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Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

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Steve Smith

Re: Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

Marcus -
> Yesterday four police cars quickly surrounded the neighbor's house with their lights and horns blaring. It turned-out to be a practical joke, as they rushed to the door to deliver happy birthday balloons. People were peeking out their windows in fear. I digress.

In some neighborhoods (maybe not in Berkeley, but in Oakland) this could
lead to a full-on firefight?

If you were a "good" city dweller (by my cynical model described
elsewhere) you would not have even looked out the window because, after
all, *it is none of your business*.

Did you jump into your cast-iron bathtub like I hear families regularly
do in Palestine?

Digressions R us,

- Steve

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve writes:

< I will cop to being guilty of free-associative riffing off of other
people's threads. When Owen was active here he used to chide us all
about "good thread hygiene" and "thread hijacking". We (me at the
vanguard perhaps) have become quite sloppy in this. >

I don't have much trouble backtracking to an origination topic (if it has momentum) or just running with a new topic. A title makes more sense after a trajectory has played out. All of the active discussion lists or Usenet groups I've been on have had this property.

Marcus

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gepr

Re: Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

Yeah, there's no problem with splattering threads. (Steve IS the fan upon which any good thread will splatter.) What annoys me is saying/thinking one is doing one thing, but actually doing another thing. I know it annoys me when *I* do that, usually accidentally because my command of language is so bad. And I appreciate it when others call me out for it.

On 5/28/20 12:59 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Steve writes:
>
> < I will cop to being guilty of free-associative riffing off of other
> people's threads. When Owen was active here he used to chide us all
> about "good thread hygiene" and "thread hijacking". We (me at the
> vanguard perhaps) have become quite sloppy in this. >
>
> I don't have much trouble backtracking to an origination topic (if it has momentum) or just running with a new topic. A title makes more sense after a trajectory has played out. All of the active discussion lists or Usenet groups I've been on have had this property.

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Steve Smith

Re: Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

In reply to this post by jon zingale

Jon/Glen (et alia) -

I very much agree that questions of a formality-informality spectrum will weave

itself throughout the work. It seems to me that the informality ought to provide a

place for birds to make a nest, a bellybutton for lint to collect, and a place for

rust to never sleep. To my mind, it is not necessarily the formality that chokes
development. Rather, I think of formality purely as description and one among
many valid and possibly incongruous descriptions.

I am brought to think of mechanical tolerancing in juxtaposition to precise machining. The latter yields better performance (e.g. in a high performance internal combustion engine) initially but the former provides for better interchangeability of parts, especially for example, replacing worn parts along the way, and as I understand the principle, better performance (including reduced further wear) than putting in a "perfect as when new" part which would at least *accelerate* wear and *reduce* performance (think of replacing one ring or one main bearing in an engine after the rest had "worn in significantly")

As I understand it, traditional gunsmiths and early ICE mechanics had to *add* wear to a replacement part to match (not always in an obvious way) the wear amongst the existing parts.

In this *analogy*, a formal description of a system is like the precision machined parts which all function together well on assembly and all wear in together in-balance; a *less* formal description might be like a machined part with deliberate tolerance built in which does not require as much "wear in" to reach a dynamic balance and when a replacement (unworn) part is introduced the whole system is more able to accept it in with it's pre-created "slop". I am suggesting that a more informal (is formal->informal a spectrum or a step-function?) description of a system leaves room for the "moving parts" to operate even if they do so sloppily where if you "tightened up" those elements with (overly in this context) formalisms they would bind against one another? Can an informal system be a precursor to a formal system? Or must a formal system be constructed by composing *smaller* formal components? Some of the early attempts at powered, manned flight seemed to fail because of their lack of precision while the Wright Bros succeeded *because* they composed a series of more precise/formal elements?

Here is a place that I would
again emphasize Rota's take on eidetic variation. For Rota, the eidetic
variation includes all of the counterfactuals, contradictions, and messiness
that we develop/uncover as we vary in our minds an object of interest. It is
not necessary that we cut away babies from bath waters, but rather recognize
that the concepts are complex. I believe that the development of a concept can
especially choke when we fail to recognize that a concepts formal description
has a combinatorial explosion.

Following my line of thinking above, the contemporary penchant for developing software/systems as "soft assemblages" of existing allows for what seems like this "combinatorial explosion" what with "soft assemblage" leaving the "slop" to allow the components to work together in spite of not being designed to (humans in the loop often make up for the slop?). It also limits the combinatorics somewhat by allowing/selecting for larger components. Bolting a grappling hook onto an offroad vehicle with acrylic window-coverings and sheet steel-armor on the sides to make a storm-chaser vehicle (with only hundreds of variants) rather than building one of 10,000 variations from wheels, engines, nuts, bolts, etc. Spot welders and epoxy glue and self-tapping screws and duct tape and bailing wire and bungee cords make for "soft assemblage" .

A good example is a way the concept of random
number can be used, ironically enough, informally to mean a number I can name.

When in a conversation the concept of the random number is invoked, it evokes for
me a complex. I can sense within a single complex: frequentist randomness and Chaitin

randomness and even an ephemeral feeling/non-symbolic experience. Comparison of

these complexes with others provides the opportunity for new pivots and jumping-off

points, for the serendipity of missed connections and false juxtapositions. There was

something of this in my experience listening to the podcasters. At times I thought

that one had completely missed the other's point, but really I had missed the point,

namely that the discussion was not about a point. They were in play, constructing

common complexes and variations which they could share.

I like this apprehension, which also evokes in me a sense of abstract classes in OO... the creation and manipulation of a meta-thing that captures the essence(s) of the myriad things that can be made more concrete and/or instantiated from the abstraction.

When I compare or attempt to describe my sense of this in terms of varieties
and free module constructions, I am not saying that concepts are these things.
I am appealing to varieties (say) in terms of its conceptual content. If we found
that the language was flexible enough to do calculations, well that would be a

pleasant though unintentional corollary.

Interesting. I'll have to listen more (and more carefully) as this unfolds.

- Steve

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

In reply to this post by jon zingale

With viruses, there is the possibility of gene overlaps where the same sequence codes for multiple proteins. I’m not aware of any effort to use this to design (compress) instruction sets for synthetic systems (e.g. digital computers). The experience of being out-of-phase with a conversation has the same gist. Maybe you’ll learn something, but it wasn’t what was intended. It’s fanciful, but suppose one reading frame was the benign program and the other was the secret Bitcoin miner (or whatever). Like homomorphic encryption, but in plain sight.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Jon Zingale <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 10:15 AM
To: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

Glen,

I very much agree that questions of a formality-informality spectrum will weave

itself throughout the work. It seems to me that the informality ought to provide a

place for birds to make a nest, a bellybutton for lint to collect, and a place for

rust to never sleep. To my mind, it is not necessarily the formality that chokes
development. Rather, I think of formality purely as description and one among
many valid and possibly incongruous descriptions. Here is a place that I would
again emphasize Rota's take on eidetic variation. For Rota, the eidetic
variation includes all of the counterfactuals, contradictions, and messiness
that we develop/uncover as we vary in our minds an object of interest. It is
not necessary that we cut away babies from bath waters, but rather recognize
that the concepts are complex. I believe that the development of a concept can
especially choke when we fail to recognize that a concepts formal description
has a combinatorial explosion. A good example is a way the concept of random
number can be used, ironically enough, informally to mean a number I can name.

When in a conversation the concept of the random number is invoked, it evokes for
me a complex. I can sense within a single complex: frequentist randomness and Chaitin

randomness and even an ephemeral feeling/non-symbolic experience. Comparison of

these complexes with others provides the opportunity for new pivots and jumping-off

points, for the serendipity of missed connections and false juxtapositions. There was

something of this in my experience listening to the podcasters. At times I thought

that one had completely missed the other's point, but really I had missed the point,

namely that the discussion was not about a point. They were in play, constructing

common complexes and variations which they could share.

When I compare or attempt to describe my sense of this in terms of varieties
and free module constructions, I am not saying that concepts are these things.
I am appealing to varieties (say) in terms of its conceptual content. If we found
that the language was flexible enough to do calculations, well that would be a

pleasant though unintentional corollary.

Jon

jon zingale

Re: Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

In reply to this post by jon zingale

Marcus,

you write:
The experience of being out-of-phase with a conversation has the same gist.

You summarized much of my experience with Friam. Can you say more about

how it is like homomorphic encryption, but in plain sight? There is a sense that homomorphic encryption (relative to the privacy discussion) is in plain sight

(public key), so I am guessing you have something different in mind.

Jon

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

I guess I should be concrete. Suppose the instruction set is 6502.

Below, if we start at the first position, A9, the A register would be loaded with the value A0, then there would be relative branch. However, if we start executing at the second, A0, the Y register would be loaded with 10 and then there would be subroutine call. One could imagine modeling the effects with a constraint solver to embed two distinct programs in the same byte sequence. Neither would be encrypted, but one of them wouldn’t be visible without changing the readers reference frame. I don’t think a reverse engineer would spot it just from a disassembly.

A9 A0 10 20 10

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Jon Zingale <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Friday, May 29, 2020 at 9:23 PM
To: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Optimizing for maximal serendipity or how Alan Turing misdirected ALife

Marcus,

you write:
The experience of being out-of-phase with a conversation has the same gist.

You summarized much of my experience with Friam. Can you say more about

how it is like homomorphic encryption, but in plain sight? There is a sense that homomorphic encryption (relative to the privacy discussion) is in plain sight

(public key), so I am guessing you have something different in mind.

Jon