be transmitted by ‘swirling patterns’ on the hulls of ships, or in visual broadcasts. Could they be using archetypal symbols to cause this effect?

In other news my two Hofstader books ( Metamagical Themas and Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies ) have arrived. I started reading FCCA yesterday.

The chapter titled “To Seek Whence Cometh a Sequence” explores the methods by which patterns are recognized, and the processes we use to extend those patterns beyond the information we are given. The idea being, I suppose, that what humans and computers consider meaningful are not at all the same thing. If I see a sequence {1,2,3,5,7,11,13} I know from experience that these are prime numbers. A computer doesn’t care if they are prime numbers. It won’t discover that they are primes unless we ask it to test the sequence for the possibility that they are primes.

And that is the fundamental conceptual stumbling block in building a thinking machine. Computers don’t out of habit, attach significance to symbols. Things are not “interesting”. They don’t have subconscious biases toward recognizing familiar patterns.

Or maybe they do. What do I know?

Geek Overload

John Winkelman

I just returned from Astronomical ConFusion. I have books, and great memories, and great stories, and I am too tired to go into detail right now. So I will leave you with a joke I heard, which is the Best Joke of the Year, right now:

“So an Irishman walks out of a bar.”

Math Anxiety

John Winkelman

After two days of being STUPID I fixed the math on the flocking experiment and now have bugs facing the direction they are flying. Aren’t they cute? When they get in formation, imagine Ride of the Valkyries playing in the background.

In two days I and a group of friends are off to the Astronomical ConFusion science fiction convention in Warren, Michigan. This will be my second Con; the first was WindyCon in Chicago in November of 2000. As we were drinking breakfast on that Sunday, the lovely and talented Christian summed up the entirety of geekdom as follows:

“You look at these people, and you see that some of them, this is the one time a year they get to cut loose and be freaks, no judgement, just a weekend of good fun. Then there are those people, you look at them and you just know, they will spend the rest of their lives pumping gas in a crushed velvet cape and pointy ears.”

Mmmmmmmyep.

I dove into the memetics book again today, discovered some interesting things, but I am too tired to think about it right now. Maybe I will post something tomorrow while I’m cleaning off my prosthetic Klingon forehead.

Playing Catch-up

John Winkelman

You know, sometimes I feel I am developing a good understanding of programming, and the kind of thought necessary to develop AI and Alife. Then I come across a site like this , and I realize how little I actually know about Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and now Artificial Evolution.

I haven’t had much time to work on my personal projects the last few days, and I will probably have even less time over the next few weeks. Such is the nature of internet work. Several months of little or nothing to do, followed by two months of frantic activity. At least I get to work on cool projects.

The flocking experiment I posted Sunday needs a lot of work. The math is all wrong, and, while the effect is interesting, it is not at all what it should be.

I ordered two more books for my library… Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern and Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought , both by Douglas Hofstader, whose brain is Very Big.

Also in the Big Brain department is Golan Levin who makes math beautiful.

Peer Pressure

John Winkelman

I have created life.

Well, maybe not created , and maybe not life, per se. I have made a flash movie which duplicates extremely simple swarming behavior in a group of organisms (read: dots). Basically they move toward the median X and Y coordinates of the swarm. This causes an amusing effect when they reach the maximum or minimum x and y boundaries of their “world”. I posted the movie here.

Flash. I still love it, and I still hate it.

update 11:30pm

Another one with rudimentary flocking behavior .