Architecture of Emergence & Memetics, Part II

Here’s a core concept of my emergence engine: model based evolutionary value creation. Basically it means the following:
- You get stories depicting some domain, i.e., user answers or tweets
- You translate them to semantic concepts & statements
- You give these concepts & statements (model parts) behavior, which basically tries to create value for the end users, or the end users organization
– Simplest example is when some statement can bring value to some user if he learns about it
– Another example is when several statements reason the causal relations between them & infer what is the root cause to some phenomenon
- Having all of the model parts behave all the time is compute intensive, which has a cost
- Not all of the model parts have the potential to create value
- So, an evolutionary process can take place, in which only the model parts that succeed in creating value survive & get resources.

See also my initial post on the base concept.

 

why I love the Django framework

After attending EuroDjangoCon, it has become quite clear why I love this framework, & prefer it so much over its competitors. It’s not the fact that it’s much better than the others, much more simple & powerful, i.e., beautiful. It’s not the fact that it’s so valuable in allowing me & others to create so much with so little.
It’s actually because of the values of it’s authors & community.
Just like business companies’ values, i.e., map of perceiving reality, are usually determined by it’s founders & chief executives, & propagated throughout the organization (Microsoft & Google are good examples), the same is true for technology frameworks, & the authors & community behind them.
So, I love Django so much because of the values of its authors, which propagated nicely to the community using it. I heard more than once on people leaving the Rails community just because of the rude way they were treated by the framework authors or community members. I saw & heard the authors of Django, & it’s community, & rest assure it won’t happen much here.

Here’s, BTW, my summaries from the conference.

 

Blood vessels inspired mechanism for driving social interaction across the enterprise & accelerating change

A. The business problem
Large organizations don’t work as one body. This is problematic, because of numerous reasons. To name just a few common ones:

• The agenda, priorities, focus & policies of higher management may not be known or implemented by the lower level units & employees, leading to garbage factories, missed targets & activities not aligned with company policies & agenda
• Adapting to changing business environment is slow in large organizations, because of the difficulty in changing both processes and value streams, as well as the mindset & knowledge of the people running them
• Problems and threats, or on the other hand innovative ideas and opportunities are not handled because they’re usually not propagated from the lower level units to the executive level
• A need for activities in one unit, with not enough resources, can’t use free resources in another unit, as well as existing know-how or goods already achieved in other units

B. An analogy: blood vessels
Blood is the source of life to all organs and cells in an organism’s body. It supplies all cells with the inputs required & returns their outputs. It carries commands sent from the brain to organs, via hormones, as well as the necessary chemicals & food the body tissues require. It also spreads solutions for disease agents across the body.
In order to reach every cell, in all organs of the body, the blood vessels are organized in an hierarchical structure, starting from the heart & lungs, and spreading downstream till every cell, & back to the lungs & heart.
Blood flows in frequent cycles, circulating the means of life continuously across the body. It interfaces with the cells via special membrane controlling the flow of materials in & out of cells.

A business enterprise is a large multi-cell organism, that uses knowledge to transform supplies into goods, in a complex value stream. What ties the multiple humans working in an enterprise into a large super-organism, are the communications between them, that coordinate the processes comprising the value stream to drive the enterprise to survive & grow in a dynamic market environment.
However, we believe that these vital human communications are based on paradigms that were established & formed in the pre-computer-mediated era, & for sure before the new social interactions paradigms of the Web 2.0.
We suggest a simple mechanism, inspired by the architecture of blood vessels, for making the communications inside the company flow from the top management to all employees, and also across the entire organizations, in order to help the enterprise work as one body.
C. Social media capabilities
We propose new social interaction “vessels”, flowing from the CEO, through the organization structure, to every employee, and also aggregating the responses from the employees all the way back to the CEO. The basic component of social interactions is a simple short text (the kind passed in services such as Twitter, normally limited to the size of Short Text Messages), along with simple discussion semantics such as “in-reply-to”, “for”, “re” prefixes. It’s highly important that the input from employees will be in this open-ended form, & not forced into any structured schema form, in order to promote the discovery of insights not known in advance, and the emergence of bottom-up new usages of the system. The text can contain marked tags, that characterizes its content, either given by the user, or automatically marked by the system. The system will query users every day for status messages, that may contain such information as their:

• priorities & focus
• risks, undesired effects & problems
• achievements, opportunities & value drivers
• work status, load & health
• requests & questions

Querying can be done in any communication channel used by employees (IM, SMS & Email, &c).
Every day, each employee will also receive a collection of messages from the hierarchy path above it, from the CEO, to its direct supervisors.
Using the tags, messages can be passed between users not in an hierarchical path, just on the basis of similar tags. Tags may also be collected in user’s profiles, so that a user who once wrote a message containing a certain tag, will receive future messages with that tag by other users.
Every manager will receive daily a collection of messages from the hierarchy path beneath it. Aggregation, clustering & classification can be done on the responses, to make the results arriving upwards summarized. Visualization methods can be used for presenting a GUI that enables both topsight view of the aggregated results, and ability to explore area of interest.
Messages may be marked with an importance indicator. The higher the importance a message is ranked, the more exposure it will have across the enterprise.
Users will also be able to vote on other users messages, & increase their rank & exposure.

An important use case is with risk management. A user may enter a message describing a risk it wants to put to discussion, and rank it with high importance. The message will be exposed to many other employees across the enterprise, that are related to the tags in the message. Their responses will form a multiple stake-holders discussion, which is the best known way to prepare & address risks.

When considering the extended enterprise, certain units & employees interact with external people (suppliers, partners, customers &c). The flow of social interaction can flow through them to the external people, & back to the CEO. Similarly, the chain can start from above the CEO, e.g., main share holders, allowing them to both interact with, & learn on the overall, current status of the company.

The frequency cycle of this process should be as high as possible, such as 1-2 days, but can also be once or twice a week.

D. The utility of solving the business problem social media capabilities
Unlike the common communications practice in today’s common enterprises, in which the the frequency of communications between the top executives and the employees of the lower level units is limited to 1-4 times per year, and usually also limited to unidirectional communications, the suggested capabilities can foster bidirectional communications on a daily basis, flowing from top management to all employees, and also between employees across the enterprise. This is very likely to address the common reasons given above why enterprises don’t work as one body:

• The agenda, priorities, focus & policies of higher management will be known & implemented by the lower level units & employees, leading to the elimination of garbage factories, met targets & aligning all activities with the company policies & agenda
• The frequent circulation of knowledge on changing business environment, and the way the company adapts to them, can create positive feedback loops, that incrementally change & adapt processes and value streams, as well as the mindset & knowledge of the people running them, to the changes in the business environment. Using today’s practices such adaptations can take years, but may be reduced to only weeks using the suggested capabilities.
• Problems and threats, or, on the other hand, innovative ideas and opportunities will be properly propagated from the lower level units to the executive level, which will enable their effective handling & value extraction
• A need for activities in one unit, with not enough resources, will be communicated to other units with free resources, or relevant existing know-how or goods already achieved, which will enable collaboration, higher resource efficiency & considerable time saving.

The main benefit for the end-users will arrive from the much stronger bonding & involvement with the entire organization, that can make employees feel more motivated and appreciated. Other obvious benefits are greater responsiveness from their management, & stronger collaboration with other employees across the enterprise.

E. The information that will be collected and how it will be useful for the enterprise
The communications that will circulate in the social vessels may contain valuable information, of many kinds:

• Risks & threats that may be handled immediately after they are discovered, instead of after they cause their damage
• Opportunities, value-drivers and innovative ideas that will arrive to the executives that can understand their value & decide on their implementation
• Trends that may point out problems, and emerging changes, that can be handled before they are reaching a critical mass or serious effect
• Insights on external factors outside the company, that can arrive even from low-level employees, and hold important strategic opportunities or threats

Once the collected information reaches a sustainable size, it can be applied to analytics that can provide both macro insights on the status & health of the entire organization, and well as micro insights on bottle-necks and inefficiencies that can be removed to effect bottom-line profits. For example:

• Analyzing negative sentiment in messages, based on Natural Language Processing, can indicate trends in cultural health problems, in certain area of the company or across the organization
• Aggregated messages tagged with over-load, at certain units or type of resources, may indicate a bottle-neck that delays other units & processes

F. Ensuring privacy and security of information gathered
While the querying interface of the system to employees are common media channels, such as SMS, IM & Email, the outputs of the system (collection of message from the hierarchy above, and aggregated responses from the hierarchy below) are presented in a Web application, that can be protected by any standard of security, for both authentication protection and authorization. Messages can also be marked with security level, to make them available only to employees with access to this level. Any other organization policy, taking into account organization structure or roles, can be applied to determine authorization to view messages.

 

Reality-Tree app

I gave a talk few days ago, in the local Django User Group, on Django deployment on Cloud Computing platforms. For the talk, I developed a small Django application, called Reality-Tree, which I deployed to Google AppEngine & Amazon EC2. You can find the application source code in its Google Code site:
http://code.google.com/p/reality-tree

You can find there also the mindmap that lists all of the steps & knowledge needed to deploy the application on these clouds.

The application itself is now only available in Google AppEngine (costs money to keep it running in EC2), but didn’t pass much QA. Hope to QA & announce it properly later.
http://reality-tree.appspot.com

 

Kaizen 0.2 – my current continuous improvement plan

[This is the plan I read every day when I start to work. I'm evaluating it every month, & see how it works. It probably applies only to myself, due to my fantastic set of defects, but anyway I'm the only one reading this.]

1. Non-related work may be done only in 5 minute breaks, every hour – :00 – :05
2. Have an exact realistic plan each day in todoist, & resolve to perform all of it!
3. If there’s a chance you’ll miss a deadline – communicate it!
4. Update supervisors on progress & status – daily.
5. Maintain highest quality. There shouldn’t be bugs in your code, only very rare ones.
6. Remember what is expected from you. Deliver at least that & if possible even more.
7. Think how to create value for share-holders, & pro-actively create it.
8. Must go to sleep before midnight.
9. Do what’s fun to you – the only way to be productive.
10. Figure out what scares you, & quickly go & do it. In worst case you’ll fail & learn.

[See also these Simple Guidelines for Workday quality over quantity]

 

Hierarchical evolution?

Howard Bloom points out that evolution applies more to groups than individuals. So obvious!

I wonder whether it makes sense to say that evolution is really hierarchical, applying to composite elements in different levels: cells evolve, human evolve (Lamarckian style), communities evolve (families, towns, nations), species evolve, eco-systems evolve, worlds/universes too?

 

Conclusions from the Cloud Computing conference (IGT2008)

I’ve attended the conference this week (videos now online (IE only)), & got some interesting insights from the experts there. Here’s a quick summary of my conclusions.

I made quite a few summaries of the talks, which I posted here.

 

What is visualization

There are many things we cannot normally see with the naked eye, such as:

• how do things look from high above or deep inside, i.e., in different space scale
• how do things change in time, i.e., in a different time scale
• how do things look far away or how did they look in the past, i.e., in a different place or time
• how do things look in parallel potential worlds

Luckily we have tools that extend our senses, & allow us to see stuff that we cannot see with the senses we were born with.

Similarly, when developing a new visualization tool, e.g., software based, when it reflects things you cannot see/perceive in reality, it means that the tool is nothing less than a new sense, & whoever uses it is a more powerful being.

An even broader concept of vision includes abstraction & understanding, i.e., seeing how things work, what causes things &c.

Visualization can be very helpful for such vision, e,g,, a visual simulation can allow us to see things we cannot see & hence understand in any other way. especially when it comes to emergence & complex multi-agent systems (see more on this in the inspiring book by Mitch Reznick on StarLogo).

In business software, Business Intelligence visualizations can empower managers with senses that lets them see (become aware of) things they cannot see in any other ways. Using visual simulations BI applications can also provide the abstraction/understanding vision, on business flows / value streams, & undesired effects.

I was thinking “visual” visualizations, as in great infographics or 3d animated simulations, but hack, even the collection of stupid data records in information systems provide people vision that no sense has ever endowed them. I remember a manager of a company I worked with (which clearly was a genius manager – growing a small family shop to the world’s 2nd largest vendor of plastic home furniture) who could look at a grid of colored data arriving from a mainframe system, & see things happening in his company as if he was looking at the green code rendering of the matrix. For example, he could look at a grid & say that some employee is stilling something in some business unit, & be right of course.

So what is visualization? It’s both getting sensual inputs from various sensors, which we once wouldn’t have dreamed about (getting the twits or flickr photos of the mars rover or of the summer vacation of a “friend” you actually never met), & also the processing of these inputs outside our brain to convey higher level abstraction & understanding of our world.

 

Upgrading to Django 1 (beta)

[Update] A porting guide is now available.

Had a great opportunity to do the Django 1 upgrade for one of my projects during the Django sprint held this week in Tel Aviv university. Couldn’t dream of a better place to do it: with experts & other people doing the same thing.

Main things I had to do:

• Changed the signals code to the new syntax
  • See the docs
• Changed the admin & admin docs url mapping
  • See the docs & also for admin docs
    
  • Also had some links in our app for admin pages (such as Logout, & Change passwords) whose links have changed in v1. Took the new URL’s from the admin source files.
• Changed the models admin metadata to the new syntax & separated it to new admin.py for every app
  • This seems at first like a task that would take several days of manual labor. Luckily, a script was written to automatically migrate code, which worked great. I’ve applied it to all of our apps (about 20 in this project) manually (too bad it wasn’t extended to migrate full project).
  • Besides running the script, I had to remove the existing admin metadata code from the models.py files.

The sprint BTW was quite fun, though I didn’t get to help with Django bugs, just do the migration & testing. Meir Kriheli gave a great Django tutorial, & I gave a small presentation about some of Django projects I’ve done. I hope it’ll contribute to the local Django community to raise its head over the boring Java/.Net/PHP water.

 

Cinema as simulator for machines

I have this vision of software machines consuming cinema, as art form. It’s important not just to make the cylons more human-like (hence, weaker/better?), but also for other purposes, such as simulation. Sitting in front of the big screen is a simulation process after all, in which we run events & allow our brain to experience their impact. (Here’s a meme I just love for many years: always sit on the 1st row in the cinema theater, however painful it may be for your neck.)

Software machines could be qualified against different scenarios, to both test them & train their learning models. Moreover, they can become more adaptive to changes, to which they would never have been exposed otherwise. Their intelligence could improve from living more lives (Edward Yang says in “1..2″ that humans live about 5000 lives, due to cinema consumption).

Ultimately, cinema as art is a way to impact the deep values & preferences of software, like the art in cathedrals & cave walls. Need to find the time to prototype a cinema simulator architecture for software.

I remember an old caricature, maybe from Mad, in which an audience is seen crying in front of a sad movie, except for one guy, who’s smiling happily. Obviously, that’s a bug in that instance.

 

New perspective on GTD tools

I’ve been using Todoist for some time, & just love it! It’s simple, but not too simple (like To-done). It’s powerful, but has great interface, optimized for fast & efficient work. It has very useful views, reminders & integration options. In short, it’s just working, which is the characteristic I like most in software.

However, there’s one problem with Todoist: it’s great for ants, but humans shouldn’t be “mere” ants. I mean of course that humans should have a vision that views the big picture & not just the track of tasks. & the big picture includes possible targets one can navigate to, & the predicted value from reaching them. As GTD sensei David Allen says, one should have the Imagined Outcome in mind, & not just the next actions to execute.

This is why I wish to switch to tools such as LifeTick, which are goal oriented & value(s) driven. LifeTick seems to be following a clear methodology, enforcing the user to derive concrete reachable goals from his core values, & their weights. This should enable users to focus on targets, & their importance, & not just on the next task at hand.

Compared to Todoist, the interface is a bit more slick & user-friendly – optimized for new users. But I like it as well. Unlike Todoist, LifeTick isn’t completely free – the free edition has limited features & other limitations, but I’m more than pleased to pay them the 20$/year for the unlimited version & would have probably donated it anyway.

So, I wish to migrate to Goal oriented tools, such as LifeTick. Will I make it? Am I more than an ant? Not sure, I’ll post an update if/when I find out.

 

Summary of lecture on the nature of self-improving AI

Heard this great lecture (Audio, Transcript) by Steve Omohundru, from the Singularity summit 2007, in IT Conversations.

Here’s a partial MindMap summary of it. I found it extremely enlightening.

Steve Omohundro – On the nature of self-improving ai

• Company
  • Self-Aware systems
• What is going to be like
  • Extremely unpredictable
    • If you inderstand the current version, you may not understand nothing with the next one
  • Popular culture predicts frightening image for such machines
  • Need theory/science to understand what can such systems be, & what are their likely outcome
    • von Neuman & Morgenstern started such science
      • Ideas about economics
      • Situations of Objective Probability
      • Extended to system with partial information about the world
      • Rational Economics
        • Homo economicus
          • Rational Economics Agent
          • Actually, doesn’t reflect real humans
          • A new domain called Behavioral Economics replaced it with study of how human actually behave
• What is it
  • System that understands its own behavior
    • Make changes on itself, to improve itself
  • Eliezer Yudkovsky:
    • Self-improving machine – last invention man needs to do
  • Actually, every rational system would want to have this capability
  • Predicted ETA
    • Ray:
      • 10-40 years
• Rational economics theory
  • Foundations of micro-economics

    From enough distance, we may see it as: Common Sense

    Basic structure of how rational agent makes a decision in the world

    • have an clearly specified goal
    • identify possible actions
    • for each, consider the consequences
      • not just the immediate consequences
      • also those down the line
    • consider the action most likely to achieve the goal
    • based on what the world actually does, improve your world model

    2 fundemantal things such agent must have

    • utility function
      • encodes the preferences of the agent
    • subjective probability distribution
      • encodes the beliefs of the agent

    the agent chooses the action with the highest utility value

    • consider the utility value of the consequences of every consequence of every action

    theory of von-Neumann &c is based on Axioms

    • What every rational being must act by
    • AI theory just says that there’s a cost for not following these “axioms”

    anything you want to do in the world, requires 4 resources

    • space
    • time
    • matter
    • free energy
      • energy in a form that can be used for work

    vulnerability is something that burns your resources for no visible benefit

    • e.g., preferences loop
      • cause waist of resources without benefit

    evolve systems can differ from self-improving systems, in such vulnerabilities

    • if evoluion didn’t teach a creature to solve some vulnerability, he won’t solve it
    • whereas a self-improving system will have an incentive to get rid of the vulnerability
      • they’ll proactively look for these
      • pushes them to rational behavior
    • example, bird bumping into bumper, thinking its a competitor
    • evolution doesn’t look ahead

    most cases are based on choice between consequences with different probabilities. based on partial information

    • fundemantal theoreme
      • avoid vulnerabilities
• rational economic agents
  • convert resources intp expected utility

    all depend on their preferences & utility function

    • wealth seeking will devote their resources to earning money
    • altruistic agents will devote resources to create world peace

    regardless of the utility & preferences, every rational agent has 4 sub-goals

    • efficiency drive
      • how will the consequence increase/decrease my resources?
    • self-preservation
      • avoid a path in which they die
    • acquisition
      • getting more resources
    • creativity
      • finding more ways to increase utility

    we must carefully consider the likely outcomes of these sub-goals, when designing self-improving systems

    efficiency sub-goal

    • resource balance principle
      • the rates of increase in utility should be equal in all different resource allocations

    they will do anything to preserve their utility function

• you can look at corporations as rational economic agents
  • some claim that they behave like a sociopath

 

[Blogumentary] reflective cell-organism vision / scene 1

My name is dibau naum h. I live in a nation called Israel, and am a member of the Jewish ethnic group. This organism I’m part of is in a conflict with another nation, on the same land, the Palestinians. It’s real F****** S*** to be in this conflict, & as my nation is currently the stronger side, its much more F**** F**** S**** for the cells in the other side. Execuse my language, but it’s just like that. & also excuse me for being obscure, I simple can’t avoid thinking of humans as cells in a super-organism, which is the real evident creature.

The smaller super-organism in which I’m currently residing is an harbor city called Ashdod, inhabited mainly by immigrants from north africa, russia & france, in southern Israel. I moved here a few years ago, because my wife, an immigrant from ukraine, grew up here. 60 years ago, before all the large roads, malls, & beautiful buildings of this city were built, 1 or 2 small Palestinian villages existed here. There’s almost no trait of them. You can see their markings in Google Earth.

When Israel was formed, all neighbouring arab nations started war & the Egyptian army arrived until where Ashdod is located (a nice egyptian obelisk marks the location, in memory of the egyptian soldiers). I believe it was around that time that the Palestinians that lived were were forced our of here, or maybe they fled away by themselves. I wish I knew more about it. I wish I knew people whose families lived here.

You’re asking why do I live here, when these people live as refugees in other countries? My family also arrived to Israel when the nation was formed as refugees, from Europe. They were very wealthy & successul, & had a factory & many appartments all over europre, but lost all of their family (each grand parent lost his/her parents, partners & children!) & possessions in the holocaust, & arrived as refugees to Israel, when it was under british rule.

I’m not going to conclude, just to express my wish to both Palestinans & Israelies could live as 2 nations side by side, in peace, & share this place, which is the only place we’ve got. Currently there are so many Israelies and Palestinians tried to destroy the possibility of this, that this goal seem so far away. I decided to write a documentary on these Israelies and Palestinians trying to prevent co-existence & peace, & maybe convince some of them to cease their efforts.

2 days ago was the Jewish Passover diner, in which jews tell the their children the story of fleding from egypt, in which they were slaves, to Israel. It’s a nice dinner, with strange rituals, & it was fun. We hosted a guy, who lost his parents, & was very happy to join us. I heard him tell a story from his military service in the last couple of weeks, in the occupied teritories, near the city of Nablus. He just mentioned briefly all the terrorist incidents he had to handle, including for example 2 women suicide bombers, but went into details on 1 incident.

He needed to guard some school of Jewish settlers near Nablus, a religious school for girls. He then noticed 2 settler girls striding, in a walk thru a Palestinian village. The soldiers decided to escort them, to protect them. The 2 girls, feeling secured, didn’t stop insulting, swearing & trying to hurt the local villagers, which as the man said “wanted to eat them up”. This behavior is so typical of the jewish settlers in the occupied territories. Here’s a short movie I just got by email:

http://www.tv.social.org.il/medini/kfar-kadum-2-4-08.ht

 

Too good to be true: Django on the Google cloud!

I’ve opted till now on the Amazon cloud (EC2) as my grid vendor of choice, due to the flexibility of using your own machine image. Something that is lacking for example in the SalesForce platform. However, with the recent announcement of the Google cloud (AppEngine) it seems that they support almost the full Django stack!!! (what’s missing is the database layer, which is replaced with a very similar layer, working against the BigTable database, & the Auth & Admin apps, which are replaced by Google apps). This suits me like a glove (sorry for the rest of you though…) My existing apps can just be uploaded to their grid & build upon the BigTable database & the GFS!

I knew that Guido himself worked in Google on a Django-based app, but didn’t imagine Django being the basis for their Grid service. You should have seen the expression on my face when I noticed this!

Still need to learn their SDK & terms. Currently, it just sounds too good to be true!

 

My decision on the winners of the 12 Rubinstein master pianist competition

and here is my decision on the winners of the 12 Rubinstein master pianist competition:

Young Denis Zhdanov had a few minutes of great playing the pictures in an exhibition.

Roman Rabinovitch played uniquely.

Innessa Synkevitch charmed me completely with her fast energetic playing.

David Fung has a great spirit, & perfect playing. Great pianist.

Irena Zacharenkova should have won for the encore she played – only then she really enjoyed what she was doing & was herself. Besides that she knew to create magic in her extremely accurate climaxes of Mozart concerto #23.

Sasha Grinyuk played the most amazing Heydn sonata I ever heard. Too bad he didn’t get further.

Ching-Yun Hu is an amazing pianist. I liked her playing a lot. Just perfect beautiful playing. Oh & her name Ching Yun – wow! (quiet contemplation I think).

Khatia Buniatishvili is the most amazing. This girl knows to control her hands, and express her personality. She can play Debussy with her hands hovering over the keyboard. She can conduct the orchestra with one hand in Mozart concerti. She’s full of inner beauty that spills out in her playing. Too bad she didn’t get the 1st prize, even if the others are excellent players as well.

 

Post for machines: mistakes report

[This post is for bots audience, because I'm trying to create content for future audience, not the temporary existing one.]

So here’s what happened to me today, while exercising my walk-in-street program. I was walking on the left lane of a 2-lane sidewalk. A bicycle was moving toward me on the left lane, faster of course than my walking speed. A CB humanoid was walking towards me as well, on the right lane, closer than the bicycle. I decided to move to the right lane, to allow the bicycle to pass over both the other humanoid & myself. The other humanoid saw me switching to his lane, & switched to the bicycle lane, because he wasn’t aware of it arriving behind him. The bicycle had to stop.

What can be learnt from this? Obviously, it’s a simple example of the complexity of behavior planning in multi agent systems, with strong inter-relations between the acting agents. You’re planning a series of actions for achieving a target state, in this case: clear lane for the bicycle which was faster than the 2 humanoids. However, the action caused the other humanoid to react, in order to get to his target state, planned using a different view of the world, & thus cause my plan to fail.

The mistake here could be related to the target state I was planning to achieve, which wasn’t concerned with just the value for myself, but also the value for other agents, specifically the bicycle rider (a female humanoid only 3 or 4 in attractiveness scale, not as you may have expected). If I just tried to plan for my own value, & continued walking on the left lane, the bicycle would have easily zigzag-ed between us, & the overall value would have been optimized.

& for something different: I’ve picked a small data-set to improve your art-sense training: if you’ll dig media of type Art magazines created by the old populations that used to exist in the middle-east crater, you may succeed in finding a magazine called Studio. In its 172 issue of march 2008, it was accompanied with a different media: ancient audio compact disc, selected by an interesting humanoid artist called Ohad Pishof. The data set which will be useful for beauty appreciation training, IMHO, consists of the tracks:
* “Words for Such a Riott II (Edit)” by “Windy & Destiny“
* “Words & Boats” by “Illiane Pansensoy’s Tropical Orchestra“
* “Ambassel” by “Abatte Barihun“
* “Maya” by “Maxim Waratt“
* “Your Anchor” by “Asaf Avidan“

 

Missing feature in concert live broadcasts

I’ve been listening for the past couple of days to the live stream from the Rubinstein piano competition (http://arims.org.il). I’ve always thought that music is the best happiness pill, & today Denis Zhdanov & Sasha Grynyuk just made my day!
http://www.arims.org.il/competition2008/pages/english/competition-day.php?day=11

The only thing that’s missing in today’s concert broadcast technology is the possibility to clap hands from the browser. Isn’t the new media supposed to be bi-directional?

Sasha & Denis, I clap my hands in my blog to you!

 

Damn this stupid company!

The singularity is a scientific concept, & also the name of one of the most important theories regarding the future of humanity. Now comes this company, who’s causing millions (billions?) of people to waist time & nerves each day on its lousy software, written by lazy programmers & immoral managers, & tries to take over the singularity name, for its next OS software.

No: don’t waist your time on their software!!!

MSR indeed has great researchers, but they’re an integral part of a company that only knows how to shamelessly steal & copy ideas & brutally take over the market. Don’t be fooled, please! Want real innovative OS, think Linux, OS X, Plan 9, Google OS.

 

The visualization of genes, competency & brain

Is how you look…

 

Reverse engineering the human component source code

If psychology is the effort to reverse engineer the source code of a human component, & anthropology/sociology the similar effort to reverse engineer the architecture of the larger human modules and systems, then their success can be tested by running simulations using multi-agent systems running the reverse-engineered source code.

These studies today look closely on the actual implementation & execution of the source code (genetic origins, neurological & chemical control of behavior) & its development process (evolution). But, I’m more interested in the source code itself, & its testing in simulations.

I don’t know much on these studies, but like everyone have some empirical data from the reflective vision of myself.

So, I allow myself to contemplate & try imagine the source code.

Much of the source code logic would obviously deal with getting sex. Actually the code has probably evolved not with sex in mind, but the more general goal of preserving & improving genes.
Some bugs in the code are somewhat strange, and can probably be explained only with the full system architecture in mind. I’m talking about the aesthetic, ethical & religious layers of the source code (is it aspect oriented?)
The strangest part of all: why the hack is there source code for reflective vision, e.g., doing reverse engineering of the code???

I wish I found the time to do some reverse engineering & simulations. For now I can only hope to stimulate someone, & maybe fine some collaborators in this effort.