 The T2tile project is building an indefinitely scalable computational stack. Follow our progress here on T Tuesday updates. Welcome back to the T2tile project. The top story, it's the end of the world, or at least it feels like that some days now as the novel coronavirus continues to spread around the globe. Here in the southwest of the United States and New Mexico, we're still in the relatively flat part of the curve. We're doing okay. How are you all doing? You know, it's interesting. I mean, on the one hand, it seems like, you know, it sort of puts everything in perspective, puts it in a little too much perspective. It's sort of paralyzing about thinking about other things. But you know, underneath it all, we keep on doing what we do because that's what living systems do. And so I want to give an update on the actual nitty gritty nuts and bolts of the T2tile project as well. On the other hand, you know, looking at this perturbation to the system, looking at this, you know, terrible tragedy as it unfolds in slow motion and then too rapid motion around the globe, you know, I've been thinking about robustness in system design and computing design for over a decade. And you know, I have to admit, when I started telling people about it and started, you know, proselytizing, speaking in favor of robustness, I imagined I would be able to get more traction than I have gotten over that decade. And really, what it comes down to is this relentless focus on efficiency that people have built into their heads. And there's, you know, plenty of times when efficiency is a good thing, but the mindset that the alternative to efficiency is waste rather than the alternative to efficiency can be robustness and the alternative to robustness is fragility. And, you know, so we look and we see these people who've made great fortunes by streamlining systems by taking the waste, a.k.a. the robustness, you know, and it can be some combination of both. One man's waste can be another man's robustness. It depends on what unexpected perturbation happens to the system. But these people who are all patting themselves on the back and walking away with their billions of dollars from having taken the robustness out of the system and now here we are. And it makes me think, you know, I have previously when I was giving talks about this stuff, I've talked about political structures as a way of interpreting what's going on inside a computer, but the reverse happens just as well that we can take computational arguments and computational architectures and structures and imagine how they apply to human systems, societies, and political systems as well. And as we look at how the different cultures and the different political organizations around the globe have responded to this, you know, so far the United States, it doesn't seem like we're doing a very good job as far as, I mean, if you assume that maintaining the most life for the most people is a good thing, something's happening, then it seems like we could have been doing a lot better than we have. And so I want to circle back to this later in this episode because I really want to just say, okay, well, at the end of the day, I'm going to do the project, I'm going to make progress, and I have made progress because it's been a while since we've talked. So the Artificial Life Conference this summer, which we've been aiming at for at least a year with the intention of having the first public display of the T2 tile grid, the 100 plus tiles operating all at once, doing stuff, you know, running a curated exhibition of people's software that they've written in this new T2 tile stack, this Ulan splat, and so forth, all the stuff that we've been talking about here, that conference is now virtual. We're not going to be going to Montreal. Montreal is not going to be hosting the thing. It's all going to be online. The tutorial that I proposed and was accepted about Ulan and splat, presumably, I'm told it's actually, it is going to happen, but it's going to be online. And so we're going to have to figure out new ways to, you know, build a, you know, get a camera and maybe we're going to need more bandwidth from wherever the camera is located. I mean, you know, this grid is going to be so big, it's going to be generating so much data in principle that we cannot get that data all off if we wanted to analyze it later. So, you know, we want to get a high res camera, you know, like there are these 8k cameras out now, but, you know, they're super expensive. But, you know, something that we can be looking at the grid and getting lots of information off it, which we can then be perhaps digesting down to stream onto the internet or what have you. But all of that has to be thought because that is now going to be the form in which the debut, the presentation of the grid is going to take place. But trying to keep the same timeline going for what I've been spending most of the time in the last couple of weeks. Oh, and, and the other thing, right? So the original paper deadline, the wall of science, all the stuff that I haven't told you guys about. The original deadline was March 1st, and then it got pushed back to March 18th, and then when it became a virtual conference, the deadline got pushed back to May 1st. So it's still more than a month away. And given that, I have largely switched back to working on the tiles themselves, back to intertile events. And the news on that front is, is, you know, everything takes longer, but it's fundamentally good. So previously we had talked briefly about how I was taking some of the protocol negotiation in particular, the saying is, does the tile next to me running the same physics, the same MFM simulation code that I am, down into the kernel. And that is now done. And they have a pretty good, pretty robust protocol that they exchange with each other. It takes a second, second and a half, whatever it is when they first connect up to determine whether or not they're running compatible physics. And if they're not running compatible physics, they don't even send cash traffic up to the MFM, the user space level. The user space level doesn't even know there's a connection there. And I am now working on a spike, a little demo program to, to grab, to grab those, to try to do events on top of this thing. And I've, I'm not going to go through it today because there's too much to talk about, but there's a new design that rather than thinking you're going to be doing one event all the way through to completion, now the idea is the code that I'm building now supports having many event windows in flight at the same time, which the old, the MFM simulator has in a limited way as well, but this is going to have it in a much more profound way, which I hope we'll see, I know, may get us several more milli-air who knows, we'll find out. But that is, you know, fundamentally what it all comes down to is I spent months trying to figure out small tweaks and little patches that would let me take most of the simulator code intact and drop it in with just shims around the outside to deal with the fact that we're on a tile and we have to actually communicate to other tiles in order to do it. I've now ditched that and I'm starting with a blank slate, you know, with new kernel modules and now a new user space code until I get up to the point where I have, okay, here's an event, here's a beginning, middle and end of an event, and then we're going to start porting back in the code, which we're going to have to, so that we can now run ULAM code and the splat code which compiles into ULAM on the tiles. So that's making good progress, I'm spending as much time on that as I can, and we'll hopefully hear more about that next week. Okay, so, you know, all of this time that I've been thinking about living computation and the relationship between living systems and computational systems, that has always for me been bigger than just computer engineering. And as I've been seeking out ways to move the needle on making some impact for these ideas about seeing the real deep relatedness between living systems and computational systems how they enter to find each other and so forth. One of the things that I've been working on for the last year is setting up a nonprofit foundation to be a place to center all of these projects, the T2 tile project, the computing up podcast that some of you may know about and other stuff as well. And to give it a point of contact and to let people support it if they want to. And that is now real. The living computation foundation exists. And, you know, that may not sound like much. But, you know, for someone like me, you know, the scientist lost in engineering land in commercial land. This is now scientists lost in lawyer land and tax code land, and so forth in corporate land. But we are real. The Secretary of State of the state of New Mexico has certified where where's we got there it is the great seal of New Mexico on the living computation foundation and more to the point the IRS knows about us as well. We don't yet have the nonprofit status cleared. We have a little bit more stuff to do. We're still, you know, trying to open new bank accounts when the banks are closed is a bit more challenging than it might be. But that is actually happening. Here is the mission statement for the living computation foundation. And it's kind of a mouthful. But I want to try to go through it and see if we can get a half decent reading. The living computation foundation advances a unified view of life and computing by supporting science and engineering to explore that connection and education and outreach to convey it. We seek to improve individual liberty and equal opportunity for the citizens of our emerging information technological societies. What do you think this is getting at when I was talking about a moment ago about robust first and different political structures, different organizations. One of the things that it comes out so clearly in robust first programming and indefinite scalability is that you want to use as little synchronization as you can. And synchronization is somewhat closely related to the idea of centralization. And centralization is the number one trick that people who are pushing efficiency always use. You know, Google is everywhere, but it's centralized Facebook centralized, you know, centralized government make the trains run on time. And what we need to be pushing what we need to be appreciating what we need to be supporting is the idea that we want only as much centralization only as much synchronization as possible to get the job done and keep everything as decoupled as possible beyond that. And that decoupling involves redundancies because it means things are being done multiple in local scopes, multiple times rather than all referring to one centralized scope for whatever the task is, which makes it inherently more robust and it makes it more robust in a natural way in a sort of spatial hierarchical way. The risk that I see of computers and the internet and all of the stuff that we see happening now is that they can easily be and to a large degree, they already have been a tool for increased centralization of power. And that's why the Living Computation Foundation wants advance the view that computational systems and living systems are the same kind of things so we can apply the same sort of stuff. And we can have completely sort of value neutral that it's not about people per se or these people versus those people. It's just about computational systems. And we can make arguments that we want to have local control, keep things small. The way to scale is not to scale in a flat space, but to scale amongst federations of eagles of larger and larger scale as we go up. We'll see. You know, the video that I put out last week, the simulation of the disease spread with the hospitals and so forth. I used the Living Computation Foundation as my affiliation for the first time. And here's our logo. Tell me what you think. The idea is it gets at the union of the rigidity of more computational stuff with the so you know, the the output sense and the input sense that makes computational go and then the more unique and opportunistic systems of life that just appear wherever they can and it's all of those things the input the output, the system is defined by its environment, the environment is defined by the systems it contains and the spark of opportunism of uniqueness of a living system. So that's it. I'm excited about it. I'm terrified about it as always. But it's now real and the website is www.livingcomputation.org. There's just a placeholder there and you know, we need help of all kinds, you know, if you can write copy, if you can do, you know, web web page management stuff and you have some time that you'd like to put into it, you know, get in touch with me and the get get her email or Twitter or anything. And let's see if we can't, you know, draw some people in to help flesh out the foundation. All right. That's it. I'll stop here. We'll have another update next week. I don't know if I'm going to stay weekly. It's possible that I will go biweekly for a while because I have these other videos that I'm sort of feeling the need to maybe, you know, who knows how long any of us really have. Maybe I should move some of those along and get them out as well. So we'll see. But I will see you next week. Thanks for being here. Be well, be safe. See you next week.