I thought I was joking

But actually, today and tomorrow, the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College is hosting a conference on The Human Algorithm. I wish I knew about it in time to go there! Speakers include Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, Marc Hauser and others for an impressive line-up who for sure will reveal the exact steps to be taken by any machine longing to be functionally equivalent to a human being. Free will and legal responsibility included.

I'm only half-joking. Maybe they will publish the proceedings.

The Algorithmic Lens on Freedom

Here's an algorithm for freedom: just follow these simple rules...

PhD

This is the obligatory tribute to Jorge Cham, the creator of phdcomics (Piled Higher and Deeper). A fact about Dr (of course!) Cham that I hadn't been aware of until yesterday: he's the same person who made the robotic cockroaches I am so fond of and who have such pretty names (the Sprawlettes): http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/biomimetics/.

Dr Seldin's Helices

The other day, Edward Seldin paid a lunch-break visit to our robotics lab. Dr Seldin is an oral surgeon and a mechanical engineer. In his spare time, he creates artistic renditions of platonic solids out of coat-hanger wire bent into helices with machines that are also his own creations. "This is what happens when I'm allowed to go on vacation," said he demonstrating his ever increasingly complex constructions.

Why didn't I take pictures?

In any case, I was witnessing the conceptual infusion of art (its medium, the helix) into the more conventionally scientific minds of students... I could almost feel them thinking: hang on, that's a really rigid connection... if you actuate these joints, you can create a modular robot (each module made of helices) with a fundamentally different geometry... maybe we should do that...

I'm going off on a real tangent here, but the mathematical thinking behind the art project (which admittedly has very little to do with computation) made its way back into the computational robotics lab bearing the gift of inspiration for a new mechanism.

Is what?

What does it mean to "be the mathematics"? The scientific process has relied for decades past on mathematical tools: equations, theorems, statistical inference. That arsenal is currently, constantly, being supplemented with computational methods, algorithms and simulations.

Then, there's the other tools: from massively parallel supercomputers to run simulations of chaotic systems, to the tiniest chip preprocessing data inside a measuring instrument at a weather station. The new hardware tools demand novel computational thinking, which in turns creates the new software tools.

For computer science to be the new mathematics is a relative measure of the importance (by weight, volume or speed) of the new, computationally-minded and derived tools. It's interesting to track their progress in service of science.