December 2008
3 posts
FaceMaker: making faces with artificial selection →
“Each of your votes helps to slowly transform abstract shapes into human faces. This is evolution driven by artificial selection.”
via reddit.com
L-systems on an FPGA →
“The advantage of using FPGAs is that the celerity and volume of calculations is greatly enhanced due to the application specific nature of the hardware, and the parallelism in calculation that occurs when allowed. This yields significant advantages for highly iterative, calculation intensive models that take significant calculation time for a serial processor, but happen almost instantly...
Scientists extract images directly from brain →
“Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.” - via Seed...
October 2008
4 posts
An End to Endless Forms →
“Researchers have put forward a simple model of development and gene regulation that is capable of explaining patterns observed in the distribution of morphologies and body plans.”
From Old Vials, New Hints on Origin of Life →
A classic experiment exploring the origin of life has, more than a half-century later, yielded new results - via io9.
Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary... →
“In the age of ubiquitous digital media, synesthesia is everywhere. In human, neurological form, it is rare: for perhaps three in a hundred people, a stimulus in one sensory modality automatically induces a sensation in another. Auditory-to-visual synesthesia, or “colored hearing” is much rarer still. Yet now this phenomenon is realised, apparently, inside every digital music player, on VJ...
September 2008
3 posts
Dynamical Systems Create Mathematical Art →
“Dynamical systems are mathematical models in which each point’s movement over time is set by a fixed rule. While these systems have some practical uses, such as tracking wildlife migration patterns or measuring the flow of water through a pipe, they can also create stunningly beautiful images.” - via io9
Ant 'from Mars' →
“Found in Brazil, the ant has a pale body and no eyes. Its mouthparts stick out like sharp forceps and are longer than the rest of its head.”
“The fact that a single ant ‘rediscovered’ in the rainforests of Brazil can tell us so much about the evolution of the ants highlights how little we know about the diversity of life on the planet.” - via Boing Boing.
The Landscape of Possible Intelligences →
“Whether (or when) AI is possible will ultimately depend on whether we are smart enough to make something smarter than ourselves. We assume that ants have not achieved this level. We also assume that as smart as chimpanzees are, chimps are not smart enough to make a mind smarter than a chimp, and so have not reached this threshold either. While some people assume humans can create a mind...
August 2008
11 posts
Exploring the virtual ant colony →
“Ground-penetrating radar has been used to nondestructively map an ant colony for the first time.
The results have been digitised and fed into an interactive visualisation system so that the colony can be explored virtually.”
Digital Planet podcast from ALIFE XI →
A nice 25 minute podcast from Alife XI, with interviews with Seth Bullock, Jason Noble and Richard Watson.
Stilts confirm ants count their paces →
“A bizarre experiment that involved putting ants on stilts has demonstrated that they count paces to measure distances.” - via Mathematics Under The Microscope.
Complex systems Java applets →
A small number of A-lifey simulation Jave applets.
(via reddit.com)
Swarms of robots join the army →
“Small robots working in swarms have finally moved out of the laboratory and into the real world. That was the most significant feature of the Ministry of Defence’s Grand Challenge competition, held over the weekend. It’s an idea that is also being pursued by the US military.”
“The Grand Challenge demonstrated what swarms of small, low-cost units can already...
Wild dolphins tail-walk on water →
“This indicates that they do learn from each other, which is not a surprise really, but it does also seem that they exhibit elements of what in humans we would call ‘cultural’ behaviour”
“These are things that groups develop and are passed between individuals and that come to define those groups, such as language or dancing; and it would seem that among the Port...
Giant kites to tap power →
An article about kite-based power generation — it quotes Allister Furey from University of Sussex, although doesn’t mention at all how the computer models were created. (By evolving neural networks, if I remember right?)
Smart future for swarming robots [BBC] →
A little bit of news from the Alife XI conference, regarding swarm robotics.
Fossils, Now Available In Color →
“Viewing fossils in color could reveal how the animals dressed up for courtship, for example, while finding camouflage patterns could cast new light on the environments the animals roamed in” - via Slashdot.
July 2008
4 posts
Researchers Synthesize Evolution of Language →
In a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, linguists observed an artificial language evolve from random to ordered, naturally adapting in ways that assured its reproduction. via digg.com
WatchIntroduction to Complexity Machine 1 on Vimeo. ”The software simulates the behavior of groups of agents and renders a variety three dimensional form with the resultant geometry. This video explains the concepts behind the project, some of its results, and some possible future directions.” Via Processing Blogs.
Watch
“By coding computer simulations with biologically modeled nervous systems, Torsten Reil [ex-EASy MSc] and his company NaturalMotion breathe life into the animated characters inhabiting the most eye-poppingly realistic games and movies around.” “See his work now in GTA4.” Via Machines Like Us.
150 Years of Natural Selection →
“Today we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first public announcement of what Richard Dawkins has called ‘…the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind.’ He was of course referring to the theory of natural selection, the primary mechanism driving the evolution of life on our planet” - via Pharyngula.
June 2008
6 posts
“I had to park my car at [Seattle’s] SeaTac on Saturday-Sunday and this...”
– George Dyson (via The Technium)
Is the Universe Actually Made of Math? →
According to Tegmark, “there is only mathematics; that is all that exists.” In his theory, the mathematical universe hypothesis, he updates quantum physics and cosmology with the concept of many parallel universes inhabiting multiple levels of space and time. By posing his hypothesis at the crossroads of philosophy and physics, Tegmark is harking back to the ancient Greeks with the oldest of the...
Robotic Cats →
The latest and greatest in killer cat/robot-hybrid technology. My favourite is BioBot.
(@hackaday.com)
RepRap: a project to create an open-source... →
“The RepRap project is working towards creating a universal constructor by using rapid prototyping…”
(via open…)
School Of Robofish Provides Basis For Underwater... →
“While most ocean robots require periodic communication with scientist or satellite intermediaries to share information, these can work cooperatively communicating only with each other.”
@sciencedaily.com
May 2008
11 posts
Collaborative robots for working in icy conditions →
No Cost for Complexity →
“The findings… shed doubt on a creationist criticism of evolution: that adaptation must rapidly slow as creatures grow more complicated, making them less able to adapt to changing conditions.” @wired.com
Lego Difference Engine →
“…I set out to build a working Difference Engine using standard LEGO parts which could compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.” Fair enough. via reddit.com
EASy-related video lectures →
In case you’re missing having lectures: …videos of lectures! Subtopics include: Evolutionary Computation/Swarm Intelligence Robotics Intelligent Agents Machine Learning Complexity Science Artificial Intelligence via reddit.com
Huge hidden biomass lives deep beneath the oceans →
“Life has been found 1.6 kilometres beneath the sea floor, at temperatures reaching 100 °C.” via richarddawkins.net
Meet the biomimetic jumping microrobot →
“Researchers from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL are unveiling a novel, grasshopper-inspired jumping robot at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation today in Pasadena, California. The robot weighs a miniscule 7 grams, and can jump 1.4 meters, or more than 27 times its body size — ten times farther for its size and weight than any existing jumping...
Evidence of evolution in the stickleback. →
Thick scales are pigmented in dark brown above or dark purple below. News via http://news.nationalgeographic.com
WatchThe massive Creation Museum opened on Memorial Day, 2007. Complete with robotic Eve living peacefully with cyborg dinosaurs, the 27-million dollar complex is designed to convince people that “science actually confirms biblical history.” at currenttv
“Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is...”
– Finally, a sensible bit of writing on the Platypus Genome story: The Platypus Genome on Pharyngula
April 2008
8 posts
Brainbows and Connectomes - Mapping the human... →
“A new field of study known as connectomics is described by Jeff Lichtman in this video. The aim is to create complete wiring diagrams for the brains of animals and eventually humans” - via The Streeb-Greebling Diaries
Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory and... →
“A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere—or a model of the atmosphere—could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.”
Biomimetics - National Geographic Magazine →
“Biomimetics brings in a whole different set of tools and ideas you wouldn’t otherwise have.” via Boing Boing.
10 Important Differences Between Brains and... →
“Although the brain-computer metaphor has served cognitive psychology well, research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed many important differences between brains and computers. Appreciating these differences may be crucial to understanding the mechanisms of neural information processing, and ultimately for the creation of artificial intelligence.” Also see commentary at Machines...
WolframTones : Cellular Automata music →
Some CA music wrapped up in a bit of WolframEgoTM. “WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram’s computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story—and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.” (via reddit.com)