Simon Hammond Blog

For the last few years I’ve had a couple of topics constantly on my mind: social software and evolutionary computation. Though equally geeky, it may not be obvious why they actually share roots.  Both of these are rather diverse fields, so I’ll outline exactly what part of each I’m thinking of — by which time those roots ought to be showing.

The particular brand of social software I’m excited about is social awareness, i.e. knowing what’s going on with people and things in a way that is anchored to the here and now.  Why? Because it sparks positive interactions.  Advice is dispensed.  A coffee chat occurs.  An item is lent.  A nodding acquaintance is tipped into a valued friendship.  There’s a net gain.

None of these consequences is explicitly coded into the social software platform which solely aims to emulate a kind of telepathy.  For this, it must gather and represent the information somehow to avoid overload, irrelevancy and ego.  Getting this model right an open problem.

My preferred flavour of evolutionary algorithm is the constructive sort.  This approach builds solutions to problems from the ground up making more complex solutions from simpler ones.  Via trial-and-error, it learns which parts of the solution depend on each other and can then support those associations.

The beauty of this approach is that, not only it can search for solutions that I don’t have but it is finding out stuff I don’t know along the way.  It’s an automatic creative process.

The buzzword that connects these two endeavours is emergence. Both should intrinsically reinforce ‘positive’ interactions, even though the form of the interaction may not be anticipated in advance.  Balanced against this is the need for exploratory interactions which give an unknown payoff.  Most likely the payoff will not be as good as current interactions but some will and these are the ones that lead away from stagnation.

Tags: science, social, social software, techie // Add Comment »

It kind of came home to me over the last few days that there are only really a couple of reasons for following someone online. Either because I have an established relationship with them or they post interesting stuff. Sometimes I get lucky and get the joy of both

Conversely, I’ve gotten into the habit of tweeting geeky, brummie, webby stuff because, well, most (but not all) of my followers are brummie social media types. If I were a celebrity (or more involved in the local scene) things might be different but right now I can’t bring myself to tweet my caffeine levels to Birmingham Bloggers.

Having said that, there’s enormous value in being able to dip into this crowd to pick up the vibe or lob an idea out there. It’s rather like wandering around a friendly convention or themed festival. You overhear stuff and can strike up conversations on anything that snags your interest.

I’m looking at getting my long-overdue second camera lens and it feels very analogous. I want to take in more of the picture but I also want to get the detail of my actual friends. The obvious Twitter hack (twhack?) is to create a new account under my actual name. This’ll be selective but get all notifications. Meanwhile, the @sixball account gets notifications toned down but I’ll add anyone who catches my eye and — best of all — no-one has to suffer an unfollowing.

Tags: self-referential, social software, web // Add Comment »

KABOOOM by Guigui @ Context Free Art

I could easily sink a week of evenings playing around with Context Free Art. It’s a system for producing abstract art from ‘grammars’ - essentially simple recursive computer programs - and can produce some stunning images.

It reminds me a lot of the ImageBreeder project I started off a couple of years ago. The images weren’t nearly as refined as those from CFA but they came from a similarly generative process with the added bonus of an online generator.

The real feature of ImageBreeder was the breeding part which made the system instantly accessible to anyone who could express a preference with a mouse click. I’d love to try to connect these two systems together but I can’t see it happening soon, sadly.

EDIT: just noticed in the forum a JavaScript port of ContextFree that would make an online breeding extension much more feasible (and rather more elegant) if the speed and compatibility are non-issues.

Much obliged to Rag! for putting me on to all this.

Tags: review, techie // 2 Comments »

This is one of those posts that wakes you up to get written.  I meant to come back and ‘ground’ it a little but after 6 weeks it hasn’t happened so I’m publishing it ‘as-is’ to move things along.  Feel free let loose on it.

The singularity, if you hadn’t already heard, is a hypothesised point in the near future where technological progress effectively comes to a head.  Graphs of technological progress appear exponential: not only is technology advancing but the rate at which is does so is constantly increasing. This is natural since our new tools allow us to build better tools faster.  Simply carrying on the curve does something funny around the middle part of this century: it goes vertical.

A standard interpretation for period is framed as an AI that bit smarter than us and which goes ahead with improving itself way beyond our comprehension. Then it becomes god or at least something from which scary but fun and compelling movies are made.  Alas, there’s the paradox of the world advancing beyond recognition overnight.  The latest device brought in the morning becomes relatively stone-age by tea time. Physics makes such scenarios implausible. Artifacts are just products of technology as organisms are disposable vehicles in the larger continuous process of life.

There is a trend but its driver is rooted in social interactions rather than technical innovation. The latter trails the former. Speech allowed ideas to spread to anyone within earshot, physical text preserved them across space and time, electronic networks made it straightforward to forge arbitrary new connections.  In this way we freed intelligence from the limited confines of the individual and released it into the social domain.  I believe the next stage will see it organising itself through us. Our thoughts will become joined up and continuous as thoughts flow between us almost seamlessly. Our self-identity remains intact yet our social awareness develops beyond recognition.

The technology that will support this is in the works but you’ll sense it’s approach in those serendipitous sparks of technology-mediated fruitful connections where strangers meet for some mission. These goals will become increasingly trivial as the effort in finding the right people drops away. Whether you are creating something or looking to dispose of something.  Finding immediate answers to questions will expand beyond Internet databases to include what is known but not transcribed digitally. Trivially, you will know what book or film or conversation to experience next. It’ll be like the Borg’s collective intelligence but in a nice way.

The individual benefits are enormous and inclusive as society effectively starts to think for itself.  In summary: the singularity is not about what we invent so much as how we connect.  That’s what makes it really exciting.  It won’t be a magic, hyper-intelligent box: it will be a new form of society that is reflective and intelligent to the point of being virtually self-aware.

Postscript:Just finished the initial dump of this post and popped on to Twitter.  Somewhat bemused to see @stef had tweeted about the new Singularity University almost exactly the same time I started drafting.  I’m predicting many more of these spooky ‘coincidences’ in the future to the point where people started to get rather freaked out.

Tags: science, social, social software, techie, unfiled, web // 1 Comment »