Totally Random

Interesting essay by George Dyson talking about Google, information and Artificial Intelligence. This is an excerpt:

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn’t be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else.

How far away is the moment that we will find ourselves acknowledging GoogleAI as a new species?

Sir Tim Berners Lee is interviewed about the web, and the semantic web. Interesting discussion.

Ever since I first read about Tom Ray's Tierra artificial evolution system, I have been very interested in where it would go. The idea of the software evolving and creating unplanned complexity seemed like a really good idea. However it never really seemed to go anywhere, and Tom seems to have started researching other things, such as evolvability. I am starting to think that the reason that he did so is that it is very hard to get software to evolve. I have written an artificial evolution environment in Python that runs animals written in my own stack implementation of a Virtual Machine. It has network communication, so separated environments can talk to each other. This is implemented as a P2P sort of service, where there is no central server required, and all the peers tell each other about peers in the network, this part isn't completely tested yet. I am happy with where the whole thing is going, but am having problems with the basic design. There are a few problems that have to be solved to get an environment that encourages evolution working:

• A virtual machine (done for now)
• An Ancestor animal that is able to reproduce (done)
• A mechanism for communication between genepools (mostly done)
• Mutation (done for now)
• Environmental pressures that encourage fitness, and allow new species to breed (problems)
• A user interface, so that we can see what is happening (partly done)

My problem has been, that once a species becomes dominant, it is hard for a new species to make a niche. Various Reaper strategies can help with this, but it isn't ideal. I need to have a bit more of a think about what the environment is for. The Tierra idea is to create an artificial ecosystem, where animals live and evolve, not as a place to optimise a solution to a problem. So the idea of every generation taking the most 'fit' animals and mutating them doesn't quite fit. I am not quite ready to release the source code publically but if anyone is interested you can certainly have it.

Ok, I wrote my first WordPress plugin for my sister's very popular Self-Portrait Tuesday. It is a plugin to allow the members of a site to upload links that can be used in ongoing competitions of communities. I have called it "PicLinks" because it is initially for that, but it could be used for anything.Here is a link to the very first stable version of it. Piclinks v0.1. Some feedback will no doubt take off its rough edges. I have to give thanks to the author of WP-Quotes which I used for inspiration (in fact I blatantly used the entire structure of his code…). This is the first time that I have done any PHP, and I can't say that I completely enjoyed the experience. After using Python, it just seems a little cludgy.

A couple of months ago (9/Jan/2009) we had a baby. These three months have been a lot of fun and a lot of work, and as I think every new and old parent says "I can't imagine what it was like without him". I can't. He is sitting next to me playing with toys on his A-frame right now and making lots of happy noises. He is possibly the best baby in the world. We took him to a wedding last week, and he slept right through all the conversation and speeches and girls cooing over him. We are very lucky. Here are some photos of Liam and my wife Tam. Looking through our photos, it seems like the only times that we take many photos of Liam is when he is asleep! (Tam and Liam outside) (All of us watching TV)