Reality is stranger than fiction

FYI: as I mentioned then, the discussion piece (provocation?) I presented at ECAL is online. I think some excellent points were made during the discussion, so maybe people want to leave those here as comments.

The brain explained (?)

In one of the panel discussions Chris Adami asked the audience what would be their response if someone claimed to have understood the brain. The beffuddled looks on our faces betrayed our scepticism. Adami then said that it was Jeff Hawkins that figured it all out, on his book 'on intelligence'. I found it a lovely reference and looked for glimpses of it over the web. I found a comment on the book by Peter Dayan, who wrote one of the standard textbooks on computational neuroscience (he is the leading the homonimous department in UCL). Though I haven't read on intelligence yet, I found Dayan's comment was strangely reassuring, as it rephrases the results in a bit more balanced manner, by bringing up a couple of the contingencies on the 'final understanding'. I thought it is definitely worth a read, specially for those of us that might have turned a little dismayed to be out of jobs, as the brain was already explained. There is still hope, according to Dayan some of the mystery is still there.

http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020394

If you are considering buying the book, perhaps you would also like to check the video of the presentation he delivered on the 'Almaden Institute' of IBM on computational neuroscience. This is a link to the video in google:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2500845581503718756

Pictures on Flickr

I have posted a few ECAL 2007 pictures in Flickr:

I have used ecal2007 as a tag. In case you've uploaded your pictures, please leave the address as a comment, or use the same tag in Flickr.

The language of living things, by Brian Goodwin: references

Dr. Brian Goodwin gave an interesting and Power-Point free talk titled as above, and he mentioned a few papers, which, apparently, very few people in the room has read. Here they are, for the enjoyment of all:

• Lethality and centrality in protein networks, by Jeong, Mason, Barabási and others. Describes the small-world structure of protein networks, essentially. More than one thousand citations, wow.


• There are several papers on the subject of Zipf's law by Ricard Solé and collaborators, but the first one was Two Regimes in the Frequency of Words and the Origins of Complex Lexicons: Zipf’s Law Revisited. However, the paper mentioned by Dr. Goodwin was probably Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language a PNAS (previously not accepted in Science, as Ricard Solé himself acronymized) paper of 2003

The prince and the magician

Brian Goodwin told a fairytale during the congress dinner speech, which, unfortunately, wasn't heard by most people (including me); he also mentioned it the following day. So I've searched for it: it's called The Prince and the Magician, and it was included in a novel by John Fowles called The Magus and adapted from it from the guys who do neuro linguistic programming. Interesting story with many meanings, which can be adopted by scientists and pseudo-scientists alike...

ECAL 2007 phrases

• Peter Todd: Searching for a mate is like searching for a parking place.
• Seth Bullock : There is no such thing as the self
• Brian Goodwin: Science is storytelling

ECAL2007 wiki

As announced before the panel discussion tonight an ECAL2007 wiki has been set up at the following web address:

http://ecal2007.wikispaces.com

Cheers,
Tom

Art or Science: Continuing the discussion from the Music-AL workshop

At the end of the Workshop on Music and Artificial Life (Music-AL) held on Monday a group discussion illuminated a topic that I often find myself confronting when working with musical applications of the techniques of artificial life. As musicians and researchers, how and when do we classify our productions as art and when do we classify them as science. I often find in my personal productions that the line between artism and research if a thin one at best, with legitimate scientific questions spawning experimentations whose results are decidedly not science, and visa versa. I think that many who attended the workshop are of similar persuasion. This topic lends itself to a few question which perhaps we can elaborate on.

- Can we mix our research with artistic productions? And is this appropriate?

What comes to mind are areas such as computational biomusicology and simulation of the evolution of music which more often appear in music journals, though in some cases they may be real contributions to science. The corollary question is:

- If we are even attempting science, are we properly using the scientific method to answer questions, or are we just applying engineering techniques of classical computer science and artificial life to make something interesting?

- Is it appropriate to bend artistic works toward science? Or to pull science out of initially artistic pursuits?

It is not unheard of to re-appropriate aspects of work depending on the conference/publication/grant profile.

Of course, ALife in music is a broad topic with many interested parties producing varying degrees of art and science. I am most interested in the opinions of those who attended the workshop to express their thoughts on this in relation to their own work and to fill in parts of this topic I may have missed or neglected.

Food for thought

For those of us who survived the dramatic thunderstorm last night, the second day of the conference is in full swing...

Here I just want to put up for general discussion some of the recurring themes that have been debated since the start of the workshops as well as yesterday's sessions on embodiment and cognition.

- What is the relationship between engineering and science in the field of artificial life? Should we distinguish between them? If yes (and I believe this strongly to be the case), then how do we best distinguish between them?

- What is the relationship between information theory and dynamical systems theory? At Sussex we've already been debating this question a little bit on the Life and Mind blog. My personal opinion is that both approaches provide equally valid perspectives that are bound to generate interesting insights. However, the requirement of information theory to deal with input/output systems severely limits its applicability to systems with an autonomous organization.

- Finally, there is an ongoing debate about the relationship between physical robots and simulated agents. What are the advantages of using one over the other or both? From the scientific perspective I'm hard pressed to give examples of questions related to artificial life that require a physical implementation in order to be answered.

Ok, that's all for now! Enjoy the rest of the conference!
Tom

Bloggers at ECAL

As is now usual in almost all events, there are going to be a good amount of bloggers in the ECAL 07 conference. A few have mentioned it in their blogs:

• GreyThumb, which seems to be a collective blog, has mentioned the program.


• Eduardo Izquierdo has written a long and extensive post


• And myself; I'll be missing a few beats, but I'll be there tomorrow evening.

See you ghere!

Welcome to Lisbon!

Greetings conference attendees, and welcome to the ninth European Conference on Artificial Life. This blog will help to chronicle the events of the next week through the contribution of posts from those attending the conference. A message has been sent to the ECAL mailing list, regarding instructions on how to contribute. Tom Froese and myself, David Michael are helping to coordinate this effort, so if there are any questions, please contact either of us (my name at gmail.com).