 Computers keep changing the world, but their power and safety is limited by their rigid design. The T2TILE project works for bigger and safer computing using living systems principles. Follow our progress here on T Tuesday Updates. This is the 44th T Tuesday Update. Let's get into it. Last week was from the UK in Newcastle. I had just arrived for the ALIVE conference. This week it's been about the traveling and the conference. And actually what I want to talk about today is about people, people in artificial life. Don't talk about them enough. I mean this is a technology, web blog, whatever it is. But really there's a tremendous number of people that are sort of important. Perhaps to the project, but to me personally in any event that I don't get to see very often. I get to see some of these. So I just want to talk about some of them today. We only got back in, you know, eight hours ago or something from a lot of traveling. So hopefully we'll keep this quick. Alright, so artificial life is made of people. This is in not any super great order and they're just obviously pictures that I got off of. Google image shirts by and large I have a few from my camera and whatnot. Cliff Bum was the first guy that we saw in Amsterdam in Schifall Airport, however you say the name. Who said he came up and recognized us and so forth. And I really like Cliff. For me he's an emblematic of a certain kind of artificial life person. That, you know, does all kinds of different things. It sort of knows a lot about everything and is just, you know, sort of everywhere. And then you end up spotting him doing something else. For example, in addition to doing a life work at Michigan State University. He also is like a blacksmith or something and he actually built the awards, the conference awards. One of which, which I handed out, which I'll mention a little bit later. And, you know, so there's a whole bunch of people who are sort of about the ideas and about doing the stuff. And it's great. So it was good to see Cliff. Charles Ophria is a huge luminary in artificial life also at Michigan State. He and I went to the same high school although we didn't overlap in years on Long Island. And Charles is really great. And he was there and we were chatting with him. You know, he sort of bookended the conference for us. We saw him in the Amsterdam airport on the way to Newcastle to begin the conference. And we saw him and his family again in the train lounge in Newcastle, Central Station, preparing to take our respective trains, them to London, us to Edinburgh and so forth. And, you know, Charles has built this incredible thing. He got some big grants and hired lots of really great people and made Michigan State, well, you know, not just him, but in addition to a number of people, he made Michigan State into a real force in artificial life, at least in this country. Wolfgang Bonzov, you know, you talk about artificial chemistry. You know, this guy wrote the book on artificial chemistry with collaborators. It's just come out in the second edition on an artificial chemistry book. And he's, you know, absolutely the nicest guy. I'm always so happy to see him. So it was great to get to catch up with him and so forth and looking at his work and so forth. So that was Wolfgang. Chris Adami, who I met when I visited Michigan State University a couple of years ago and the videos are up, the two videos from the two talks I gave there are up on the Dave Ackley channel. And I got to talk to Chris Adami at that point. I had known his paper reputation. I had known him by name for a long time. But he's done a lot of really interesting stuff. And one of the things that he did that I particularly liked, you know, a number of years ago, you know, we've had this sort of informal slogan that, you know, life preserves dynamically preserving a pattern. And that, you know, I was talking to Chris about it, that this sort of view that life, you know, where does information actually come from? The sort of Shannon information is all presupposes that both people center and receiver already share a dictionary. But why would that be true? How would that come to be true? And so there's a sneaking suspicion that I've had for a long time that really, this goes to the core of living computation, that living systems and computational systems end up being the same thing. Why is that? Because it's the struggle for life that gives choices, actions, information, meaning. The sort of Shannon information in sense of meaning of information is ultimately completely sterile. It never explains the meaning side of information. And living systems, I think, do Chris Adami actually has a paper where he shows that mathematically, you know, with simulations, looking at DNA chains and you can sort of knock out various things and see how it affects simulated, simulated creatures, see how it affects their ability to live. And you can actually infer the meaning of an individual piece of genetic information. So for, you know, for that and many, many other reasons, Chris Adami was got the Lifetime Achievement Award, which was one of those awards that had been made by Cliff Bum. And it, and, you know, again, Chris Adami also at Michigan State University. And in fact, he showed this great picture from when he was just getting started, when he was young and look at this, Charles Ophria, Cliff Bum already there. They were, you know, students at the time and they were implementing code for him. And now, you know, this is the way it works. You know, you land where the work takes you and then you go from there. So that was all really great. Another friend from artificial life is Haruki Sayama. Haruki is an incredible whirlwind. He's everywhere. He's all over complex systems, as well as artificial life, as well as areas of mathematics and other stuff as well. He was just tweeting. He tweets a lot and he was just tweeting about the Kardashian index, the K-index. This is another one of these formulas that you can compute for academics where you sort of take your number of Twitter followers and you put it together with your number of paper citations. And if you have a lot of Twitter citations relative to your citation count, then, you know, you might have a high Kardashian index and Haruki has a high Kardashian index. If you're greater than five, then you're a science Kardashian or something like that. I don't know. Of course, you know, my Kardashian index is incredibly pitiful. But, you know, to me, the important thing about Haruki is that in addition to being out there and supporting everybody and tweeting about everybody else's papers and just building the field, he's also does all kinds of really cool, really interesting stuff himself. And the thing that he was talking about today was just a little quick two-page paper but it was a really interesting idea that, you know, you can take the idea of a graph for connecting things together by weights and how much they're connected. You could take a graph that represents a bunch of environments that might be related, like how you could get from one environment to another. And you could take another graph of organisms that have relationships among their genomes or their behaves or whatever. And just by doing a purely mathematical operation of multiplying the two graphs, a graph product in a certain kind of way, you can actually then from the eigenvectors, the mathematical properties of the result, you can actually observe things. And the thing that's so great about this, right, is that unlike all of the stuff that I do and that so many people in artificial life do, there's no simulation here. This is just a matrix describing one thing, a matrix describing another thing. Do arithmetic on it and you're done. I mean, you know, it's a limited, it's a little demonstration and, you know, obviously there's a lot of coupling between how you can move from one environment to another, depending on what kind of organism you are as fish, bird, different ways of moving between environments, but it was just a very cool thing. And it's just an example of the kind of stuff that Heroke does on top of being everywhere all the time doing everything. So Heroke's great. For example, here is Heroke introducing Stefano Badestin, one of the keynote speakers. And that's one of the great things about going to these conferences is that you get these people that are coming in from nearby fields or even quite different fields that are telling you stuff that you never knew, absolutely at all. Stefano is sort of an economist type. And so, yeah, Stefano Badestin. And he gave us this great talk, also one thing. He did this paper where by analyzing financial information, you can kind of identify the key movers and shakers of the entire global economy. And so there's this bow tie thing where you have this sort of high fan in and high fan out and you can identify things that are the center of the bow tie. And he did it. And so he had a really great talk. I went up and talked to him afterwards about, you know, pushing back a little bit on some of the things, because it all seemed to me there was a result that if you have a certain kind of relationship among people who are trying to trade risk, these credit default swaps that were like implicated in the 2008 thing, there's a theorem that says, you know, certain conditions are OK and it really didn't seem to me like they were that OK. So I was talking to him afterwards. And we actually got into it in the front of the room, which was kind of fun. And Rudy Fuchsland, who I didn't know before, he was one of the conference organizers and he was sort of taking care of Stefano. And, you know, he actually invited me to come along with them to dinner, which I really wanted to do, but I had a prior engagement, which I'll tell you in about a minute. But this is the kind of thing that happens in conferences, especially if you can manage to scrape up the money to go year after year. And again, I went, you know, in the 90s and the early 90s, I used to go to these things and then, you know, through the O's. But then I took a big gap off while I was trying to do biological approaches to computer security and stuff like that. Another one of the key notes, this is one of the guys that I tweeted about, is doing microbial fuel cells, you know, actually having living organisms in reactors where you pour in, you know, dead flies and grass cuttings in urine and they digest it, they literally digest it and they produce electricity and he runs robots all over this. These are mostly just showing that it's possible sorts of things, but apparently his group has been actually making urinals, demonstration urinals that had been at the Glastonbury Music Festival or something for the last several years, where they make their own power, the lights in the urinals are run by digesting the urine. A-life is great. You know, it's been going since the 90s, since the late 80s and, you know, as people were talking about at the end of the conference, you know, it's still weird, it's still welcoming, there's still new ideas and that's good. Well, okay, and then there was my stuff, which, you know, was a little bit more conventional from some points of view. But, you know, the talk went pretty well and there were... Right, so Susan Stepney, another big name in artificial life based in the UK, B.S. University of York. Our whole artificial chemistry session, there were three talks. The first one was from Susan Stepney's lab, then there was me and then the last one was Susan Stepney's lab, so I was the whole in the Susan Stepney artificial chemistry donut. I don't know exactly why the Guardian has a picture of Isaac Asimov next to Susan Stepney's article, although they look a little bit similar. But she asked one of the questions at the end. It's a little bit hard. The talk is now up over on the Dave Ackley channel. I'll link to it here. She asked one of the questions at the end. The second question, I'm not sure who was, somebody named Alan. I haven't figured out who that is yet. The third question was from Lee Cronin and Lee Cronin is another big name in sort of an adjacent field to artificial life. He is artificial life, but he's a real chemist and he's been building chemical systems, you know, robotics-based things, all sorts of stuff to do chemical reactions and actually perform computations of various sorts. So he gave a keynote at the A-Life conference a couple of years ago. That's where I first became aware of him and he showed up to my talk, well, to the artificial chemistry session. You know, he's a feisty guy and apparently, you know, one of his bones to pick is, how do we get to call it chemistry at all? I said, well, go on artificial chemistry. We can go on artificial anything, right? And so he and I had a little go at the end and I wanted to catch up with him because, so, you know, basically he's got a thing called the chem-puter. That's what he was referring to at the end, where, you know, he's got some essentially programmable ability to do chemical reactions and he wanted to say, you know, couldn't we take the movable feast ideas, the ways of programming these things and pop out the digital computer underneath and put his chem-puter structure underneath. And my response was exactly what I said, you know, it's not something I'm going to be working on anytime soon because there's so much to do with a digital substrate, but in principle, sure, it's better than CPU and RAM. At least it's completely distributed. I feel like, you know, he was a little bit old for selling what he could actually provide as compared to what a digital system already provides, like, you know, random number streams on every individual site that are de-correlated from each other, stuff like that's more complicated. But I really was glad that he was there and I was really glad to get the feedback from him and I hope that can actually connect with him more in the future. In addition, there's all of these younger researchers that show up these things. Artificial life is one of these things for better and for worse, where there's a very significant portion of folks who are coming to their first artificial life conference. They're graduate students. They're interested in their postdocs doing something crazy, whatever it is. Lana Senapayan, I first met at Tokyo last year. She asked some questions during my talk and so forth. And she's doing great stuff. And as it happened, I ended up giving her the Artificial Life 2019 Education and Outreach Award, which was one of those awards made by Cliff Boehm, for this A-Life paper Twitter's handle that you can just go subscribe to. And she pulls out papers from Artificial Life, the People Center, she looks at them, gets a quote and that's a picture, posts them. And they get a lot of attention. It's really a very good thing. So she was there. Another folk, Nicholas Gutenberg was another one who that we met at the airport. So he and I ended up standing around in an airport lounge and learning out about what's been happening later and so forth. Kevin Kovitz is a little bit older, but he's still got that youthful vigor so much does. So I ended up going to his talk where he had a particular sort of fitness landscape thing about how you have different opinions, different parts of your brain can end up sort of making the search easier for other parts of your brain. So he and I spent quite a bit of time trying to give him some feedback trying to say, you know, you might be a little bit overstated in your case. And then finally this guy, Nam Lee, who was sort of hanging around and so he and I ended up having quite a few chats. And, you know, I guess he's Vietnamese and he's got a lot of the sort of Asian being sort of very polite and everything. But then I finally heard his talk and he was talking about the Baldwin effect, which is something that I've done some work on in the past. And he was like, you know, yes. He just sort of cutting loose. It was a real bad ass on stage. It was great. Talking about how to understand what the original guy Baldwin was saying who didn't of course call it the Baldwin effect because that's the way it works. And so it was a lot of fun meeting him as well and so we ended up with a selfie, which he sent to me. Harold Feldman organized the conference and that is in many ways a thankless job except you get a big round of applause at the end. Plus you get, you know, you're the editor on the proceedings and so forth. And I had not met Harold really before, although he was in Tokyo last year. And, you know, he's really great. We had a few very brief chats, but mostly he was just being run frazzled the whole time. All right. And the reason that I didn't go to the dinner with Stefano Battiston was because I was going out for beer with Juniper Lovato and Lauren. He were to frame us, the pitcher down in the corner here. This guy, why is he appearing in a Google image search for Juniper Lovato? Because they're married, number one. And number two, because it turns out that I knew Juniper from the Santa Fe Institute where she was sort of running education and all kinds of outreach stuff there for a number of years. And now she's at the University of Vermont and the University of Vermont is actually organizing A-Life 2020. It's going to take place in Montreal, but that's just an hour away across the border from Vermont. And so I got to spend time, well, in addition to just catching up with Juniper, because it had been a while, talking about maybe we should have some kind of art display, some kind of room on a wall where we could have two meters by a meter and a half of 152 tiles that would be running a curated exhibition of software that people wrote in the coming year. And we'd have maybe blocks of three hours of time and you'd know up front that John Smith software is going to be running from noon to three on Tuesday and Sally Jones software is going to be running from three to six on Tuesday and so forth. I want to see if we really can't maybe even get a competition or something like that. And Juniper was very positive, they knew about the conference space and they were thinking maybe we could have it in the lobby where people could see it all the time or maybe it would be off in sort of a, you know, build a little hood so it would be a little darker, a little more meditative space. So that was incredibly exciting. We have a contact at A-Life 2020, which is going to be next July. It sounds like a long ways away, but as far as getting all of this done, all of this working on the wall running with software, I think that's a great goal. All right. And Lauren, again, who I really hadn't met before, but he was really great too. And then so it is, artificial life is made of people. There's Lance Williams, my collaborator from UNM right there and all these other folks, which you could probably recognize a bunch of them outside the castle where we had our banquet dinner, where a bunch of Harry Potter stuff was filmed. All right. Save this. That's it for this week. Next week, it's back to techno nerd stuff. Using the lock tracing stuff, we made a lot of progress and I really think there's a chance we might have at least real locking and perhaps progress towards real cash intertile events. I'll see you next week. Have a good week.