On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Alejandro F. Reimondo
alereimo...@smalltalking.net wrote:
John,
Where else should I look?
In my opinion what is missing in the languages
formulations is sustainability of the system. [*]
In case of formula/abstract based declaration of systems
all
But how can complexity be understood in therms of topology and graph
theory? What about the complexity of a sorting algorithm? Are you sure you
know what topology is?
I'm not talking about time complexity. That's a totally different
issue. Whether an algorithm is O(n) or O(n^3) is not my
Why we want to measure complexity?
So we can characterize and talk about complexity and complex systems.
Complexity can have many meanings, but here I'm taking it to be a
quantifiable property of a system that essentially describes the
density of causal links, chains, loops and their capacity to
Related to the bio perspective on computation, has anyone on this list
explored the ideas of Tibor Ganti's Chemoton Theory in relation to
computation and programming? It's a really interesting example of how
to abstract out the essence of biological systems in a way that
simplifies without losing
On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote:
Thanks for the references to The Chemoton Theory -- I hadn't seen this
before.
But I didn't understand your reference to Bergson -- wasn't he an adherent
of the Elan Vital as a necessary part of what is life? and that also
The root idea behind what I wrote years ago was that we often think that our
way to keep up is by going up to a higher abstraction. Instead, I thought it
might be possible to go sideways. Thus the computer builds us systems from
many smaller pieces that are interchangeable, rather than us
Why all those emerging technologies is just reproducing the same
which were available for desktop apps for years?
Doesn't it rings a bell that it is something fundamentally wrong with
this technology?
Which technology? The technical software one or the human
organization social one?
This could change in the future to be more general purpose. For example,
hardware-based computations using quaternions and octonions. As far as I am
aware, it isn't done today for purely mathematical reasons; no one knows
how. And as far as I'm aware, such a mathematical breakthrough would
The value in quaternions is that they are a compact, direct representation
of a transformation matrix in 3D space, ergo seems ideally suited for 3D
graphics abstractions. Technically, I suppose a software layer could do the
optimization and map it to SIMD coprocessors, but figuring out
please excuse the double reply here:
I have noticed your previous postings about Geometric Algebra and do find it
interesting, but struggle with figuring out how to apply it.
This is really an under explored area. The best applications are
those that deal with inherently spatial tasks. The
I like to think about simplicity as coming up with the right core
abstractions and the optimal way to distribute complexity among them to
support a large set of use cases.
This phrase comes up so much when talking about computational systems
that I wonder if it can be made more tangible.
I think that creating computer systems that support naive or unfounded
intuitions (whether about how computers work or about the world
outside the computer system) actually does a disservice.
I agree, but with a twist: computer systems should help us in founding
useful intuitions, with a
vectors are nice though.
for example, in the book I had, some aspects of the topic were expressed in
terms of a mess of trigonometry which wouldn't really work correctly in 3D.
some of these topics were fairly simple/elegant-looking if expressed with
vectors.
so, linear systems and vectors,
typically, vector multiplication is treated as either dot-product or
cross-product (with cross-product only existing in certain numbers of
dimensions, such as 3 and 7, and sort of in 2).
This is exactly why I said vector algebra considered harmful. The
cross product is actually a shadow of a
I think there two sides:
a) no abstraction at all (assembly code) : complicated since simple things
are huge
b) over-use of abstraction : complicated since hard to see where the real
stuff is going on
Maybe it also has something to do with bottom up vs top down.
I think you need both. One
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Max OrHai max.or...@gmail.com wrote:
My thinking out loud response would be that classical control theory may
not be very well suited to CS-type problems, which often can't even be
approximated by linear systems. Cybernetic feedback control, a la Weiner, is
IIRC
There are also a number of live coding editors that do this for
environments like SuperCollider and Fluxus
http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/
http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/
It has always bugged me that more coding environments don't support
this, but some languages don't lend themselves to
I would encourage those with an interest in this stuff to read Robert Rosen,
and also perhaps Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. While somewhat
heterodox, they're the best I've found in the subject of theoretical biology
so far. Any others?
I'm a fan of Tibor Ganti's approach to
random expression trees mutating.
OK, so less Ray's Tierra then Koza's Genetic Programming? Still too much
structure baked in, I'd say. All the GP stuff I've ever seen has been more
about selection than natural evolution; the modularity, replication and
selection is provided for free by the
I use LPEG ( http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ ) a lot for
writing grammars. I'm not familiar with the ones you mention so I
have no idea how similar they are. I too had a lot of trouble
debugging, so I ended up writing some tools that print out debugging
statements in a human readable
Some things are just expensive. No one has found an acceptable solution.
These are things we should avoid in the infrastructure underneath a personal
computing experience:)
Or figure out how to amortize them over time. I think recent
raytracing apps are a good example of this. You can
most notable thing I did recently (besides some fiddling with getting a new
JIT written), was adding a syntax for block-strings. I used [[ ... ]]
rather than triple-quotes (like in Python), mostly as this syntax is more
friendly to nesting, and is also fairly unlikely to appear by accident,
On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 5:23 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote:
You don't want to use assert because it doesn't get undone during
backtracking. Look at the Alex Warth et al Worlds paper on the Viewpoints
site to see a better way to do this. (This is an outgrowth of the labeled
situations
If things are expanding then they have to get more complex, they encompass
more.
Aside from intuition, what evidence do you have to back this statement
up? I've seen no justification for this statement so far. Biological
systems naturally make use of objects across vastly different scales
to
You have to handle infinity the same way a computer does: make up a
special symbol and let it use different rules.
This is pretty much correct. For any concept of infinity, it should behave
consistently with what it represents in terms of the operators of a given
system. For example, in
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