Consider Bookhling

Juergen Schmidhuber is supposedly working on an artificial scientist. I’ve come to a sudden realization that I am very interested in creating an artificial creator, or an engine of creativity, and that my interest in artificial life might have in fact been an interest in studying the origins of the trait we refer to as creativity.

It is rather curious. Will an artificial scientist be different from an artificial construct capable of demonstrating the trait we refer to as creativity? From what I am seeing, artificial scientist is an informational construct while an artificial creator is more of a physical system, thus the term engine of creativity.

Only known case of creativity exhibited in nature is us. If we ignore that the universe itself demonstrates ingenious and unexpected things through emergence, self organization and evolutionary principles, the only observed and somewhat-understood case of creativity in the universe are demonstrated by life-like systems. Would this somehow imply that only life-like systems can demonstrate traits of creativity? Would this mean that any artificial engine of creativity formed by human hand would have to be alive? Considered alive?

People love fantasies. They fantasize about things all the time. Act of shaping the most compelling traits of that fantasy in real world is called art. And the process that allows the conversion of idea to shape is called technology. Look at this.

Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but I think this will definitely appear beautiful in the eyes of the majority. Now, this is merely a model. But sciences and technology might as well make this come true sooner that most people expect it.

What I find truly interesting, however, isn’t the shared trait between arts and sciences. That much had been obvious since the days of Leonardo Da Vinci, and the hints of the inseparable relationship between the two had been acknowledged even before then… Or rather, would it be correct to say that modern separation between arts and sciences is a freak accident of history that was given birth a few centuries ago at most? I guess we are all collectively reeling in from the aftershock of the events that happened centuries ago (and people ask why we should bother to learn history).

What I really find interesting, to an almost obsessive degree, is where the beginnings of arts and sciences came from. That is, what would drive bunch of complex systems of collections of molecular compounds to form ideas, worldview, beliefs, and etc… Whether you are a religious fundamentalist or a Dawkins-ian atheist, the fact is that most if not all of humanity have some capacity at aesthetic sensitivity that borders on mystical. Like any prudent scientist (to-be), I believe in things happening in front of my eyes rather than some abstract ideas floating in the clouds. It is a fact that people keep on creating and reacting to stuff, tries to keep themselves alive (though survival seem to take on varying degrees of priority in individuals), and are a system of molecules. So it should be reasonable to suspect that there is a method in nature to create systems of creativity out of components we already know about, using systematic pathways/algorithms that can be replicated.

What is creativity? It is a constant drive to do stuff. Is that enough? Not really. Simply being active isn’t good enough… Creativity is a drive to do stuff in coherent manner. Thermodynamic work with coherence, which I might even call ‘memory’ though it might be too hasty at this point. Would this mean that a metabolic engine with capacity for coherent action (memory?) on the system-wide level contains innate ability to create? Like bacterium? Localized complex chain reaction with proper coherence eventually leads to self-replication? So would this mean that the human capacity for arts is in some deep level related to the capacity to procreate in minimally life-like systems?… Then what would be the concept of beauty? And why/how would human beings pursue aesthetics/ideas outside of the necessity for survival?

It’s fun to do a bit of musing like this. Yet it always get frustrating at the end, because I know in my heart that there’s no way to test all this physically. Or is there?

All I can do at the moment is to sit here and wait for my muse.

As I’ve continuously whined about past few months in various places around the net, I need to buy a new laptop. Yes. I haven’t bought the darn thing yet. I’ve been doing all my computing on school desktop (by remote connection) and the Asus EEEpc 701 ‘netbook’, which comes equipped with Xandros linux (buggy as a sin would be an understatement), 7in screen, 516mb RAM, and 4GB SSD (which I complement with another 4GB SD card). The little laptop have been surprisingly useful, and I don’t know what I would have done without it by my side. Only if the default OS was a bit more stable… The system is more shaky than a vial of nitroglycerin on a centrifuge.

I’ve actually ordered my laptop on the net already, Lenovo Thinkpad T400. It’s scheduled to ship sometime in the week of Nov 12th, so I will be receiving it near the end of the November, which would be roughly a month from now. Yes. While Lenovo builds some decent quality laptops, they certainly suck big time at customer service and shipping arrangements.

The problem is, Apple released their aluminum MacBook line a week or two ago. And from what I’m seeing, the performance on that machine is amazing. The integrated graphics on that machine trumps the dedicated graphics card on quite a few laptops of similar class, and actually does slightly better than the T400 with dedicated video memory I have on order. I’ve  stopped by at the Apple Store on Broadway to take a look (at 11 PM, those guys are open 24hrs), and the weight/design impression is fantastic. Even better, if I decide to pick up the new MacBook, I don’t have to sit around sucking on my thumb for a month. Oh, and then there’s OS X. Aesthetics wise, I hate OS X and its outdated brushed aluminum look, but the system is built on top of UNIX, so it affords some unique advantages for someone in the field of sciences. The wealth of biology-oriented scientific softwares in OS X and native mathematica integration is staggering, and user even has an option to utilize OS X variety of apt-get software repository for installing some of the more obscure and specialized softwares and frameworks. Extensive software development environment like the Xcode is included free of extra charge, and you are allowed to reinstall the OS as many times as you want. (learn from this, MS!!!) The rumors of impending update to the OS X that would allow users to utilize the GPU component as a secondary (primary?) processor for calculation-intense tasks doesn’t sound too bad either… If done properly, it might even be possible for regular MacBook to have near workstation quality number crunching capabilities.

There are several disadvantages in getting the MacBook/OS X, though. The first issue is software compatibility. OS X library might have grown by leaps and bounds in past few years, but it still pales in comparison to what is available on windows platform. Things get progressively worse when you try to use web services/programs in foreign language, i.e. entirely different software culture and financial ecosystem. Take, for example, QR-Code. QR codes are almost universally available in Japan and used in some other Eastern Asian countries to lesser extent. Windows have hundreds of different scripts and programs for generating and reading QR codes. Quick search of google nets us three or so read-only programs for OS X and it is not certain whether they are actively maintained or not. How about interactive fiction utilizing the infocom Z-machine? (My secret passion…) Gargoyle program on windows runs nearly all possible formats used in IF, while OS X needs about two, maybe three of such programs installed on same machine for maximum compatibility. Some people would say that I can run windows on a Mac machine using bootcamp or a virtualization software, but frankly I find the notion of running multiple OS on a single computer to be unrealistic on usability perspectives. Theoretically it might sound like a great option, but the prospect of turning off a computer and ending all my working sessions just to use another program or two is certainly not attractive to me.
The price ratio is also something of an issue. In my configuration of the T400, I get 1440×900 resolution 14in screen, built-in 7in1 card reader, three USB ports, express card slot, 6 hours of wifi-using battery life, 2.2 ghz processor, bluetooth, and WiMax/WWAN upgrade capacity. All of it for 1180 dollars. If I choose to go with the MacBook, I get two USB ports, bluetooth, 1280x 800 resolution on 13in screen, 2.0ghz processor, and 3~4 hours of wifi-using battery life. All of it for whopping 1400 dollars including taxes. That’s roughly a 200 dollar difference, with the machine obviously lacking in feature set costing more. Mac aficionados out there will tell me that the OS X itself (with its unlimited reinstallation capabilities), variety of built in software tools, the iLife suit (which looks quite amazing), and UNIX based performance boost/stability offsets the 200 dollar premium, and they might be right (build quality is stacked in favor of the Thinkpad, since Thinkpads have industry-approved build quality record under their belt already). But then I know a good number of free, open source programs available for the windows platform that can do all of those things… Perhaps not better than the Mac software, but certainly adequate. Aesthetics-wise, as I’ve stated above above, I am not very fond of the OS X design and its ‘Aqua’ theme, and I personally find how they shove the ‘dock’ interface down their user’s throats to be insulting and grotesque. Windows has such issues as well, but at least I am familiar with some very hard-core theme-patching under the windows platform. It doesn’t hurt that I know precisely how I want my computer/OS to look design-wise (and yes, I don’t think T400’s black box look is ugly, contrary to popular opinion).

I guess for the time being, my ideal machine would be T400 capable of running OS X out-of-the-box. I am aware of certain projects like OSx86 that tries to tune OS X so that they can run on non-native hardwares, but they are just too darn clunky to be used on a mission-critical work laptop. Maybe I should install Ubuntu within the windows partition of the T400?

Whatever the case, logic dictates that I should wait for a month for my cheaper and faster T400 to arrive. It’s only that I get constant urge to cancel my order and just go pick up a MacBook like some primal impulse beyond the reach of civilized consciousness… (insert witty H.P. Lovecraft reference here)

I’ve been away from U.S.A for a while now. Well, it’s actually only been around two weeks or so, but it still feel like forever to me (it probably is on the net).

I’ve been attending the Synthetic Biology 4.0 conference in Hong Kong, and spent the rest of the days in South Korea visiting bunch of friends and families… The level of technology around this part of the world really puts NYC to shame. And people wonder why U.S.A is losing it’s edge lately (which actually means for about a few decades).

I was fortunate enough to learn a lot of interesting things about the currents trend of synthetic biology, what it exactly is, and how to do it, among other things (like the minimal cell and multitude of ways to construct it). I plan to do a full post on some of the topics I found interesting (which I took extensive notes on) once I get to somewhere more private, since I’m writing this using the public wifi terminal at the Tokyo Narita airport on my way back to the states. 

An important reminder: the google 10^100 contest (http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html) deadline is today! Don’t forget to submit your idea for changing the world if you haven’t already!