The Boston Phoenix weighs in on the eternal question

Will robots take over the world?
There's endless speculation, and I promise to post some links and actual commentary shortly, but meanwhile, I'm a little late in on this: http://thephoenix.com//Boston/Life/61912-Rage-against-the-machines/ (published May 28, 2008), where I sound like a total ass.

A tournament of social computers

It is where they don their armor and charge, in the name of 10,000 euros.
"They" are pseudo-code strategies for a strange game that the organizers claim will shed some light on the computational properties of social behavior.

The rules of Project Cultaptation's Social Learning Strategies Tournament are complex, but the game is simple. Your strategy has to invade a population of 100 agents over thousands of simulation runs, based on its accumulated score. You get points by pulling levers of an n-armed bandit machine. But you can only pull a lever that you know about. And that knowledge can come from two sources: either you try your random luck, or you look at someone pulling levers next to you. Seems like a no-brainer, but the devil is in the details of this clever setup. Observing someone may be error-prone. The scoring may change over time, maybe faster than the expected lifetime of the agents.

I'm sorry to say that the deadline for entries to the tournament is over; it was today. Playing with the simulation has been truly fun. Of course, I really doubt that my entry will win -- I hope it gets past the round-robin selection phase! But I'd like to make a prediction about the winner.

I think the winning strategy will be very simple -- 10 lines of elementary pseudo-code maximum -- and stochastic -- with in-built randomness. I might have my reasons for that, but the chief ones come from history (the strategy that won the Prisoner's Dilemma tournament back in the 1980s was a very simple tit-for-tat) and perhaps misplaced reasoning-by-analogy (there's randomness in the environment, therefore a good strategy should include some of that too).

And I think the results won't tell us much about the fundamental nature of social learning, that is, gleaming truths about the way the world works from observing the behavior of others.

Why not? For instance, because in the tournament, my actions don't influence anything about the world beyond my own ability to score and therefore reproduce (ha ha). Or because there is no competition for resources -- all agents can choose the same action and they will all receive the same scores, same as it would be if only one agent chose it. Or even because there is no timeline, no sequences in this game, no planning a few steps ahead even.

Still, I can't wait to see the results, and they will be fascinating for all the simplifications of the game. And if I'm wrong, if the winning strategy is complex, or deterministic, or biologically plausible, it'll be pretty exciting to reason why that should be the case, and how the tournament actually captured some fundamental property of learning in groups.

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.