 was a new version of splits at the end of the universe. A demo did way back when before a lot of this stuff was even working and I sort of implemented it in splat in the last couple of weeks and did a run. That is a nine-day simulation that we just looked at there at varying speeds of time lapse. And I wanted to use it today to talk about cellular automata architectures. And because there's a couple of things that are important about cellular automata that are widely used that I think are a little bit misleading and they cause trouble. And I thought it would be opportune time to kind of maybe go through one of them. And that's the idea that, you know, a cellular automata is the spatially distributed array of computing elements that talk just locally to each other. And the question comes up, well what happens when you reach the edge of the array? Because there's going to be an edge somewhere. And what typically people do is they wrap the east and west edges around and connect them to you. So when you head out the edge in one direction you come right back in the other way and the same thing with the north and south edges you wrap them around. So you end up making what would, in your mind anyway, it's like a tube and then the tube is connected to itself. So it's like a doughnut. It's a torus shape. And, you know, I've spent, you know, I spent years doing that sort of stuff as well. It makes a whole lot of sense. If you want to focus on the rules that a sort of individual little agent, a little being, is using in the middle of a vast expanse of open space, you don't want to have to care about special cases for the edges. But one of the things that has come home more and more clear to me over the years, especially starting focus on indefinite scalability, the idea of, you know, this array might not be fixed. It might be this big now, but it might get bigger later. And we've seen some demos in the T Tuesday updates where that is exactly what happens. The size of the simulated array, the size of the underlying cellular automata grows as the same thing is running. So that's not the only problem that the doughnut architecture, the torus shape has. The other problem is, is that, you know, you say, OK, I just want to simplify things and focus on the main event. But the problem is, is that cellular automata structures, they often tend to grow. And in fact, we like it when they do, because it's kind of cool and a little more complicated structure coming out of some simpler beginning. The problem is, once it grows to be more than the size of whatever actual array you have, now part of its own structure comes back and starts running into itself. And an awful lot of the cool demos that you can see in cellular automata land, living on the doughnut, what you're actually seeing, the importantly, what you're actually seeing is the pattern essentially interfering with itself as it goes around and around and does whatever it does. And that, in fact, that behavior would not happen in a real world array that, you know, has edges or just keeps going on indefinitely as if that was possible. So one of the things that we've been doing seriously in the T2 tile project is to try to be an advocate for edges. Edges are a good thing. Figuring out what your creatures, your beans are going to do when they run into an edge is an inherent part of the system design. It cannot just be swept away as a minor detail. Sorry, no doughnut. And the splits at the end of the universe demo is meant to drive that home, you see, because the way it works, what we just saw. So you pick a random direction and a random color and you just keep going in that direction as long as you can, as long as there's space overall, you swap with whatever is ahead of you. And only when you actually get to the point where there's some kind of edge that you cannot go any further, you pick a new random direction and you also pick a random neighbor around you. And if that neighbor is empty, you split. You make a new you with a new random direction, a new random color in this new version and off it goes. And so if we had used the doughnut architecture for splits at the end of the universe, what would have happened? We would have had one guy, one being going around and around and around in whatever direction it went forever and ever and ever, completely boring because it doesn't do anything unusual until it reaches the end of the universe. But instead, what happens here is the universe fills up solely as a result of interactions between the edges of the universe. And you get these long range structures of, you know, picking, if you go into a corner and you pick a random direction, if you head into a wall, you'll just bounce again. Or if you head into the other wall, you'll just bounce again. So there's only, you know, up and over and diagonal out, that's possible. And you get these, you know, huge flows of traffic going in various directions. There's additional details on exactly how the colors work in this sort of thing. And then of course, you know, splits at the end of the universe, eventually fills up all empty space. The only way it fills empty space is when it gets to the edge of the universe, it tries to pick a new direction and finds an empty site there. So it gets slower and slower and slower as the universe gets more and more full. But eventually, in principle, it would fill the last empty space and then everybody would just be moving around and swapping over each other till Kingdom come, except not here because the simulation engine that we're using is still fragile. We've got to fix it. Okay. That's the rant demo for today. Got a bunch of other stuff. Let's go fast. So yeah, splits at the end of the universe, next generation, I'm going to try to get an annotated version up on T2 demos before our next update, we'll see what happens. All right, we got research development outreach. The research front is, you know, trying to rebuild the engine so that it won't be fragile in the way that we saw that was pretty spectacular, wasn't it? You know, the splits at the unit, the whole bunch of the grid would reboot because it got some will not reboot the engine would restart because it got some horrible error. But there was enough splitting at the end of the universe beans around to start reinfecting because the whole thing didn't crash at once. And they actually managed to survive by dodging and bouncing and dodging and bouncing. Anyway, at first, I was thinking I could just use a GitHub branch, you know, a software thing to separate it, but it's hard because in addition to having a separate piece of software on one tile that I'm developing on, it's got to be able to spread to a bunch of other tiles in a little local neighborhood because the whole point of this is to work on intertile stuff. So what I thought I would do was I was going to make a new key master the key master tile that we've seen it's the white one is the one that actually has this the crypto private key on it so that it can generate packages that will get propagated by the common data manager out to an arbitrary grid. And so the idea was, you know, I'm having a lot of fun running on the fragile grid. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to take the key master that we've got and nuke it. But I need to be able to nuke something. So the idea was to create the blue key master because I had this nifty blue case. Unfortunately, I went through two tiles installing them in the blue case before realizing that there's, you know, in permanent all kinds of little teeny bumps inside the thing that cause it to push down on the touchscreen. So the touchscreen never works with the blue key master. So that was the end of that brilliant idea. Instead, we have the gold key master, which hopefully, yeah, here we can see. So it's not even really gold, I just use the gold sharpie pen to make it be gold. And the idea was is that this is going to be the one that will do the new development on and the old original key master the white one will just continue to be doing for demos and so on and so forth. And you know, my plan at first was just to have, you know, take the private key that this guy was using and leave it there and then have put a different private key on the gold key master and otherwise let everything go through. But in fact, that turned out to be a problem. So at first, I was right. So I was just commenting out the name of the old private key and inserting the new one gold key master. But that didn't really that one didn't work because now, you know, I was only trying to change one package on the MFM engine itself. But if I didn't have the original other key in it, then all the other packages were rejected during propagation. So what I really needed was to have two different keys that would both be recognized, but have only one of them that was on the gold key master and the white key master would not know about the other one at all. And therefore, packages signed by the gold key master would not propagate. And it turned out, you know, I had actually implemented that. You're right. So this was the problem that all the packages were getting dumped because they had the wrong key. But there was already support for having multiple key masters. So now we've got the T2 key master that's the original one that the white key masters using and the gold key master has its own separate one. And it took a few little places in the code to fix it up. But now it seems like I can actually, you know, really mess up the code. You know, so for example, I mean, so this one, this is still running a huge gene because I haven't killed anything yet. But this guy, right, he's running a splits at the end of the universe. Right. So see, there he goes bounced off created a whole bunch splits at the end of the universe fills up space really fast. Because there's no reason why I can't it when it tries to bounce, there's lots of empty space, but then it immediately hits the wall tries to create another one, and so forth. All right, we'll let these guys go. So that is the research front. The development side of things, you know, it's just crazy. I'm calling the research front the software stuff at this point. And the development side is, you know, working on the grid. You know, and last time when we built this risers to support to bring the grid up higher, you know, after I got it all set up, I slid it over into the corner, into the position where it would actually go once there's seven lotuses, but we only have two lotuses at the moment. And so a couple of days later, it was like in the middle of the night, it was like saying, Well, you know, I want to set up to do another run with the with the cameras, see if I can get another good time lapse. I need to slide it back a little bit. So I slid it back a little bit and the pipe dropped out of the ceiling like that and the whole thing crashed. And it was a mess. It actually I don't know if you can really see it. It's scraped up the bookshelf cabinets, multiple bookshelf cabinets as all this stuff came down. This was my my Kleenex box. The Kleenex box got like basically sawed through by the edge of the hangers that had all those zigzag things on it. And they got pretty well beaten up as well. I mean, you got some of them here. They just, you know, they shattered like that. However, however, none of the tiles were damaged. As far as I can tell, they all booted. They all seem to work all the intertile connections still make intertile connections. The framework took the hit like it was supposed to. So that was nice. And this is what it looks like now that whole upper right hand corner. And that was the part that slid down those things that they just got smashed the connectors that go around the hooks that go around the rod are okay. But there's the hangers are going to have to be replaced. But it's been sitting like that that nine day run that we saw was like this with those hangers missing. So that's the development story. Oh, and then who'd be nice if this wouldn't happen again. So it was time for a little 3d printing stuff. Now, I mean, it could have been solved by, you know, just ordering a piece from the outside world. But why bother? It seems like I had the ability to do it. So I just, you know, made one of these little things up, printed it up, you know, maybe it took two or I guess it took three tries. And there it is. So it's just a little sleeve that goes around the thing and wangs down hard. That's that's really not going to move. So that now you try to slide it to the left, the collar bounces off of the upper the riser on the left hand side and keeps it from moving. If you want to go left, you've got to lift it up and go over. So now it's anchored in both directions. Hallelujah. All right. That's the development story. Yes, two updates ago. We, we all saw, I submitted a this little science fiction story search quiet wake to Asimov science fiction magazine. They said our average response time five weeks, you should expect a quick response. And in the last update, I had this slide that it was under review. And I was saying, you know, expectation management probably shouldn't probably expect it's like, you know, not not less than a 50% chance, you know, like it's odds off, you know, got to be prepared. Well, it was only a few days after the last update that this arrived in the mailbox. Although it does not suit the needs of the magazine at this time. Good luck. So there it is. And, you know, that really kind of really kind of hurt. I had managed to convince myself that, you know, this is such a, you know, nifty little story and so forth. And, you know, my big problem, of course, with talking about this at all, on the one hand, is, you know, it's all sort of pitiful and embarrassing from one point of view. But the other point is that, you know, my tiny, our tiny little community that we have here that's trying to do this stuff of folks that, you know, watch the videos, come check it out, participate in some fashion or another. I almost nobody's read the story. So it's really sort of, you know, okay, you're talking about something I still haven't had a chance to see. So I'm sorry about that. And I'm going to kind of shut up about it. I think after like today, we'll see how it goes. But, you know, I actually managed to convince myself that even though I said it was less than a 50% chance, maybe it was like a 45% chance, you know, but the fact, you know, and looking around and seeing how these things actually tend to work, the fact that it was like 17 days, like two and a half weeks. What that tells me is that, you know, it didn't even make the second read queue. You know, apparently, you know, stuff that just comes in the front door. You know, someone reads, takes a look at them and gets rid of as many as they can and only the ones that actually seem interesting in some way, go on and get read again. And, you know, so and again, I haven't really thought about this either that, you know, the quicker the answer is, the more likely it's going to be and no. So, you know, this was a pretty quick reply, which I said I wanted number one. And number two, you know, there was no feedback at all, except for the fact that they got the title of the story right. You know, and I had papers, scientific papers rejected from conferences and workshops before and so forth. And I participated in review panels that have rejected things, you know, and I know number one, it's an incredibly noisy process. And number two, that's just part of the game. But in this, at least in the scientific communities, you know, you're sort of obligated to say something. And a lot of times the reviews are pretty perfunctory and not all that informative, but they do exist. So that made me sad. I didn't even get to the level of a comment about why. So, you know, I took my 72 hours of just thinking about other stuff. I self medicated with some shopping. And, you know, okay, so I got over it. Going forward, what I think I want us to do is I want to try at least one more time. I can't have, you know, I can't let as mobs beat me for you know, just one outing. So the idea is, I think try one more time to actually send it someplace. And if still don't get any luck, then somehow self publish. I'm not sure exactly what that would mean. Just put up on a website, Patreon, you know, make a little book out of it and put it up on Amazon. I don't know. But we'll jump off that bridge when we get to it. And so what do you think? I mean, I could just turn it around and send it to analog, or send it to the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, the top three. But you know, I'm thinking, you know, maybe that's a little bit, you know, embarrassing, the unpublished author with, you know, this crazy story that is, you know, it's a little hard to get into. You have to be willing to identify with things that you don't often identify with to really make it go. And then, you know, there are other structural issues to as well. But you know, here's the thing. There's a bunch of things of venues outlets for science fiction that count as real. And if I get accepted by one of those, and there's a spectrum of them, then I can become an associate associate associate member of the science fiction writers of America, the SFWA. And, you know, I've been part of professional associations as an academic over the years, you know, engineering societies and scientific stuff and so on. And, you know, they're good to some degree, they're good for networking to some degree. And they're kind of a racket to some degree as well. But this has been a new racket. So I thought it would be fun to try to do that. So we'll see. So I'm kind of thinking maybe let analog, let magazine and fantasy and science session go and look for something farther down that still qualifies as a publication for purposes of SFWA. What do you think? You know, blinded by the dream. You know, when I talk to other people, and I'm kind of at least if I'm not, you know, cranky for some reason, you know, I can sort of understand where people are coming from and help people see things clearly. But you know, when it comes to my own stuff, that doesn't work. Because, you know, I've got this dream that we can do a whole new kind of way of computing that would be more robust, would be a better society, you know, more interesting, it'll be more a better model for how we think and exist. It will be all kinds of good things in principle. But it doesn't exist at all. And I'm trying to will it into existence. And I have been for for decades now. And that means I don't have an accurate view of the world. I, you know, stuff that might work. I want to push the odds up and think that the odds are more than negligible. And stuff that I don't like, I want to think, Oh, yeah, people are going to be figuring out a bad idea really soon now. And so this was a little reminder that, you know, the world out there is the world out there. And, you know, when you have a dream, that's what you sign up for. So it hurts sometimes. But you know, I am bent, but not broken, we're going to keep on pushing well, full core press at this point, we're going to keep on pushing all the possible ways we can and see how far we go. So anyway, that's the outreach story for this update. And, and I guess that is actually about it. I fell to welcome the nerds again, these are the same goals as last time, you know, have made progress, the G draw user space spikes, you know, the path is now open to that because we have the gold keymaster and so forth. I have got some other stuff coming up in the next couple of weeks. In particular, I'm going to do a panel discussion on self organization. I guess, I think it might be one week from today, February 22. I don't have the all the exact details yet and so forth. But it's associated with the guy, Joshua Bach, who was the one who called me, you know, the Bob Ross of computer models or something like that. So he invited me to do this thing. So I said, yes, so we'll see. And I've got some scientific writing deadlines and stuff coming up early in March as well. So it's going to get it's going to get a little busy for a while. But I am enjoying being able to run these demos and catch another one. I have a whole another one that I want to talk about. But I think I'm going to save it for next time. And so I'll stop here. And again, folks, thank you for participating at whatever level you can. I hope things are going all right with you. We're doing okay. I hope to see you next time.