cellular automata

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pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

With all that fame, funding, and the freedom to do whatever he wanted, Wolfram chose to study the dynamics of cellular automata. In the spirit of good theoretical physics, Wolfram set out to study the behavior of cellular automata in the simplest form possible—using one-dimensional, two-state cellular automata in which each cell is connected only to its two nearest neighbors (figure 10.4a). Wolfram termed these “elementary cellular automata.” He figured that if he couldn’t understand what was going on in these seemingly ultra-simple systems, there was no chance of understanding more complex (e.g., two-dimensional or multistate) cellular automata. Figure 10.4 illustrates one particular elementary cellular automaton rule.

Like complex systems in nature, cellular automata are composed of large numbers of simple components (i.e., cells), with no central controller, each of which communicates with only a small fraction of the other components. Moreover, cellular automata can exhibit very complex behavior that is difficult or impossible to predict from the cell update rule. Cellular automata were invented—like so many other good ideas—by John von Neumann, back in the 1940s, based on a suggestion by his colleague, the mathematician Stan Ulam. (This is a great irony of computer science, since cellular automata are often referred to as non -von-Neumann-style architectures, to contrast with the von-Neumann-style architectures that von Neumann also invented.)

For these reasons, people don’t use Life (or other “universal” cellular automata) to perform real-world computations or even to model natural systems. What we really want from cellular automata is to harness their parallelism and ability to form complex patterns in order to achieve computations in a nontraditional way. The first step is to characterize the kinds of patterns that cellular automata can form. The Four Classes In the early 1980s, Stephen Wolfram, a physicist working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, became fascinated with cellular automata and the patterns they make. Wolfram is one of those legendary former child prodigies whom people like to tell stories about.


pages: 247 words: 43,430

Think Complexity by Allen B. Downey

Benoit Mandelbrot, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, discrete time, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Guggenheim Bilbao, Laplace demon, mandelbrot fractal, Occupy movement, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, seminal paper, sorting algorithm, stochastic process, strong AI, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%

In particular, it focuses on complex systems, which are systems with many interacting components. Complex systems include networks and graphs, cellular automata, agent-based models and swarms, fractals and self-organizing systems, chaotic systems, and cybernetic systems. These terms might not mean much to you at this point. We will get to them soon, but you can get a preview at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems. A New Kind of Science In 2002, Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science, where he presents his and others’ work on cellular automata and describes a scientific approach to the study of computational systems. We’ll get back to Wolfram in Chapter 6, but I want to borrow his title for something a little broader.

Do you get the sense that practicing philosophers think highly of Popper’s work? What Is This a Model Of? Some cellular automata are primarily mathematical artifacts. They are interesting because they are surprising, useful, or pretty, or because they provide tools for creating new mathematics (like the Church-Turing thesis). But it is not clear that they are models of physical systems. If they are, they are highly abstracted, which is to say that they are not very detailed or realistic. For example, some species of cone snail produce a pattern on their shells that resembles the patterns generated by cellular automata (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_snail).

beetles, Falsifiability behavior, Explanatory Models BetterMap, Hashtables BFS, Connected Graphs, Analysis of Graph Algorithms, Dijkstra Big O notation, Order of Growth The Big Sort, Thomas Schelling bin size, Cumulative Distributions bisect module, Analysis of Search Algorithms bisection search, Analysis of Search Algorithms Bishop, Bill, Thomas Schelling boid, Boids bond percolation, Percolation bottom-up, A New Kind of Engineering bounded, Hashtables box-counting dimension, Fractals breadth-first search, Connected Graphs, Analysis of Graph Algorithms, Dijkstra brick wall, Emergence broadcast service, A New Kind of Engineering bubble sort, Analysis of Algorithms busy beaver, Universality C CA, Implementing CAs CADrawer, CADrawer caffeine, Paul Erdős: Peripatetic Mathematician, Speed Freak canonical ensemble, Percolation carrot, Boids causation, Determinism, SOC, Causation, and Prediction, Thomas Schelling Cdf class, Cumulative Distributions CDFs, Cumulative Distributions, Cumulative Distributions plotting, Cumulative Distributions cells, Universality cellular automaton, Cellular Automata centralized system, A New Kind of Engineering chaos, Determinism Church-Turing thesis, Universality circular buffer, FIFO Implementation CircularCA, CADrawer Class 3 behavior, Randomness Class 4 behavior, Universality, Conway’s Conjecture classifying cellular automata, Classifying CAs client-server architecture, A New Kind of Engineering clique, Watts and Strogatz clustering, Watts and Strogatz clustering coefficient, Watts and Strogatz color map, Implementing Life comparing algorithms, Analysis of Algorithms comparison sort, Analysis of Basic Python Operations complementary CDF, Zipf, Pareto, and Power Laws complementary distribution, Continuous Distributions complete graph, What’s a Graph?


pages: 210 words: 62,771

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science by Chris Bernhardt

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Conway's Game of Life, discrete time, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

Quantum Computing since Democritus by Aaranson, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by Deutsch, and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter are all fascinating. Cellular automata We only looked briefly looked at cellular automata, but they have a long and interesting history. They were first studied by Ulam and von Neumann as the first computers were built. Nils Barricelli was at Princeton during the 1950s and used the computer to simulate the interaction of cells. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral gives a good historical description of this work John Conway, in 1970, defined Life involving two-dimensional cellular automata. These were popularized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American.

In this chapter we pause to examine at three of these. We begin with the lambda calculus (λ-calculus) of Alonzo Church, then look at an example of a tag system, finally we consider cellular automata. These views of computation seem very different, but each perspective has its own strengths. The λ-calculus leads to programming languages; tag systems are useful for proving different systems equivalent; cellular automata give pictures of complete computations. After this brief detour we return to Turing’s arguments. Chapter 6 Up until now, machines have been described by diagrams. This chapter starts by showing how finite automata and Turing machines can be described by finite sequences of digits, called encodings.

Tag systems are easy to describe, but despite their simplicity, they are able to do any computation. Their simplicity is often useful in proving the equivalence of computational systems. For example, the proof that cellular automata can do anything that Turing machines can do involves emulating Turing machines by tag systems. The final topic is the study one-dimensional cellular automata. These are interesting because they yield two-dimensional pictures that show the entire computation. From these pictures it is possible to make conjectures about the computational power of the underlying rules. Each of these three topics is independent of the others, and so they can be read in any order.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Wilson notes, ‘no termite need serve as overseer with blueprint in hand’.32 The Michigan group would run some of the first computer simulations of automata in the 1960s, and many off-shoots of automata theory would trace their origins here.33 One of the first in a stream of visionaries to pass through the doors of the group was Tommaso Toffoli, who started a graduate thesis on cellular automata there in 1975. Toffoli was convinced there was a deep link between automata and the physical world. ‘Von Neumann himself devised cellular automata to make a reductionistic point about the plausibility of life being possible in a world with very simple primitives,’ Toffoli explained. ‘But even von Neumann, who was a quantum physicist, neglected completely the connections with physics – that a cellular automata could be a model of fundamental physics.’34 Perhaps, Toffoli conjectured, the complex laws of physics might be rewritten more simply in terms of automata.

Fredkin offered Toffoli a job at his new Information Mechanics Group. Toffoli accepted. The MIT group rapidly became the new nerve centre of automata studies. One of Toffoli’s contributions to the field would be to design, with computer scientist Norman Margolus, a computer specifically to run cellular automata programs faster than even the supercomputers of the time. The Cellular Automata Machine (CAM) would help researchers ride the wave of interest triggered by Conway’s Life. Complex patterns blossomed and faded in front of their eyes as the CAM whizzed through simulations, speeding discoveries they might have missed with their ponderous chuntering lab machines.

Wolfram invented a numbering convention so that all eight rules governing an automaton’s behaviour could be captured in a single number, from 0 to 255. Converting the decimal number to binary gives an eight-digit number that reveals whether the middle cell of each trio will be a ‘1’ or a ‘0’ next. Wolfram’s numbering convention for his elementary cellular automata. Wolfram systematically studied all 256 different sets of rules available to his elementary cellular automata, sorting them carefully into groups like a mathematical zoologist. Some of the rule sets produced very boring results. Rule 255 maps all eight configurations onto live cells, resulting in a dark screen; Rule 0 condemns all cells to death, producing a blank screen.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

However, expressing continuous formulas in this way is an inherent complication and would violate Einstein's dictum to express things "as simply as possible, but no simpler." So the real question is whether we can express the basic relationships that we are aware of in more elegant terms, using cellular-automata algorithms. One test of a new theory of physics is whether it is capable of making verifiable predictions. In at least one important way, that might be a difficult challenge for a cellular automata-based theory because lack of predictability is one of the fundamental features of cellular automata. Wolfram starts by describing the universe as a large network of nodes. The nodes do not exist in "space," but rather space, as we perceive it, is an illusion created by the smooth transition of phenomena through the network of nodes.

I don't have in hand, but I know he's there....What I see is so compelling that it can't be a creature of my imagination.62 In commenting on Fredkin's theory of digital physics, Wright writes, Fredkin ... is talking about an interesting characteristic of some computer programs, including many cellular automata: there is no shortcut to finding out what they will lead to. This, indeed, is a basic difference between the "analytical" approach associated with traditional mathematics, including differential equations, and the "computational" approach associated with algorithms. You can predict a future state of a system susceptible to the analytic approach without figuring out what states it will occupy between now and then, but in the case of many cellular automata, you must go through all the intermediate states to find out what the end will be like: there is no way to know the future except to watch it unfold....Fredkin explains: "There is no way to know the answer to some question any faster than what's going on. "...

It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bas news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places. 63 Fredkin went on to show that although energy is needed for information storage and retrieval, we can arbitrarily reduce the energy required to perform any particular example of information processing. and that this operation has no lower limit.64 That implies that information rather than matter and energy may be regarded as the more fundamental reality.65 I will return to Fredkin's insight regarding the extreme lower limit of energy required for computation and communication in chapter 3, since it pertains to the ultimate power of intelligence in the universe. Wolfram builds his theory primarily on a single, unified insight. The discovery that has so excited Wolfram is a simple rule he calls cellular automata rules 110 and its behavior. (There are some other interesting automata rules, but rule 110 makes the point well enough.) Most of Wolfram's analyses deal with the simplest possible cellular automata, specifically those that involve just a one-dimensional line of cells, two possible colors (black and white), and rules based only on the two immediately adjacent cells. For each transformation, the color of a cell depends only on its own previous color and that of the cell on the left and the cell on the right.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Is there an even simpler system that exhibits a complexity that is easier to analyze? Cellular Automata Another colorful character with a scientifically serious approach to complexity, Stephen Wolfram (figure 13.1) was a wunderkind, the youngest person ever to earn a doctorate in physics from Caltech at the age of 20, and the founder of the Center for Complex Systems Research at the University of Illinois in 1986. Wolfram thought that neural networks were too complex and decided instead to explore cellular automata. The Age of Algorithms 197 Figure 13.1 Stephen Wolfram at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, standing on an algorithmically generated floor.

The Age of Algorithms 197 Figure 13.1 Stephen Wolfram at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, standing on an algorithmically generated floor. Wolfram was a pioneer in complexity theory and showed that even simple programs can give rise to the complexities of the kind we encounter in the world. Courtesy of Stephen Wolfram. Cellular automata typically have only a few discrete values that evolve in time, depending on the states of the other cells. One of the simplest cellular automata is a one-dimensional array of cells, each with value of 0 or 1 (box 13.1). Perhaps the most famous cellular automaton is called the “Game of Life,” which was invented by John Conway, the John von Neumann professor of mathematics at Princeton, in 1968, popularized by Martin Gardner in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American, and is illustrated in figure 13.2.

How common are rules that generate complexity? Wolfram wanted to know the simplest cellular automata rule that could lead to complex behaviors and so he set out to search through all of them. Rules 0 to 29 produced patterns that would always revert to boring behaviors: all the cells would end up in a repeating pattern or some nested fractal pattern. But rule 30 produced unfolding patterns and rule 110 dazzled with continually evolving complex patterns (box 13.1).8 It was eventually proved that rule 110 was capable of universal computation; that is, some of the simplest of all possible cellular automata have the power of a Turing machine that can compute any computable function, so it is in principle as powerful as any computer.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

This line of inquiry became identified with certain formal frameworks, such as cellular automata and genetic programming, which aimed to capture in silico the essential aspects of biological evolution. Various commentators saw these bio-inspired computing frameworks as alternatives to the conventional digital and sequential modes of computing that have long served military aims and capitalist production. Media theorist Tiziana Terranova, for one, saw political promise in biological computing frameworks such as cellular automata. Biological computing of this sort, Terranova argued, is a promising attempt to “hack the social at its most fluid and least stratified, wherever it escapes the constrictions of rigid forms of organization but also of identity and class.”59 In narrating the history of British cybernetics, historian Andrew Pickering was even more optimistic about decentralized and bio-inspired frameworks such as cellular automata, arguing they provide “nonmodern ontology” and sharp counter to ordinary science.

Stefan Helmreich has insightfully explored the imagery of colonization (and the biblical creation stories that often come along with it) in the work of artificial life researchers. See Helmreich, 92–96, 113–22.   13.   Quoted in David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997), 171. The context was Rucker’s call for more to enlist in the study of cellular automata and help realize this “manifest destiny.” See Rudy Rucker, “Cellular Automata,” in Seek! Selected Nonfiction (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1999), 64–84.   14.   Helmreich notes that “genetic difference, coded here [in a computing system called PolyWorld that uses genetic algorithms], is to be handled carefully, with populations kept pure of contamination from others.

Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Cultural Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 130.   60.   Andrew Pickering has argued that frameworks such as cellular automata (and the ways of thinking he associates with them) offer a “nonmodern ontology” and a radically different paradigm from that of modern scientific practice (as exemplified by fields like physics). He argues for the inclusion of courses on decentralized computing and robotics (e.g., cellular automata and robotics as practiced by Rodney Brooks). He writes that he “would be prepared to argue for one such course as a requirement [at universities] for all freshmen, whatever their field.”


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

It looks as if nature is a lover of extreme sports. It adores pushing everything that is precious to the point of breaking up. This deeper link between the emergence of complex behaviour at criticality and recursive computations has also been demonstrated in digital computers using cellular automata, another great invention by John von Neumann. Cellular automata are patterns of 0s and 1s that evolve step-by-step according to a simple set of rules. A new pattern, or ‘generation’, of a cellular automaton emerges after each step. Points on the new patterns will be either 0 or 1 depending on their current value as well as the value of their neighbours.

It is the interpretation of this connection that polarises empiricists and idealists. Perhaps the discovery of Rule 110 is one giant step towards the discovery of a general, mathematical, law for life. There are too many things about cellular automata that make them profoundly similar to physical, living, things. By operating near the edge of chaos, cellular automata evolve with time by responding to their changing environment. They look like a form of ‘artificial life’ existing in the computer that runs the calculations that make and sustain it. Could this artificial life evolve to the point of becoming conscious?

We do not yet know whether this attraction is governed by a general law for biology. However, we have discovered something that seems to point towards such a law: Rule 110, a recursive algorithm that is Turing complete and lifelike – and there might be more.23 This profound correlation between cellular automata and biological phenomena suggests that life is governed by recursive computations, probably similar – or identical – to cellular automata. There is one more special feature of complex computations that is worth noting. They are fractal-like and scale-invariant. This means that they repeat themselves at every scale. From microscopic organisms to weather systems and the formation of galactic clusters nature creates similar patterns of organisation and behaviour.


Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Author(s): Bruce Schneier ISBN: 0471128457 Publication Date: 01/01/96 Search this book: Go! Previous Table of Contents Next ----------- 20.7 Cellular Automata A new and novel idea, studied by Papua Guam [665], is the use of cellular automata in public-key cryptosystems. This system is still far too new and has not been studied extensively, but a preliminary examination suggests that it may have a cryptographic weakness similar to one seen in other cases [562]. Still, this is a promising area of research. Cellular automata have the property that, even if they are invertible, it is impossible to calculate the predecessor of an arbitrary state by reversing the rule for finding the successor.

Then, improve the key scheduling by adding constants to the round keys to remove the bias. He’s not going to do it; he designed 3-Way instead (see Section 14.5). 13.11 CA-1.1 CA is a block cipher built on cellular automata, designed by Howard Gutowitz [677, 678, 679]. It encrypts plaintext in 384-bit blocks and has a 1088-bit key (it’s really two keys, a 1024-bit key and a 64-bit key). Because of the nature of cellular automata, the algorithm is most efficient when implemented in massively parallel integrated circuits. CA-1.1 uses both reversible and irreversible cellular automaton rules. Under a reversible rule, each state of the lattice comes from a unique predecessor state, while under an irreversible rule, each state can have many predecessor states.

Ivan Damgård designed a one-way hash function based on the knapsack problem (see Section 19.2) [414]; it can be broken in about 232 operations [290, 1232, 787]. Steve Wolfram’s cellular automata [1608] have been proposed as a basis for one-way hash functions. An early implementation [414] is insecure [1052, 404]. Another one-way hash function, Cellhash [384,404], and an improved version, Subhash [384,402, 405], are based on cellular automata; both are designed for hardware. Boognish mixes the design principles of Cellhash with those of MD4 [402, 407]. StepRightUp can be implemented as a hash function as well [402].


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

Data were handled the way ships are moved through locks in a canal. “We enjoyed some interesting speculative discussions with von Neumann at this time about information propagation and switching among hypothetical arrays of cells,” remembers Bigelow, “and I believe that some germs of his later cellular automata studies may have originated here.”20 “We did not move information from one place to another except in a positive way,” emphasizes James Pomerene. “That is used absolutely universally now. I think we were the first to do it. And I regret that we didn’t patent it.” Patentable inventions were being generated right and left.

“My incredible luck,” he bragged to von Neumann from Los Alamos in February 1952, “was evident in poker (8 successive + earnings) this year.”70 Four of the twentieth century’s most imaginative ideas for leveraging our intelligence—the Monte Carlo method, the Teller-Ulam invention, self-reproducing cellular automata, and nuclear pulse propulsion—originated with help from Stan. Three of the four proved to be wildly successful, and the fourth was abandoned before it had a chance. Monte Carlo was the realization, through digital computing, of what Maxwell could only imagine: a way to actually follow the behavior of a physical system at its elemental levels, as “if our faculties and instruments were so sharpened that we could detect and lay hold of each molecule and trace it through all its course.”71 The Teller-Ulam invention invoked a form of Maxwell’s demon to heat a compartment to a temperature hotter than the sun by letting a burst of radiation in, and then, for an equilibrium-defying instant, not letting radiation out.

Monte Carlo was the realization, through digital computing, of what Maxwell could only imagine: a way to actually follow the behavior of a physical system at its elemental levels, as “if our faculties and instruments were so sharpened that we could detect and lay hold of each molecule and trace it through all its course.”71 The Teller-Ulam invention invoked a form of Maxwell’s demon to heat a compartment to a temperature hotter than the sun by letting a burst of radiation in, and then, for an equilibrium-defying instant, not letting radiation out. Ulam’s self-reproducing cellular automata—patterns of information persisting across time—evolve by letting order in but not letting order out. When Nicholas Metropolis and Stanley Frankel began coding the first bomb calculations for the ENIAC, there was room for only a one-dimensional universe—represented by a single line, in our universe, extending outward from the center of the bomb.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Inspired by Turing’s papers on computation, von Neumann also came up with the modern conception of Babbage’s ‘store’ and ‘mill’ computer structure, in what is now called the ‘von Neumann architecture’, the architecture at the heart of almost all modern computers. Amongst this world-changing productivity, von Neumann also speculated about how computer programs, like genetic organisms, might be able to self-replicate. His ‘cellular automata’ theory closely parallels the actual replication methods of biological DNA, despite the fact that von Neumann’s work was done in advance of the actual structure of DNA being discovered by Watson and Crick in 1953.7 At the same time, statistician George Box suggested ‘evolutionary operations’8 as a methodology for optimizing industrial processes in the late 1950s, though he never implemented the procedure as a computer algorithm, and there are a number of other scientists who also struck close to the ideas that would eventually emerge as evolutionary computation.

So the evolutionary metaphor for computational algorithms was a firmly set context from the very start of computation, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s that the foundational idea of evolutionary algorithms really began to gain traction in various research centres around the world.9 In Germany, a group led by Ingo Rechenberg developed a kind of optimization algorithm called ‘evolutionsstrategies’.10 On the West Coast of the US, a group led by Lawrence Fogel developed another called ‘evolutionary programming’.11 And, at the University of Michigan, John Holland pioneered another form called ‘genetic algorithms’.12 Of all of these researchers, it is John Holland who has the most direct connection with Von Neumann’s early theories, since his PhD supervisor was Arthur Burks,13 who worked on the ENIAC engineering team and extended von Neumann’s work on ‘cellular automata’.14 Furthermore, Holland was granted the first PhD in computer science and went on to teach at the University of Michigan where he advised many students on PhDs that involved evolutionary computation, including my own PhD supervisor, David Goldberg. Goldberg wrote the first textbook on genetic algorithms while I was a part of his research group in 1989.

These models and algorithms seem to imply that, to be effective, evolution requires a balance between the discipline of using the best-known idea and the chaos of mixing ideas up. Other scientific studies also show that striking a precise balance between the two may be the vital characteristic of living systems. The term edge of chaos was first used by the SFI researchers Doyne Farmer and Chris Langton, while looking at cellular automata models, simplified algorithms invented by John von Neumann to represent self-replicating biology.4 While experimenting with parameters that controlled these programs, they observed that for some parameter settings, the algorithms would settle into uninteresting equilibria, essentially static states.


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Wolfram proposes a way to resolve the dilemma. His book A New Kind of Science (2002) presents a comprehensive view of the idea of cellular automata and their role in every facet of our lives. A cellular automaton is a mechanism in which the value of information cells is continually recomputed as a function of the cells near it. John von Neumann created a theoretical self-replicating machine called a universal constructor that was perhaps the first cellular automaton. Dr. Wolfram illustrates his thesis with the simplest possible cellular automata, a group of cells in a one-dimensional line. At each point in time, each cell can have one of two values: black or white.

If there is a satellite orbiting Earth, we can predict where it will be five years from now without having to run through each moment of a simulated process by using the relevant laws of gravity and solve where it will be at points in time far in the future. But the future state of class IV cellular automata cannot be predicted without simulating every step along the way. If the universe is a giant cellular automaton, as Dr. Wolfram postulates, there would be no computer big enough—since every computer would be a subset of the universe—that could run such a simulation. Therefore the future state of the universe is completely unknowable even though it is deterministic.

., 113 busy beaver problem, 207 Butler, Samuel, 62, 199–200, 224, 248–49 Byron, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 190, 191 California, University of, at Berkeley, 88 “CALO” project, 162 carbon atoms, information structures based on, 2 Carroll, Lewis, 109 cells, replacement of, 245, 246 cellular automata, 236–39 cerebellum, 7, 77, 103–4 uniform structure of, 103 cerebral cortex, 7–8 see also neocortex Chalmers, David, 201–2, 218, 241 “chatbots,” 161 chemistry, 37 chess, AI systems and, 6, 38–39, 165–66, 257 chimpanzees: language and, 3, 41 tool use by, 41 “Chinese room” thought experiment, 170, 274–75 Chomsky, Noam, 56, 158 Church, Alonzo, 186 Church-Turing thesis, 186 civil rights, 278 cloud computing, 116–17, 123, 246, 279–80 cochlea, 96, 97, 135, 138 cochlear implants, 243 Cockburn, David, 214 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 129 Colossus, 187, 188 “common sense,” 40 communication, reliability of, 182–85, 190 communication technology, LOAR and, 253, 254 compatibilism, 234 complexity, 198, 233 of human brain, 8–9, 181, 272 modeling and, 37–38 true vs. apparent, 10–11 computation: price/performance of, 4–5, 250–51, 257, 257, 267–68, 301n–3n thinking compared with to, 26–27 universality of, 26, 181–82, 185, 188, 192, 207 Computer and the Brain, The (von Neumann), 191 computers: brain emulated by, see brain, human, computer emulation of consciousness and, 209–11, 213–15, 223 intelligent algorithms employed by, 6–7 knowledge base expanded by, 4, 246, 247 logic gates in, 185 memory in, 185, 259, 260, 268, 301n–3n, 306n–7n reliability of communication by, 182–85, 190 see also neocortex, digital “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing), 191 conditionals, 65, 69, 153, 189, 190 confabulation, 70, 217, 227, 228, 229 connectionism, 133, 191 “connectome,” 262 consciousness, 11, 199–209 cerebral hemispheres and, 226–29 computers and, 209–11, 213–15, 223, 233 Descartes on, 221–22 dualist views of, 202–3 Eastern vs.


pages: 238 words: 46

When Things Start to Think by Neil A. Gershenfeld

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Bretton Woods, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, disinformation, Dynabook, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information security, invention of movable type, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, means of production, new economy, Nick Leeson, packet switching, RFID, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, the medium is the message, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, world market for maybe five computers

Like the checkers on a checkerboard, tokens that each represent a collection of molecules get moved among sites based on how the neighboring sites are occupied. This idea has come to be known as Cellular Automata (CAs). From the 1970s onward, the group of Ed Fredkin, Tomaso Toffoli, and Norm Margolus at MIT started to make special-purpose computers designed for CAs. Because these machines entirely dispense with approximations of continuous functions, they can be much simpler and faster. And because a Turing machine can be described this way, a CA can do anything that can be done with a conventional computer. A cellular automata model of the universe is no less fundamental than one based on calculus. It's a much more natural description if a computer instead of a pencil is used to work with the model.

Index adding machine, Pascal's, 131-32 Adelson, Ted, 180-81 affective states, computer's perception of, 53-54 agents, 107, 109, 116-17 airbag, smart, 170-71, 180 analog circuits, 165, 166 Analytical Engine, 125 Any Thing project, 70, 71, 73 Apple Macintosh, 139 Argonne National Laboratory, 158 ARPANET, 79 artificial intelligence, 108, 128, 129-30, 135, 201 sensory perception and, 135, 201 assembly line, 180 AT&T, 158, 203 autonomy and wearable computers, 57-58 Babbage, Charles, 124-27, 132 Barings Bank, 77, 86 bassoon, 29-32 Begin Again Again, 34 Bell Labs, 36, 162, 174 Bender, Walter, 202-3 Benioff, Paul, 158 Bennett, Charles, 159, 176, 177 Benton, Steve, 14 2 Bill of Rights, 98-99 Bill of Things' Rights, 104 Bill of Things Users' Rights, 102 Birnbaum, Joel, 52 Bitnet, 89 "bit" of information, 176 "blessing of dimensionality," 164-65 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 175 books, printed, 13-25 competing technologies, 10, 13-25 dimensions of, 20 future of computing, lesson to be derived for, 14 Gutenberg and movable metal type, 18-19 as historical artifacts, 23-24 libraries and electronic book, 20-23 lighting for reading, 15 papal bull to require certification of, 96 paper for, 15 specifications of, 13-14 state of book business, 13 universal book, 18-20 Borden, David, 30-31 218 +INDEX Boyden, Edward, 196, 197 brain, 212 brain, human, 135, 163-64 Brain Opera, 206-7 Bretton Woods Agreement, 79 Bunka Fashion College, 55 Bush, Vannevar, 139,171-74,180 Buxton, Bill, 140 buzz words, technology, 107-21 CAD software, 73 calculus, 131, 132 Caltech, 158 carbonless copy paper, 15-16 card catalogs, 20-22 Carnegie Mellon, 129 CD-ROM, 10 as competitor of printed book, 13 cello: comparison of computer mouse to violin bow, 142-43 critical reaction to digital cello, 37-38 designing a smart, 27-44, 143-44, 187 limits of classic, 33, 37 Cellular Automata (CAs), 132-33 Census Bureau, 78 central planning, 88-89 chaos theory, 109, 112-16 chess-playing computer programs, 128-30, 134-35 children: learning methods of, 137-38 LOGO programming language, 138, 147 China, Internet access in, 99 Chuang, Isaac, 160-61 Chung, joe, 34 Citron, Robert, 78 Clarke, Arthur C., 51 Clausius, Rudolf, 175 clocks, 104 clothing and wearable computers, 50, 52,55-56,61,102-3,179 coffeemaker, intelligent, 201 communications: imposing on our lives, 95, 100-2 performance limit of a channel of, 176 privacy issues and, 100-1 regulation of, 99-100 see also specific forms of communication, e.g. e-mail; telephones Communications Act of 1934, 99 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), 208 compact disc players, 4 Compumachine, 67 computer chips: entropy and, 177 future uses of, 152 lowering the cost of, 152-56 computers: affective states and, 53-54 Babbage's contribution in developing, 124-25, 132 battle of operating systems, 146 chips, see computer chips cost of, 4, 103 desktop, 5 difficulty using, 4, 7, 103 division of industry into software and hardware, 7 ease of use, 4, 7, 103 educational use of, 201 expectations from, 4 inability to anticipate your needs, 7-8 interfaces, see interfaces, computer irritation with, 199-200 laptop, see laptop computers mainframes, see mainframes minicomputers, 52, 138 Moore's law, 155-57, 163 music and, see musiC and computers parallel, 68, 157 PCs, see personal computers (PCs) peripherals, 52-53 INDEX+ pnvacy issue and, 56-57, 100-1 productivity and, 7 pyramid of information technology, 151 quantum, 157-63, 177 software, see software speed of, 7 standards, 88-90, 126 supercomputers, 151, 177, 199 unobtrusive computing, 44, 200, 211 upgrades, 98 wearable, see wearable computers "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," 128, 135 consciousness, quantum mechanics to describe human, 130-31 Constitution, U.S., 98-99 Copernicus, 113-14 copyrights, 181 Creapole, 55 credit cards: electronic commerce and, 80-81 privacy and use of, 100-1 reflective holograms on, 142 cryptography, 80-81, 156, 207-8 "curse of dimensionality," 164 Daiwa Bank, 77, 86 Darwin, Charles, 125 Data Glove, 49 "Deep Blue," 129-30 "Deep Thought," 129 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 79, 129 derivative~ 78, 85-86 Deutsch, David, 158 Deutsche Telekom, 203 developing countries, 210-11 Dickinson, Becton, 204 Difference Engine, 124-25, 132 digital evolution, 10 digital money, see smart money digital representation, effect of time and use on, 5-6 219 Digital Revolution: disturbance resulting from, 10 promise and reality of, 3, 5 disabled, wearable computers and, 58 discovery, the business of, 169-84 Disney, 203 distance learning, 19 3 distribution of wealth, 78 division of labor between people and machines, 8 DNA molecules, 157 Domus, 55 Doom (computer game), 89 Dynabook, 138 e-broidery, 55 Economist, 115 economy, electronic, 79 education: classroom, 188, 197 departmental organization of, 190-91 distance learning, 193 just-in-time, 192 local learning, 193 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, 187-97 use of computers for, 201 Einstein's theory of relativity, 178 electronic books, 15-25, 38, 72 electronic commerce, 80-81, 152, 156 cryptography and, 80-81 paying-as-you-go, 82 electronic funds transfers, 80 electronic ink, 16, 17, 200 universal book and, 18-20 e-mail, 101-2, 104-6 encryption, 80-81 Engelhart, Doug, 139 English Bill of Rights, 98 entanglement, 159 entropy, 175, 176, 177, 188-90 "Entschedidungsproblem," 127 Equifax, 101 220 + Ernst, Richard R.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

Combined with the monadic property of being able to perceive the states of all other monads, this comes close to being a mathematically formal definition of cellular automata, a branch of mathematics generally agreed to have been invented by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann during the 1940s as an outgrowth of work at Los Alamos. The impressive capabilities of such systems have, in subsequent decades, drawn the attention of many luminaries from the worlds of mathematics and physics, some of whom have proposed that the physical universe might, in fact, consist of cellular automata carrying out a calculation—a hypothesis known as Digital Physics, or It from Bit. 4.

During Leibniz’s era, the only person who had thought seriously about such machines was Leibniz himself; building on earlier work by Blaise Pascal, he designed, and caused to be built, a mechanical computer, and envisioned coupling it to a formal logical system called the Characteristica Universalis. He invented binary arithmetic, and, according to no less an authority than Norbert Wiener, pioneered the idea of feedback. 3. In particular, the monads’ production rule scheme clearly presages the modern concept of cellular automata. Quoting from Mercer’s work: “The Production Rule of F is a rule for the continuous production of the discrete states of F so that it instructs F about exactly what to think at every moment of F’s existence. Following Leibniz’s suggestion, if F exists from t1 to tn and has a different thought at each moment of its existence, then at every moment, there will be an instruction about what to think next.

He’s making the argument that a lot of science doesn’t necessarily fit that mold: biological science, psychology. There are plenty of cases you can point to, even in mathematics, where being able to break things down into its smallest components doesn’t really get you anywhere. It doesn’t give you an explanation that’s really worth anything. If you look at cellular automata, for example: Sure, each automaton can be explained as a unit, but that’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting is the really complicated emergent behaviors that you can get out of a whole bunch of these things acting at once. There’s really no grid to cross that gap. Yet we’re often led to believe that these things are better understood than they are.


pages: 492 words: 118,882

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

Emergence relates to the dynamic nature of interactions between components in a system (Gallegati and Kirman, 2012). The dynamic character of emergent phenomena is not a property of a pre-established, given whole - but arises and becomes apparent as a complex system evolves over time (Goldstein, 1999). Complexity in a system can arise, after all, from simple rules - this is seen in examples such as cellular automata, neural networks and genetic algorithms (Refer Notes). This is because of the non-linearity of the systems relations. As the system becomes complex, emergence manifests itself in the form of self- organization. In other words, no external forces are needed for the system to take on certain properties and traits and these systemic properties arise from far-from-equilibrium conditions (Morçöl, 2008).

Vector autoregression (VAR) models employ a small number of estimated equations to summarize the dynamic behaviour of the entire macroeconomy, with few restrictions from economic theory beyond the choice of variables to include in the model. Sims is the original proponent of this type of model. Cellular automata (CA) : “Automaton” (plural: “automata") is a technical term used in computer science and mathematics for a hypothetical machine that changes its internal state based on inputs and its previous state. (Sayama, 2015). A cellular automaton consists of a regular grid of cells, each in one of a finite number of states, such as on and off.

Buiter The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), Guy Standing Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (2016), Andy Stern Index A Aadhaar program Agent Based Computational Economics (ABCE) models complexity economists developments El Farol problem and minority games Kim-Markowitz Portfolio Insurers Model Santa Fe artificial stock market model Agent based modelling (ABM) aggregate behavioural trends axiomatisation, linearization and generalization black-boxing bottom-up approach challenge computational modelling paradigm conceptualizing, individual agents EBM enacting agent interaction environmental factors environment creation individual agent parameters and modelling decisions simulation designing specifying agent behaviour Alaska Anti-Money Laundering (AML) ARPANet Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) Atlantic model Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Autor-Levy-Murnane (ALM) B Bandits’ Club BankID system Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Bitnation Blockchain ARPANet break down points decentralized communication emails fiat currency functions Jiggery Pokery accounts malware protocols Satoshi skeleton keys smart contract TCP/IP protocol technological and financial innovation trade finance Blockchain-based regulatory framework (BRF) BlockVerify C Capitalism ALM hypotheses and SBTC Blockchain and CoCo canonical model cashlessenvironment See(Multiple currencies) categories classification definition of de-skilling process economic hypothesis education and training levels EMN fiat currency CBDC commercial banks debt-based money digital cash digital monetary framework fractional banking system framework ideas and methods non-bank private sector sovereign digital currency transition fiscal policy cashless environment central bank concept of control spending definition of exogenous and endogenous function fractional banking system Kelton, Stephanie near-zero interest rates policy instrument QE and QQE tendency ultra-low inflation helicopter drops business insider ceteris paribus Chatbots Chicago Plan comparative charts fractional banking keywords technology UBI higher-skilled workers ICT technology industry categories Jiggery Pokery accounts advantages bias information Blockchain CFTC digital environment Enron scandal limitations private/self-regulation public function regulatory framework tech-led firms lending and payments CAMELS evaluation consumers and SMEs cryptographic laws fundamental limitations governments ILP KYB process lending sector mobile banking payments industry regulatory pressures rehypothecation ripple protocol sectors share leveraging effect technology marketing money cashless system crime and taxation economy IRS money Seigniorage tax evasion markets and regulation market structure multiple currency mechanisms occupational categories ONET database policies economic landscape financialization monetary and fiscal policy money creation methods The Chicago Plan transformation probabilities regulation routine and non-routine routinization hypothesis Sarbanes-Oxley Act SBTC scalability issue skill-biased employment skills and technological advancement skills downgrading process trades See(Trade finance) UBI Alaska deployment Mincome, Canada Namibia Cashless system Cellular automata (CA) Central bank digital currency (CBDC) Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Chicago Plan Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) Complexity economics agent challenges consequential decisions deterministic and axiomatized models dynamics education emergence exogenous and endogenous changes feedback loops information affects agents macroeconoic movements network science non-linearity path dependence power laws self-adapting individual agents technology andinvention See(Technology and invention) Walrasian approach Computing Congressional Research Service (CRS) Constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) Contingent convertible (CoCo) Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) CredyCo Cryptid Cryptographic law Currency mechanisms Current Account Switching System (CASS) D Data analysis techniques Debt and money broad and base money China’s productivity credit economic pressures export-led growth fractional banking See also((Fractional Reserve banking) GDP growth households junk bonds long-lasting effects private and public sectors problems pubilc and private level reaganomics real estate industry ripple effects security and ownership societal level UK DigID Digital trade documents (DOCS) Dodd-Frank Act Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model E EBM SeeEquation based modelling (EBM) Economic entropy vs. economic equilibrium assemblages and adaptations complexity economics complexity theory DSGE based models EMH human uncertainty principle’ LHC machine-like system operating neuroscience findings reflexivity RET risk assessment scientific method technology and economy Economic flexibility Efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) eID system Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) Elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) EMH SeeEfficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) Equation based modelling (EBM) Equilibrium business-cycle models Equilibrium economic models contract theory contact incompleteness efficiency wages explicit contracts implicit contracts intellectual framework labor market flexibility menu cost risk sharing DSGE models Federal Reserve system implicit contracts macroeconomic models of business cycle NK models non-optimizing households principles RBC models RET ‘rigidity’ of wage and price change SIGE steady state equilibrium, economy structure Taylor rule FRB/US model Keynesian macroeconomic theory RBC models Romer’s analysis tests statistical models Estonian government European Migration Network (EMN) Exogenous and endogenous function Explicit contracts F Feedback loop Fiat currency CBDC commercial banks debt-based money digital cash digital monetary framework framework ideas and methods non-bank private sector sovereign digital currency transition Financialization de facto definition of eastern economic association enemy of my enemy is my friend FT slogans Palley, Thomas I.


pages: 489 words: 148,885

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens. "More!" By the time they finish, he's aching, and she shows him how to use the bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying. While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the Communist Central Planning problem using a network of interlocking unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music industry, and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars.

Each of these companies – and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful. Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles.

He snarls irritably: "Give me some space!" He coughs, a threatening noise from the back of his wattled throat, "Searching the sail's memory now." The back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as visions of darkness in motion – the cold, dead attendants of an aborted sun.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

The Austrian understanding of the superiority of free markets over central planning is sound. Still, the Austrian school needs updating using new science and twenty-first-century technology. Christopher Columbus was the greatest dead-reckoning navigator ever. Yet no one disputes he would use GPS today. If Friedrich Hayek were alive, he would use new instruments, network theory, and cellular automata to refine his insights. His followers should do no less. Neo-Keynesian models are the reigning creed. Interestingly, they have little to do with John Maynard Keynes. He was above all a pragmatist; those who follow in his name are anything but. Keynes advocated for gold in 1914, counseled for a higher gold price in 1925, opposed gold in 1931, and offered a modified gold standard in 1944.

Predicting market crashes is like predicting earthquakes. One may be certain the event will occur, and can estimate its magnitude, yet one will never know exactly when. Laboratory science, in particular sand pile experiments (similar to a snowflake-avalanche dynamic) and computer simulations using cellular automata, reveal degree distributions of extreme events. Still, a million experiments will not let you predict which particular grain of sand causes a certain sand pile to collapse. Systemic instability, not an individual catalyst, destroys your wealth. Anxious investors should not focus on snowflakes, they should stay alert for an avalanche.

Schumpeter eschewed Keynesian models because of the artifice in holding most variables constant while monotonically isolating one as the “cause” of the phenomena under study. Today a twenty-first-century mélange of a Schumpeterian long view and massive computing power—unavailable to Schumpeter—allows for a rapid expansion of recursive functions and simulation of human action via cellular automata. Schumpeter would surely look benignly on such efforts as a reasonable simulacrum of his deep historical processes. Society stands on Schumpeter’s shoulders with new tools of complexity theory to look over a ridgeline at the rise of socialism and fascism, one and the same. The New Praetorians In ancient Rome, the Praetorian Guard were an elite military unit that provided personal protection to emperors.


Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes by Richard C. Francis

agricultural Revolution, autism spectrum disorder, cellular automata, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, meta-analysis, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

Therefore, it would be more apt to say that the genes are programmed by cellular interactions. There are other, very minimalist senses of “program” that have become popular in the fields of artificial intelligence and artificial life.26 On this minimalist notion of program, a program provides a few basic rules, and the robots or cellular automata take it from there through interactions with their neighbors and the rest of their environment. But the idea of a central director is gone. This minimalist sense of program looks a lot like epigenesis. So the preformationist notion of an epigenetic (or genetic) program is either false or too squishy to be distinguished from epigenesis.

Collas (2010) is typical in this regard, in the context of cellular differentiation. 26. For the minimalist notion of programming in situated robotics, see Hendriks-Jansen (1996). Wolfram (2002) is an expanded, semi-mystical view of the significance of a minimalist program, motivated by Wolfram’s research on cellular automata. 27. Passier and Mummery (2003). 28. Moreover, there are subtle differences between embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced embryonic stem cells (iPSCs) that are clinically relevant. For example, ESCs have proved much more efficient in promoting neuronal redifferentiation than iPSCs have (Tokumoto, Ogawa, et al. 2010). 29.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Von Neumann’s constructors existed in an entirely virtual universe of possibility. At the time he imagined them, there wasn’t enough computing power in the world to simulate their behavior, let alone physically realize them as anything other than painstakingly inked grids of pen on paper, so-called cellular automata.2 But with its implication of a continuously and geometrically expanding productivity, his vision of a universal constructor inspired generations of engineers. Sometime around the turn of the twenty-first century, one of them—a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Leeds named Adrian Bowyer, troubled by the thought of a world riven by material scarcity—finally took von Neumann at his word.

Casey Newton, “Seattle dive bar becomes first to ban Google Glass,” CNET, March 8, 2013. 23.Dan Wasserman, “Google Glass Rolls Out Diane von Furstenberg frames,” Mashable, June 23, 2014. 4Digital fabrication 1.John Von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966, cba.mit.edu/events/03.11.ASE/docs/VonNeumann.pdf. 2.You may be familiar with cellular automata from John Conway’s 1970 Game of Life, certainly the best-known instance of the class. See Bitstorm.org, “John Conway’s Game of Life,” undated, bitstorm.org. 3.Adrian Bowyer, “Wealth Without Money: The Background to the Bath Replicating Rapid Prototyper Project,” February 2, 2004, reprap.org/wiki/Wealth_Without_Money; RepRap Project, “Cost Reduction,” December 30, 2014, reprap.org/wiki/Cost_Reduction.

., 103 Brown, Joshua, 223–4, 254 Brown, Michael, 231 “buddy punching,” 198 bullshit jobs, 203, 205 Bui, Quoctrung, 192–3 bushido, 266–7 Bushido Project, the, 266 Business Microscope, 197 Buterin, Vitalik, 147–50, 152, 154, 162–4, 167, 169, 172, 175, 177, 179, 303, 311 Byzantium, 69 CAD-Coin, 157 Californian Ideology, the, 283 Carmack, John, 82 cartography, 20 cats, 214 CCTV, 49–50, 54, 241 cellular automata, 86 Champs-Élysées, 1 Chaum, David, 121 Checkpoint Charlie, 70 chess, 263 Chevrolet Camaro, 216–18 Chicago Police Department, 230–1 China, 87, 102, 190, 194, 278–9, 286, 290, 306 Churchill, Winston, 28 circular economy, 92, 96, 99, 288 Ciutat Meridiana, Barcelona neighborhood, 109 climax community, 289 Cockney rhyming slang, 311 code library, 274–5 commons, the, 171–3 computer numerical control, CNC milling, 86, 93, 95, 97, 108, 110, 273 Container Store, 196 cooperatives, 171 cooperative motility, 80 Copenhagen, 31, 51 Cornell Law School, 151 Cortana virtual assistant, 39 Costco, 45 cozy catastrophe, 291 cradle-to-cradle industrial ecosystem.


pages: 634 words: 185,116

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

As a general rule, the more symmetries you have, the simpler things become. 110 This whole checkerboard-worlds idea sometimes goes by the name of cellular automata. A cellular automaton is just some discrete grid that follows a rule for determining the next row from the state of the previous row. They were first investigated in the 1960s, by John von Neumann, who is also the guy who figured out how entropy works in quantum mechanics. Cellular automata are fascinating for many reasons having little to do with the arrow of time; they can exhibit great complexity and can function as universal computers. See Poundstone (1984) or Shalizi (2009). Not only are we disrespecting cellular automata by pulling them out only to illustrate a few simple features of time reversal and information conservation, but we are also not speaking the usual language of cellular-automaton cognoscenti.

bosons bouncing-universe cosmology boundary conditions and cause and effect described and initial conditions of the universe and irreversibility and Maxwell’s Demon and recurrence theorem and time symmetry Bousso, Raphael Brahe, Tycho branes Brillouinéon brown dwarfs Brownian motion Bruno, Giordano bubbles of vacuum Buddhism Bureau of Longitude Callender, Craig Callisto caloric Calvin, John Calvino, Italo Carnot, Lazare Carnot, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carrey, Jim Carroll, Lewis cause and effect celestial mechanics cellular automata CERN C-field Chandrasekhar Limit chaotic dynamics The Character of Physical Law (Feynman) charge charge conjugation checkerboard world exercise and arrow of time background of and conservation of information and Hawking radiation and holographic principle and information loss and interaction effects and irreversibility and Principle of Indifference and symmetry and testing hypotheses chemistry Chen, Jennifer choice Chronology Protection Conjecture circles in time.


pages: 244 words: 73,966

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

active measures, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, dark matter, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum entanglement, retail therapy, scientific worldview, sugar pill, systems thinking, the scientific method

(Coyne 2014b). 13 Seth Lloyd writes: ‘Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.’ (Lloyd 2006, p. 176). Perhaps the most evocative demonstrations of how simple rules can generate unfathomable complexity come from computational systems called cellular automata (Ilachinski 2001). 14 Lehar writes: ‘Beyond the farthest things you can perceive in all directions, i.e. above the dome of the sky, and below the solid earth under your feet, or beyond the walls and ceiling of the room you see around you, is located the inner surface of your true physical skull, beyond which is an unimaginably immense external world of which the world you see around you is merely a miniature internal replica.’

Available from: http://richannel.org/the-magic-of-consciousness [Accessed 19 December 2014]. Huxley, A. (2009). The Perennial Philosophy. New York, NY: HarperPerennial. Huxley, A. (2011). The Doors of Perception: includes Heaven & Hell. London, UK: Thinking Ink Limited. Ilachinski, A. (2001). Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe. Singapore: World Scientific. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Palo Alto, CA: Association for Transpersonal Psychology. Jung, C. G. (1969). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, Second Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1972).


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

“universal constructor”: Von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing, 271. As Christopher Langton noted, universal construction is not necessary for self-replication. Von Neumann built one because he was interested in sufficient conditions for self-replication, not necessary ones. Christopher G. Langton, “Self-Reproduction in Cellular Automata,” Physica D 10 (1984): 135–44. “cellular automaton”: On cellular automata, see von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing. two hundred thousand cells: John von Neumann never finished his automaton. The most complete “organ” of his self-replicator that he produced was the Memory Control (MC) unit. The MC and the linear array (L) that contains the “blueprint” make up the “tape unit” (MC + L); the entire UC is the tape unit plus a constructing unit (CU): UC = CU + (MC + L).

Philosophers have long noted: Gideon Yaffe, Manifest Activity: Thomas Reid’s Theory of Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 79. self-replicating entities: The internal blueprint need not be fixed, but can be composed dynamically through self-inspection. See, e.g., Jesús Ibáñez et al., “Self-Inspection Based Reproduction in Cellular Automata,” Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 929 (1995): 564–76. In cases of self-inspecting self-replicators, the self-replicator “contains” a blueprint in the trivial sense that it is the blueprint. Sarah Gordon: Email correspondence between Scott Shapiro and Sarah Gordon, June 2021, and telephone interview, June 7, 2021.


pages: 315 words: 93,628

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

However, was it truly inevitable that mathematics would start with these particular disciplines? Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram argued in his massive book A New Kind of Science that this was not necessarily the case. In particular, Wolfram showed how starting from simple sets of rules that act as short computer programs (known as cellular automata), one could develop a very different type of mathematics. These cellular automata could be used (in principle, at least) as the basic tools for modeling natural phenomena, instead of the differential equations that have dominated science for three centuries. What was it, then, that drove the ancient civilizations toward discovering and inventing our special “brand” of mathematics?


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

The following is an edited transcript from a live interview with him conducted in December 2015. Over nearly four decades, Stephen Wolfram has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking and responsible for many innovations in science, technology, and business. His 1982 paper “Cellular Automata as Simple Self-Organizing Systems,” written at the age of twenty-three, was the first of numerous significant scientific contributions aimed at understanding the origins of complexity in nature. It was around this time that Stephen briefly came into my life. I had established The Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals who met in New York City to present their work before peers in other disciplines.

That’s why history means something. If we could get to the endpoint without going through the steps, history would be, in some sense, pointless. So it’s not the case that we’re intelligent and everything else in the world is not. There’s no enormous abstract difference between us and the clouds or us and the cellular automata. We cannot say that this brainlike neural network is qualitatively different from this cellular-automaton system. The difference is a detailed difference. This brainlike neural network was produced by the long history of civilization, whereas the cellular automaton was created by my computer in the last microsecond.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory. Trans. Lynn Solotaroff. New York: Basic Books. Lynch, Peter. 2008. “The Origins of Computer Weather Prediction and Climate Modeling.” Journal of Computational Physics 227: 3431–44. doi: 10.1016/j.jcp.2007.02.034. Maerivoet, Sven, and Bart De Moor. 2005. “Cellular Automata Models of Road Traffic.” Physics Report 419, no. 1: 1–64. doi: 10.1016/j.physrep.2005.08.005. Majdandzic, Antonio, Boris Podobnik, Sergey V. Buldyrev, Dror Y. Kenett, Shlomo Havlin, and H. Eugene Stanley. 2014. “Spontaneous Recovery in Dynamical Networks.” Nature Physics 10, no. 1: 34–38. doi: 10.1038/nphys2819.

, 118–119, 174 Calvinism, 58 Cambridge University Press, 52 cascades: and the financial crisis of 2008, 159–160 (see also financial crisis of 2008); fire sales and, 140; liquidity during, 128, 152 (see also liquidity); margin calls during, 14; occurrence of, 159; portfolio insurance and, 146–147; cash providers, 136 CDOs, 161, 164 cellular automata, 37, 95, 97–98 chaos, 29; limits to knowledge and, 51 chatbot. See MGonz Chernobyl, nuclear accident of, 112 Church, Alonzo, 54 Citigroup, 11, 166 Clower, Robert, 85 cockroach, 68, 74; defense mechanism of, 66; and omniscient planner, 66–67 Coleman, Henry, 5 collateral: haircuts and, 131; risk reduction of, 204; transformations of, 131 commercial paper, 136 Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), 147–148 complexity: and chaos theory, 110–111; in comparison to computational irreducibility, 108, 122; description of, 109–112; and emergence, 108, 122; and ergodicity, 111, 122; and financial crises, 112 (see also financial crises); and informational irreducibility, 109–110; investigation of by Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 109; and neoclassical economics, 123–124 (see also neoclassical economics); and network theory, 110; and nonlinear systems, 110–111; and the OODA loop, 122 (see also OODA Loop); and radical uncertainty, 112, 122; and strategic complexity, 122–124 computational irreducibility, 12, 18, 33; crises and, 105; and heuristics, 65; and the Library of Babel, 62–63; and maps, 26; and mathematical shortcuts, 26; and neoclassical economics, 83 (see also neoclassical economics); and three-body problem, 27–28 (see also three-body problem); and Turing’s halting problem, 55 computers, and the universal Turing machine, 54.


pages: 396 words: 112,748

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

(“The first chapter, I have to admit, is 300 pages, okay?” he says.) Then came Stochastic Processes, Modeling Simulation, Cellular Automata, Computation Theory and Information Theory, Scaling, Renormalization, and Fractals, Neural Networks, Attractor Networks, Homogenous Systems, Inhomogenous Systems, and so on. Bar-Yam, the son of a high-energy physicist, had studied condensed matter physics and become an engineering professor at Boston University, but he left in 1997 to found the New England Complex Systems Institute. He had been exposed to Stephen Wolfram’s work on cellular automata and Robert Devaney’s work in chaos and discovered that he was less interested in polymers and superconductors than in neural networks and—he says this with no sense of grandiosity—the nature of human civilization.


pages: 448 words: 116,962

Singularity Sky by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological constant, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Extropian, Future Shock, gravity well, Higgs boson, Kuiper Belt, life extension, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, skinny streets, technological singularity, uranium enrichment

"Herman was unusually vague about it," Martin admitted. "Normally he has a lot of background detail. Every word means something. But it's as if he doesn't want to say too much about the Festival. They're—he called them, uh, glider-gun factories. I don't know if you know about Life—" "Cellular automata, the game?" "That's the one. Glider guns are mobile cellular automata. There are some complex life structures that replicate themselves, or simpler cellular structures; a glider-gun factory is a weird one. It periodically packs itself into a very dense mobile system that migrates across the grid for a couple of hundred squares, then it unpacks itself into two copies that then pack down and fly off in opposite directions.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Imagine the nightmare of having to draw up neural circuitry on a two-dimensional piece of paper, where there is no room for wires to cross each other without intersecting. In his annotation of Flatland, Ian Stewart cleverly solves this problem for the author by invoking the theory of “cellular automata”: two-dimensional arrays of cells that, communicating with their neighbors according to simple rules, can carry out any task that a computer could accomplish. With cellular automata for brains, Flatlanders would be capable of intelligent behavior (although, as philosophers like John Searle would argue, they might fall short of consciousness). As for more intimate details of the Flatlanders’ existence—their method of sexual congress, for example—the author maintains a proper Victorian reticence.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

His description (posthumously published, 1966) of how an automaton would read its own blueprint and then copy it into its new creation anticipated in impressive detail many of the later discoveries about the mechanisms of DNA expression and replication, but in order to make his proof of the possibility of a self-reproducing automaton mathematically rigorous and tractable, von Neumann had switched to simple, two-dimensional abstractions, now known as cellular automata. Conway's Life-world cells are a particularly agreeable example of cellular automata. Conway and his students wanted to confirm von Neumann's proof in detail by actually constructing a two-dimensional world with a simple physics in which such a self-replicating construction would be a stable, working structure. Like von Neumann, they wanted their answer to be as general as possible, and hence as independent as possible of actual (Earthly?

The task of the wise God required to put this world into motion is a task of discovery, not creation, a job for a Newton, not a Shakespeare. What Newton found — and what Conway found — are eternal Platonic fixed points that anybody else in principle could have discovered, not idiosyncratic creations that depend in any way on the particularities of the minds of their authors. If Conway had never turned his hand to designing cellular-automata worlds — if Conway had never even existed — some other mathematician might very well have hit upon exactly the Life world that Conway gets the credit for. So, as we follow the Darwinian down this path, God the Artificer turns first into God the Lawgiver, who now can be seen to merge with God the Lawfinder.


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

This could include systems like chaining together simple if-this-then-that (or IFTTT) behavior and the open source Huginn platform for building agents that monitor situations and act on your behalf. A second possible path is implementing programmatic ideas from AI research fields such as Wolfram’s cellular automata, Conway’s Game of Life, Dorigo’s Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence, Andy Clark’s embodied cognitive robots, and other general agent-based systems. Chapter 3. Blockchain 3.0: Justice Applications Beyond Currency, Economics, and Markets Blockchain Technology Is a New and Highly Effective Model for Organizing Activity Not only is there the possibility that blockchain technology could reinvent every category of monetary markets, payments, financial services, and economics, but it might also offer similar reconfiguration possibilities to all industries, and even more broadly, to nearly all areas of human endeavor.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

Back in those early MIT days, she was trying to run a weather-simulation model, but it kept on crashing. Why? Eventually Hamilton learned it was because the hackers had rejiggered the computer’s assembler to suit their desires and hadn’t switched it back. They wanted to muck around with pretty cellular automata; she was trying to do weather science. But the hackers simply hadn’t appeared to think about the repercussions their tinkering had for other people. These guys were companionable with each other but mostly uninterested in talking about their own or others’ inner lives. “I spent my lifetime walking around talking like a robot, talking to a bunch of other robots,” as one of them later said with a sigh.

When you take cheap machines that can do nearly anything you tell them to and hand them over to teenagers with essentially no adult supervision—because their parents had no idea what computers were—you create the infinite-monkeys experiment of software. Soon, teenage coders were cobbling together everything and anything: chatbots that would curse and swear, spellbinding forms of artificial life known as “cellular automata,” casino games, little databases and accounting programs, computer music, and endless varieties of games. Everingham was desperate to join this scene. He was from a lower-middle-class family whose parents couldn’t afford to buy him a computer. So he began frantically picking up every spare job he could—mowing lawns, then shoveling snow when winter came—until he’d saved enough, with a contribution from his mother, to get his own VIC-20.


Practical OCaml by Joshua B. Smith

cellular automata, Debian, domain-specific language, duck typing, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Grace Hopper, higher-order functions, hiring and firing, John Conway, Paul Graham, slashdot, SpamAssassin, text mining, Turing complete, type inference, web application, Y2K

Random BMP 620Xch27final.qxd 9/22/06 1:22 AM Page 389 CHAPTER 27 ■ PROCESSING BINARY FILES Figure 27-3. xor BMP Figure 27-4. and BMP 389 620Xch27final.qxd 390 9/22/06 1:22 AM Page 390 CHAPTER 27 ■ PROCESSING BINARY FILES Conway’s Game of Life In 1970, a British mathematician named John Conway created the field of cellular automata when he published the first article on the subject. Conway’s “game” isn’t so much a game played by people as it is a mathematical experiment. The game is an example of emergent behavior because there are only four simple rules that generate an amazing amount of complexity. Conway’s game is also Turing Complete, which means that (given the right initial conditions) the game is as powerful as any “real” computer.

See primitive types batch compilers, 405 Bayes’ Theorem, 169 binary files bitmaps and, 383–389 comparing two, 380–383 outputting, 377 parsing, 295 processing, 375– 399 reading, 383–389 bitmap header definitions, 384 blog server example, 278–288 BNF (Backus-Naur Form), 210 Boolean type (bool), 67 bottom-up design, 267 bprintf function, 76 broadcast function, 318 bscanf function, 77, 253 buffers, 80, 110 build tools, 401–409 buildmap function, 172 build_list function, 324 445 620Xidxfinal.qxd 446 9/22/06 4:19 PM Page 446 ■INDEX built-in exceptions, 125, 131 built-in functions, 48 built-in types, 24 buy function, for securities trades database, 54 ■C C code, interfacing with, 349–358 -c compiler flag, 405 .c files, 408 C functions, defining, 352–355 C preprocessor (cpp), 411 C++ Foreign Function Interfaces and, 349 polymorphic classes and, 26 templates and, 25, 160 calculators four-function, 42 guards and, 48 Calendar module, 360 CAM (Categorical Abstract Machine), 3 CAM-ML, 3 Cameleon, 14 Caml Light, 3 Caml Special Light, 4 camlbrowser, 402, 405 CamlIDL library, 359 camlidl tool, 349, 355, 357 Camlp4, 411–429 camlp4o command, 418, 425 CAMLparam macro, 352 CAMLprim, 362 caml_alloc data, 352 caml_alloc_string(length) function, 351 caml_alloc_string(n) function, 352 caml_alloc_tuple(n) function, 352 caml_copy_double(d) function, 352 caml_copy_double(initial_value) function, 352 caml_copy_string(str) string, 352 caml_failwith(argument_string) function, 352 caml_invalid_argument(argument_string) function, 352 caml_raise_end_of_file (void) exception, 352 caml_raise_not_found ( void ) exception, 352 Capability Maturity Model (CMM), 271 Categorical Abstract Machine (CAM), 3 -cc <CCNAME> flag, 406 -cclib -lLIBNAME flag, 406 -ccopt OPTION flag, 406 cellular automata, 390 CGI (Common Gateway Interface), 273–291 advantages/disadvantages of, 274 writing your own functions and, 277–284 channels, 52, 113–117 chars, 64, 377 check_suffix function, 137 choose function, 320 chop_extension function, 137 chop_suffix function, 137 Church, Alonzo, 263 class keyword, 226, 228 classes, 25, 225–229 internal, 233 vs. objects, 226 parameterized, 234 polymorphism and, 230 reasons for using, 227 virtual, 234, 241 client class, 334 client functions, 189 clients, OCaml support for, 179–191 client_app.ml file, 190 cloning objects, 241 close_in function, 114 close_out function, 114 .cma files, 20, 408 .cmi files, 20 CMM (Capability Maturity Model), 271 .cmo files, 20, 408 Cocanwiki web application, 291 code linking options for, 356 coding rules and, 130–133 obtaining line numbers/function names and, 134 ocamllex processing and, 197–201, 222 ocamlyacc processing and, 206, 222 reuse and, 225–228, 267 code completion, 14 code files, 12, 18 collapse function, 46 collections, 89–111 combine function, 96 command-line flags, 311 command-line toplevel, 13 comments documentation extracted from, 145 importance of, 154 ocamldoc for, 146 Common Gateway Interface.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

One approach has been to use non-silicon materials in chips for the first time.53 Another possibility is to move from the current paradigm of ‘2D’ integrated circuits—where transistors are arranged side-by-side on a wafer of silicon—to a ‘3D’ approach where transistors are piled high.54 Another approach might be to abandon silicon altogether in favour of carbon nanotubes as the material for building even smaller, more efficient transistors.55 Yet another approach, currently taken by Google, would be to use more special-purpose computer chips for particular functions—chips that do fewer things but much faster.56 Microsoft increasingly uses a new type of chip that could combine much greater speed with flexibility.57 Looking further ahead, engineers at Google and elsewhere are already hard at work developing ‘quantum computers’ which, in certain tasks, are expected to be able to compute well beyond the capabilities of classical computers.58 Another possible alternative to OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Increasingly Capable Systems 41 silicon might be to use 2D graphene-like compounds and ‘spintronic’ materials, which compute by harnessing the spin of electrons rather than moving them around.59 There’s also the growing field of ­neuroelectronics, which seeks to reverse-engineer the neural networks of the human brain while potentially requiring less power than silicon.60 In the still longer term, Quantum Dot Cellular Automata (‘QDCA’) technology may yield an unimaginably small semiconductor capable of doing the work of a transistor, but using much less power and wasting little energy.61 Many of these technologies are still in their infancy and nothing certain can be said about the future of Moore’s Law. But the least likely outcome is that computer science simply grinds to a halt, with hungry young Silicon Valley engineers hanging up their circuit boards and heading for retirement.

A. 389 Pokémon Go 58 political campaigning 219–20 political concepts 74–80 political hacking 180–2 political speeches 31, 360–1 political theory 80–5 conceptual analysis 81–3, 84–5 contextual analysis 84–5 future of 84–5 normative analysis 83–5 promise of 9–11 politicians Direct Democracy 240–1, 243 technocratic 251 politics definition 74 nature of 70–4 of politics 72 post-truth 230–1, 237 of prediction 172–6 task of 346 of tech firms 156–9 Popper, Ben 381 Portugal 50 post-politics 362–6 post-truth politics 230–1, 237 Potts, Amanda 422 power 3, 10, 22–3, 89, 345–6 code as 95–7, 154–5 concept 75, 76 conceptual analysis 81 definition 92 digital technology 94–8 faces of 92–3 force 100–21 and liberty 189–94 nature of 90–2 nature of politics 74 perception-control 142–52 private 153–60, 189–94 public 153–60 range of 91–2, 158 scrutiny 122–41 separation of powers 358–9 and significance 92, 158 stability of 92, 158 structural regulation 356, 357–9 supercharged state 347–8 tech firms 348–54 pragmatism 349 predictability of behaviour 127, 138–9 prediction Data Democracy 250 politics of 172–6 totalitarianism 177 predictive policing 174, 176 predictive sentencing 174, 176 preliterate societies 111–12 Preotiuc, Daniel 393 pricing mechanism 269–70, 286 Prince, Matthew 414 Princeton Review 286 printing technology 3D printing 56–7, 178, 329 4D printing 57 Gutenberg’s press 20, 62–3 prioritarians 260 Pritchard, Tom 405 Private Property Paradigm 323–7, 336 privatization of force 100, 114–19 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Index productive technologies 316–17 state ownership 329 taxation 328 profit, rights of 330–1 Promobot 55–6 property 313–41 capital 314–17 concentration of 318–22 concept 77, 78 conceptual analysis 82–3 future 327 new paradigm 327–40 Private Property Paradigm 323–7 types of 324 Wealth Cyclone 322–3 ProPublica 174 Proteus Biomedical 51 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 232 proxy votes 242 public utilities, similarity of tech firms to 157–8 Qin dynasty 131 quantum computers 40 Quantum Dot Cellular Automata (QDCA) technology 41 race/racism data-based injustice 282 neutrality fallacy 288, 289, 290 recidivism prediction 174 rule-based injustice 283, 285 Radicati Group Inc. 387 Ralph Lauren 44 ranking, digital 276–8 algorithmic injustice 289–90 ransomware 182 rateability of life 139–40, 277 rational ignorance, problem of 241 Ratner, Paul 383 Rawls, John 389, 404, 417, 419, 432 justice 257, 258, 262–3 political hacking 181 political theory 9 reality, fragmented 229–31, 237 real property 324 509 recognition, algorithms of 260, 275–8 Reddit 77 regulation of tech firms 350–1, 354–9 reinforcement learning (AI) 35 Remnick, David 367, 412 representative democracy 218, 240, 248 republican freedom 167–8, 184 and democracy 222 and private power 191 wise restraints 185 Republican Party (US) 229 reputation.com 290 reputation systems 289–90 resources, limited 365 responsibility, individual 346–7 Reuters 405 revolution concept 77, 78 Richards, Thomas 369 Rieff, David 397 right to explanation 354 usufructuary 330–1 to work 304–5, 307 Riley v.


pages: 632 words: 163,143

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

Ligeti, Xenakis, Grisey and Haas, four of the greatest composers of the late twentieth century, all embraced fractal principles self-consciously, deliberately absorbing the contours of natural processes.65 Reciprocally, computers have been fed pink noise as a raw material to produce music, and fractals have inspired a new breed of algorithmic composition based on ‘cellular automata’ – discrete dynamic systems formed of simple computational units that behave like living cells.66 While the results are not very polished, this musical simulation of artificial life is perhaps the most promising direction for AI composition. And now we see how the musical human and the machine converge on nature, something bigger than them both.

The most spectacular example is Wagner’s Ring cycle, which repeats the tragedy of nature defiled across three timelines of gods, heroes and men. All music as a matter of course ‘evolves’ from a thematic or tonal seed planted in its opening bars, and in the space of minutes, not aeons. Such compressed evolution is what drives the latest generation of ‘cellular automata’ AI composers, which we saw in Chapter 11. It is not going too far to define music as a space in which we negotiate interactions between all these aspects of ourselves: the human, the animal, the machine. Music is a playground in all senses. Most importantly, we now also see that my three timelines in the three parts of this book – Life, History, Evolution – express the fractal pattern of music’s nature at the highest level.


pages: 252 words: 74,167

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

For years, however, he had been searching for what he refers to as the ‘problem of a lifetime’ to sink his teeth into. An interest in the brain made him consider everything from primate neuroanatomy and insect flight behaviour, to learning in the rat hippocampus or curing Alzheimer’s disease. For a while, Hopfield was fascinated by cellular automata and the prospect of robots that could build copies of themselves. However, after months of research, it led him to a dead end. ‘It is surprisingly difficult to give up on a wrong idea that has been nurtured for a year,’ Hopfield says. But the idea of creating a model of life inside a computer stayed with him.


pages: 306 words: 82,765

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

anti-fragile, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, data science, David Graeber, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, equity premium, fake news, financial independence, information asymmetry, invisible hand, knowledge economy, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, mental accounting, microbiome, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, tail risk, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, Yogi Berra

O. Wilson) about the terminal flaws in the selfish gene theory.fn2 The question is: could it be that much of what we have read about the advances in behavioral sciences is nonsense? Odds are it is. Many people have been accused of racism, segregationism, and somethingism without merit. Using cellular automata, a technique similar to renormalization, the late Thomas Schelling showed a few decades ago how a neighborhood can be segregated without a single segregationist among its inhabitants. ZERO-INTELLIGENCE MARKETS The underlying structure of reality matters much more than the participants, something policymakers fail to understand.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

., “Robokitty,” New York Times Magazine, August 1, 1999. In fact, de Garis: De Garis, Hugo, Brain Builder Group, Evolutionary Systems Department, ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories, “CAM-BRAIN The Evolutionary Engineering of a Billion Neuron Artificial Brain by 2001 which Grows/Evolves at Electronic Speeds inside a Cellular Automata Machine (CAM),” last modified 1995, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.8902 (accessed June 22, 2011). a system will consider stealing: Omohundro, “Foresight Vision Talk: Self-Improving AI and Designing 2030.” They are going to want: Omohundro, “The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence.”


The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences by Rob Kitchin

Bayesian statistics, business intelligence, business process, cellular automata, Celtic Tiger, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, congestion charging, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, discrete time, disruptive innovation, George Gilder, Google Earth, hype cycle, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, longitudinal study, machine readable, Masdar, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, platform as a service, recommendation engine, RFID, semantic web, sentiment analysis, SimCity, slashdot, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, statistical model, supply-chain management, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transaction costs

Bates, J. (2012) ‘“This is what modern deregulation looks like”: co-optation and contestation in the shaping of the UK’s Open Government Data Initiative’, The Journal of Community Informatics, 8(2), http://www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/845/916 (last accessed 6 February 2013). Bates, J. (2013) ‘Opening up public data’, SPERI Comment, 21 May. http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2013/05/21/opening-public-data/(last accessed 18 September 2013). Batty, M. (2007) Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent Based Models, and Fractals. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Batty, M., Axhausen, K.W., Giannotti, F., Pozdnoukhov, A., Bazzani, A., Wachowicz, M., Ouzounis, G. and Portugali, Y. (2012) ‘Smart cities of the future’, European Physical Journal Special Topics, 214: 481–518. Baym, N.K. (2013) ‘Data not seen: the uses and shortcomings of social media metrics’, First Monday, 18(10), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4873/3752 (last accessed 3 January 2014).


pages: 398 words: 86,855

Bad Data Handbook by Q. Ethan McCallum

Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Benoit Mandelbrot, business intelligence, cellular automata, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, conceptual framework, data science, database schema, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, Gini coefficient, hype cycle, illegal immigration, iterative process, labor-force participation, loose coupling, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, selection bias, sentiment analysis, SQL injection, statistical model, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, text mining, too big to fail, web application

The Delicate Sound of a Combinatorial Explosion… We’ve introduced the problem and sketched out a rudimentary solution in just a few pages, but imagine how a real system like this might evolve over an extended period of months or even years with a team of people involved. It’s easy to see how the complexity could be overlooked or taken for granted as the nature of the problem we set out to solve. A system can start out simple, but very quickly become complex. This fact has been deeply explored in the study of complex systems and cellular automata. To see this idea in action, consider a classic technique for defining a complex graphical object by starting with two simple objects: “One begins with two shapes, an initiator and a generator…each stage of the construction begins with a broken line and consists in replacing each straight interval with a copy of the generator, reduced and displaced so as to have the same end points as those of the interval being replaced.”


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The real world offers intrinsically parallel problems such as images that flood the eye all at once, whether you’re driving a car in the snow or summoning a metaverse with computer-generated graphics or pattern-matching in “machine learning” argosies across the seas of big data. The von Neumann bottleneck was recognized by von Neumann himself. In response, he proposed a massively parallel architecture called cellular automata, which led to his last book before his death at age fifty-seven. In The Computer and the Brain, he contemplated a parallel solution called neural networks, which were based on a primitive idea of how billions of neurons might work together in the human neural system. Von Neumann concluded the brain is a non-von machine nine orders of magnitude slower than the gigahertz he prophesied for computers back in 1957.


pages: 496 words: 174,084

Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages by Federico Biancuzzi, Shane Warden

Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), business intelligence, business logic, business process, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive load, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, continuous integration, data acquisition, Dennis Ritchie, domain-specific language, Douglas Hofstadter, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Firefox, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, history of Unix, HyperCard, industrial research laboratory, information retrieval, information security, iterative process, Ivan Sutherland, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, linear programming, loose coupling, machine readable, machine translation, Mars Rover, millennium bug, Multics, NP-complete, Paul Graham, performance metric, Perl 6, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, Turing complete, type inference, Valgrind, Von Neumann architecture, web application

I pulled some of those ideas into UML, but data flow architecture doesn’t seem to replace von Neumann architecture in most cases. So I had my shot and didn’t quite make it. There are also cellular automata. I think over half of my fellow grad students tried to build on them a highly parallel computer. That has to be the right approach, because that’s how the universe is constructed. (Or maybe not. Modern physics is stranger than fiction. The latest speculations suggest that space and time arise out of something more primitive.) But cellular automata seem suited to only certain geometric problems, very important problems to be sure, but not general-case problems. People haven’t figured out how to program them for the general case.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

You get this from the human-computer dialogues: And this from the human-human dialogues: Now if that difference isn’t night and day, I don’t know what is. Over. 1. Some equations (the Newtonian parabolas that projectiles follow, for instance) are such that you can just plug in any old future value for time and get a description of the future state of events. Other calculations (e.g., some cellular automata) contain no such shortcuts. Such processes are called “computationally irreducible.” Future time values cannot simply be “plugged in”; rather, you have to run the simulation all the way from point A to point Z, including all intermediate steps. Stephen Wolfram, in A New Kind of Science, attempts to reconcile free will and determinism by conjecturing that the workings of the human brain are “irreducible” in this way: that is, there are no Newtonian-style “laws” that allow us shortcuts to knowing in advance what people will do.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

McGuinness. First paperback edition. New York: Routledge, 1974. ———. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Third edition. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2002. ———. 1972. On Certainty. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1984. Culture and Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolfram, Stephen. 1994. Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ———. 2002. A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media. Wright, Ronald. 2005. A Short History of Progress. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Ziff, Paul. 1961. Semantic Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zittrain, Jonathan. 2008.


Mathematics for Finance: An Introduction to Financial Engineering by Marek Capinski, Tomasz Zastawniak

Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, martingale, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, short selling, stochastic process, time value of money, transaction costs, value at risk, Wiener process, zero-coupon bond

Springer-Verlag: Mathematica in Education and Research Vol 4 Issue 3 1995 article by Roman E Maeder, Beatrice Amrhein and Oliver Gloor ‘Illustrated Mathematics: Visualization of Mathematical Objects’ page 9 fig 11, originally published as a CD ROM ‘Illustrated Mathematics’ by TELOS: ISBN 0-387-14222-3, German edition by Birkhauser: ISBN 3-7643-5100-4. Mathematica in Education and Research Vol 4 Issue 3 1995 article by Richard J Gaylord and Kazume Nishidate ‘Traffic Engineering with Cellular Automata’ page 35 fig 2. Mathematica in Education and Research Vol 5 Issue 2 1996 article by Michael Trott ‘The Implicitization of a Trefoil Knot’ page 14. Mathematica in Education and Research Vol 5 Issue 2 1996 article by Lee de Cola ‘Coins, Trees, Bars and Bells: Simulation of the Binomial Process’ page 19 fig 3.


pages: 329 words: 106,831

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

activist lawyer, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, cellular automata, Columbine, Conway's Game of Life, Fairchild Semiconductor, G4S, game design, Ian Bogost, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Good Place, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning

Little Computer People was occasionally hilarious and featured a slow-moving cartoonlike character called Darren who would write you letters saying, “I have many hobbies that occupy my time.” To prove it, he watched TV, exercised, and searched for someone to live in his computer with him. Finally, Wright was impressed with John Horton Conway’s theories of cellular automata, which were espoused in The Game of Life. In his 1970s simulation game, Conway showed that you could emulate the complex patterns of the birth and death of organisms living together in society—and everything in between. All these combined to influence Wright as he dreamed up a project whose working title was Home Tactics, the Experimental Domestic Simulator.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Unfortunately, a NOR gate is not the Master Algorithm any more than a Lego brick is the universal toy. It can certainly be a universal building block for toys, but a pile of Legos doesn’t spontaneously assemble itself into a toy. The same applies to other simple computation schemes, like Petri nets or cellular automata. Moving on to more sophisticated alternatives, what about the queries that any good database engine can answer, or the simple algorithms in a statistical package? Aren’t those enough? These are bigger Lego bricks, but they’re still only bricks. A database engine never discovers anything new; it just tells you what it knows.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

., Developing New Approaches for People-centred Development, Environment and Urbanisation, 2008 Arthur, C., The Thinking City, BBC Focus, January 2012 Barney, S. A. et al, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, CUP, 2006 Barros, J. and Sobeiera, F., City of Slums: Self Organisation Across Scales, CASA Working Paper 55, June 2002 Batty, M., Cities and Complexity: Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-based Models and Fractals, MIT Press, 2005 Batty, M., Complexity in City Systems: Understanding, Evolution and Design, UCL Working Paper 117, March 2007 Beavan, C., No Impact Man, Piatkus, 2011 Bergdoll, B. and Martin, R., Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, MoMA, 2012 Bettencourt, L. and West, G., ‘A Unified Theory of Urban Living’, Nature, 21 October 2010 Bettencourt, L., Lobo, J. et al, Growth Innovation, Scaling and the Pace of Life in Cities, PNAS, 16 April 2007 Bound, K. and Thornton, I., Our Frugal Future, NESTA, July 2012 Brand, S., Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Atlantic Books, 2010 Bratton, W. and Tumin, Z., Collaborate or Perish: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World, Crown Business, 2012 Brugman, J., Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How cities are changing the world, Bloomsbury Press, 2010 Bucher, U. and Finka, M., The Electronic City, BWV, 2008 Burdett, R. and Rode, P., Cities: Towards a Green Economy, UNEP, 2011 Burnham, S., Trust Design, Part Four, ‘Public Trust’ supplement to Volume 30, 2011, www.premsela.org Burra, S., Towards a Pro-poor Framework for Slum Upgrading in Mumbai, India, Environment and Urbanisation, 2005 Burra, S., Community-based, Built and Managed Toilet Blocks in Indian Cities, Environment and Urbanisation, 2003 Burrell, J., Livelihoods and the Mobile Phone in Rural Uganda, Grameen Foundation, USA, January 2008 Burrows, E.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

., Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 47. 40.John Myhill, “The Abstract Theory of Self-Reproduction,” in Mihajlo D. Mesarovic, ed., Views on General Systems Theory, Proceedings of the Second Systems Symposium at Case Institute of Technology, 1964; reprinted in Arthur Burks, ed., Essays on Cellular Automata (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 218. 41.John von Neumann, 1948, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” in Lloyd A. Jeffress, ed., Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior: The Hixon Symposium (New York: Hafner, 1951), 31. 42.Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844), 222–223. 43.Nils Barricelli, in Paul S.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

The way the task was accomplished by living organisms of the type found on earth was only one way it could be done. In principle, the task could be done by a machine that could follow a plan, because the plan, and not the mechanism that carried it out, was a part of the system with the special, heretofore mysterious property that distinguished life from nonliving matter. Von Neumann approached "cellular automata" on an abstract level, just as Turing did with his first machines. As early as 1948, he showed that any self-replicating system must have raw materials, a program that provides instructions, an automaton that follows the instructions and arranges the symbols in the cells of a Turing-type machine, a system for duplicating instructions, and a supervisory unit -- which turned out to be an excellent description of the DNA direction of protein synthesis in living cells.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Alan Turing, for example, had written about the possibility the previous year, to receptive audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. McCarthy was thinking about intelligence as a mathematical abstraction rather than something realizable—along the lines of Turing—through building an actual machine. It was an “automaton” notion of creating human intelligence, but not of the kind of software cellular automata that von Neumann would later pursue. McCarthy focused instead on an abstract notion of intelligence that was capable of interacting with the environment. When he told von Neumann about it, the scientist exclaimed, “Write it up!” McCarthy thought about the idea a lot but never published anything.


pages: 1,087 words: 325,295

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Danny Hillis, double helix, information security, interchangeable parts, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, selection bias, Snow Crash, Stewart Brand, trade route

You look down on it from above and say, ‘Oh, that looked like flanking.’ But if there’s no commander to see the field and direct their movements, can they really perform coordinated maneuvers?” “That’s a little like Saunt Taunga’s Question,” I pointed out (“Can a sufficiently large field of cellular automata think?”). “Well, can they?” “I’ve seen ants work together to carry off part of my lunch, so I know they can coordinate their actions.” “But if I’m one of a hundred ants all pushing on the same raisin, I can feel the raisin moving, can’t I—so the raisin itself is a way that they communicate with one another.

The Orithenans had used a system of computational chanting that, it was plain to see, was rooted in traditions that their founders had brought over from Edhar. To that point, it was clearly recognizable to any Edharian. It was a way of carrying out computations on patterns of information by permuting a given string of notes into new melodies. The permutation was done on the fly by following certain rules, defined using the formalism of cellular automata. After the Second Sack reforms, newly computerless avout had invented this kind of music. In some concents it had withered away, in others mutated into something else, but at Edhar it had always been practiced seriously. We’d all learned it as a sort of children’s musical game. But at Orithena they had been doing new things with it, using it to solve problems.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Toepperwein, L. L., et al. Robotics Applications for Industry: A Practical Guide. Park Ridge: Noyes Data Corporation, 1983. Toffler, Alvin. Powershift. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. ————. The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Toffoli, Tommaso and Norman Margolis. Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Torrance, Stephen B., ed. The Mind and the Machine: Philosophical Aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Chichester, UK: Ellis Horwood, 1986. Traub, Joseph F., ed. Cohabiting with Computers. Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, 1985.


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

each car behind it will stop: One simulation compared the “oscillations” and “amplifications” found in stop-and-go traffic to those found in queues. “Perturbations” in the queue, or the way people stopped and started, were often observed to grow larger from the front to the back of the queue in simulators using cellular automata. See Bongsoo Son, Tawan Kim, and Yongjae Lee, “A Simulation Model of Congested Traffic in the Waiting Line,” Computational Science and Its Applications: ICCSA 2005, vol. 3481 (2005), pp. 863–69. the harder it is to predict: An interesting parallel has been drawn between the way nonlinear traffic flows behave and the way supply chains work in the world of business.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

Oakley, A. (1983) The Making of Marx’s Critical Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Obama, B. (2009) ‘Obama’s remarks on the economy,’ New York Times, 14 April. O’Brien, Y.-Y. J. C. (2007) ‘Reserve requirement systems in OECD countries,’ SSRN eLibrary. Oda, S. H., K. Miura, K. Ueda and Y. Baba (2000) ‘The application of cellular automata and agent models to network externalities in consumers’ theory: a generalization of life game,’ in W. A. Barnett, C. Chiarella, S. Keen, R. Marks and H. Schnabl (eds), Commerce, Complexity and Evolution, New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Hara, M. (1995) Market Microstructure Theory, Cambridge: Blackwell.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The masters of causality search for conditional independence, screening-off and Markov neighborhoods, among bits and groups of bits. The so-called “color” appears to play a role in neighborhoods and screening, so it’s not just the equivalent of surface reflectivity. People search for simple equations, simple cellular automata, simple decision trees, that can predict or compress the message. Physicists invent entire new theories of physics that might describe universes projected onto the grid—for it seems quite plausible that a message such as this is being sent from beyond the Matrix. After receiving 32 × 512 × 256 = 4,194,304 bits, around one and a half months, the stars stop flickering.

I do urge you to investigate Life if you’ve never played it—it’s important for comprehending the notion of “physical law.” Conway’s Life has been proven Turing-complete, so it would be possible to build a sentient being in the Life universe, although it might be rather fragile and awkward. Other cellular automata would make it simpler. Could you, by creating a simulated universe, escape the reach of God? Could you simulate a Game of Life containing sentient entities, and torture the beings therein? But if God is watching everywhere, then trying to build an unfair Life just results in the God stepping in to modify your computer’s transistors.


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Yes, as Dawkins says they are creatures naturally evolved in their physical universe and they cannot violate their physics (Dawkins 2006), but they can violate ours if they want. Make this simple experiment: Run a Game of Life program, choose an initial pattern, and let it evolve for a while. Now, stop the program, flip a cell, and resume the program. You have just performed a miracle: something that goes against the physical laws (the simple cellular automata evolution rules of Life) of the lower-level reality that you are simulating. Of course the Game of Life is too simple to contain conscious observers, but hypothetical observers within the game would observe an event that cannot be understood in terms of the physical laws of their universe. A miracle.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

(In)civilty and the city, Urban Studies, 43(5–6) 919–938 Baran, P K; Rodriquez, D A & Khattak, A J (2008), space syntax and walking in a New Urbanist and suburban neighbourhoods, Journal of Urban Design, 13(1), 5–28 Barnett, J (2003) Redesigning Cities: Principles, Practices, Implementation, Planners Press, Chicago, IL Barnett, J (1982) An Introduction to Urban Design, Harper & Row, New York Barnett, J (1974) Urban Design as Public Policy, Harper & Row, New York Barrett, S; Stewart, M & Underwood, J (1978) The Land Market and the Development Process, Occasional paper 2, SAUS, University of Bristol, Bristol Barthes, R (1967) Elements of Semiology, Hill & Wang, New York Barthes, R (1968) The death of the author, in Barthes, R (1977) Image–Music–Text, Flamingo, London, 142–148 Bartlett, K (2003) Testing the “Popsicle Test”: Realities of retail shopping in New “Traditional Neighbourhood” Development, Urban Studies 140(8), 1471–1485 Barton, H & Tsourou, C (2000) Healthy Urban Planning, Spon Press, London Barton, H; Davis, G & Guise, R (1995) Sustainable Settlements: A Guide for Planners, Designers, and Developers, Local Government Management Board, Luton Barton H; Grant, M & Guise, R (2003) Shaping Neighbourhoods, A Guide for Health, Sustainability and Vitality, Spon Press, London Barton, H (1996) Going green by design, Urban Design Quarterly, 57, January, 13–18 Barton, H; Davis, G; & Guise, R (1994) Sustainable Settlements: A Guide for Planners, Designers, and Developers, Local Government Management Board, Luton Batty, M (2008) Hierarchy, scale and complexity in urban design in Haas, T New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future, Rizzoli International, New York, 258–261 Batty, M (2005) Cities and Complexity Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models, and Fractals, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass Baudrillard, J (1994; in French 1981) Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Baudrillard, J (1983; in French 1981) Simulations, Semiotext, New York Beauregard, R A (2005) The textures of property markets: Downtown Housing and Office Conversions in New York City, Urban Studies 42 (13) 2431–2445 Beck U (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London Bell D (2005) The emergence of contemporary masterplans: Property markets and the value of urban design, Journal of Urban Design, 10(1): 81–110 Bell, P A; Fisher, J D; Baum, A & Greene, T C (1990) Environmental Psychology (third edition) Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., London Bemelmans-Videc, M-L (2007) Introduction: Policy instrument choice and evaluation, in Bemelmans-Videc, M-L Rist, R; & Vedung, E (2007) (editors) Carrots, Sticks and Sermons: Policy Instruments and Their Evaluation, Transaction Publishers, London, 1–20 Ben-Joseph E (2005) The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass Ben-Joseph, E (1995) Changing the residential street scene: Adopting the shared street (Woonerf) concept to the suburban environment, Journal of the American Planning Association, 61(4) 504–515 Bentley, I (1999) Urban Transformations: Power, People and Urban Design, Routledge, London Bentley, I (1998) Urban design as an anti-profession, Urban Design Quarterly, 65, 15 Bentley, I (1990) Ecological urban design, Architects' Journal, 192, 24 October, 69–71 Bentley, I (1976) What is urban design?


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The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

But out of a concern for their privacy and a desire not to seem like I’m clinging to their ankles, I’ll draw a veil over those conversations. Suffice it to say that the Royal Society crowd written about in these books has many descendants and heirs today, who are capable of talking learnedly about monads, cellular automata, the calculus dispute, absolute time and space, &c. at the drop of a hat, and that it’s been my privilege to know a few of them. They seem pleasantly surprised to learn that someone actually wants to write a novel about such topics, and I in turn have been pleasantly surprised to find that they are actually willing to spend time talking to me, and out of this, quite a few good conversations have arisen over the years.