Kirk Israel's commonplace and blog. Quotes and links daily since 2001.
2024.03.28
So tonight the "Science and Spirituality" group I co-lead talked about John Holland's book "Complexity: A Very Short Introduction".

It was a bit dry, and my approach was a little superficial, so I didn't take much out of it that I didn't bring to it; just the idea the emergence is important, simple interactions lead to unpredictable new behaviors at higher levels.

But it made me think of how much interesting stuff I know about chaos and complexity came from the 90s - and how most of the folks in the groups hadn't heard of Cellular Automata (like Conway's Game of Life) or the Mandelbrot Set or all that kind of stuff, so I had something cool to show them.

One idea that has stuck in the back of my head (from Steven Levy's book Artificial Life) is Chris Langton's Edge of Chaos idea - that there's a variable "Lambda" λ that describes just how much change a system undergoes. Too high a value leads to boring randomness, too low a value leads to static dullness. I think the goldilocks "just right" value was given as around 0.273.

I haven't heard much about Artificial Life lately, not sure if it just petered out or what.
2024.03.27
A long while back I wrote my own "soundboard" in Visual Basic and one of the more useful one was 0:11 from here: Homer Simpson saying "phew, all this computer hacking is making me thirsty"...

2024.03.26
Baltimore Bridge Collapses, YIKES
2024.03.25
This is a perfect illustration of the kind of shit you have to deal with when you're trying to build a language model which actually has an internal symbolic representation of what it "knows", rather than just belching out the most statistically likely sequence of letters.
Actually that little pronoun engine (no not in the gender-y sense) Infocom games used (and that Inform was based on) is something that was so impressive back in the 80s... being able to say "examine the tree" and then "hit it with a brick" and have it know what you meant was amazingly impressive back in the day.
2024.03.24
2024.03.23
2024.03.22
legit scary and wonderful horror dancing from India...