Wolfram Science

Michael Schreiber's talk

Posted by Todd Rowland

After just having listened to Michael Schreiber's talk, I was thinking that I'd like to say something to the blogience.  It is kind of a neat idea, though it is hard to understand and explain what he is talking about.

As he said in the talk, some people find it a logically impossible dream, while others see it as completely trivial.  Given those reactions, it means he is on to something.

Allow me to paraphrase, and then I will say that he wants to find simple descriptions of rules that lie within large rule spaces.  From the global context of complex systems, where one might have a complicated rule, but at the same time one wants to use the power and methods of NKS.  Then one has to have a simple description, or a compression of the rule.  Going even further, if one allows that all natural processes are computations, then one wants to compress the complicated rules in terms of simpler ones.

So that might explain why one might think it is impossible.  But he has some ideas of realizing this idea using what he calls formal coordinates.  Interesting, but there would need to be a bit more concrete work done.  He showed a few examples, but to be more convincing, we'd probably need hundreds or thousands of such examples.

Brig Klyce, "The Evolution Prize"

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

Brig Klyce wants to know whether open-ended evolution in a closed system is possible.

He first asks whether is planet earth a closed evolutionary system and argues that it is not because of material from space. Also he discussed non-evolutionary processes like gene transfer: among bacteria gene transfer is the driver if innovation, he said. Example: the immune system of jawed vertebrates came via a transferred gene. 

Klyce wants to know the answer to his question and is going to be offering a prize. He is looking for board to help design the prize.

Abstract. Astrobiology Research Trust web site: www.panspermia.org.

Rod L. Sipe, "A Systems Development Life-Cycle Methodology for Agent-Based Model Development"

Posted by Kathryn Cramer.

The network is down, so I am not able to post this live. But here we go anyway.

Rod E. Sipe is a specialist in the energy industry who does predictive marketing.

(can I get his technology adoption lifecycle graphic? I liked that.)

He discussed the origins of his approach in the work of Geoffrey Moore & Frederick Brooks.

He talked about the complex real world dynamics of getting innovation throug corporate systems and discussed the mismatched between academic expectations and business expectations, and the various stanges of meeting corporate standared and how these expectations are met. Or not. (The whole discussion reminds me very much of how my husband the editor talks about publishing.)

He looks for breakthroughs, not small improvements in an already optimized system. That was the key line in the talk for me.

Abstract. Website of New Science Partners: www.newsciencepartners.com.

George Danner, "Real-World Applications of NKS"

Posted by Kathryn Cramer; the wireless network died for the evening during this talk, hence the presence of the partial draft of this post for a long time.

So I'm late for this talk, the one on the program I most wanted to hear, having to do with Real World problems. When I walk in Danner, of Industrial Science, LLC, is talking about tweaking systems that hunt for easter eggs, which is more of less of a piece with the conversation about how to track what aid kids in orphanages are receiving. On the way back from the Ethiopian restaurant, my dinner companions and I were talking about systems for tracking the fate of individual kids in the 3rd world. This involved having randomly selected kids and trying to give a clear profile of real success and failure in helping them. And of course that easter egg problem he describes is essentially a way to optimize what we were just talking about before I walked in.

This one provided me with a fair amount  of food for thought that I will try to revisit later.

Abstract.