Ender Of Games

The Pinocchio Function, Part 5: Amazing Technicolor Dreamcode

2008-08-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

The story I'm telling here is true. The dates are approximate and the events are summarized, but I'm not making this shit up. This is part five and the final part of the recap of the story so far. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, and part 4 here.

So there I was, having written enough code to really wet my appetite.

Once I had gotten the concept down, and flexed my muscles a little, I got to thinking about how the instruction set was really just a metaphor for what was really happening, which was this complex interaction and eventual abstraction of functionality into larger functionality. This in turn lead me to think more about how to model the true interaction for what it was I'm trying to do. So I set aside the old code, and started fresh in a completely different language (Java, if you're interested), and started to focus more on the way in which behavior was encapsulated. This lead to the eventuality of what I now call the Abstraction Engine.

The Abstraction Engine took a wholly different approach to it's design, because right from the get-go it was never designed to 'solve problems', rather it was designed to explore the way that code executing in parallel can interact and build off their own abilities by leveraging other aspects of what their neighbors were doing, where neighbors was this loosely defined concept that had no bearing on their spatial relationship to each other.

And it was watching how one piece of code would poison another to death with clever tricks of encapsulation and a little magic that it had invented on it's own when I finally had the ultimate confirmation of what I had always dreamed of, and found a new and profound understanding of the nature of life itself.

It was surely by no accident that I finally obtained these understandings, any more than a bee's flight to a flower is no accident; neither are pre-destine, and yet destiny still prevails due to the serendipitous nature of our universe. To deny it requires denying all of existence, which leaves me but a clever rook in some much larger game of multi-dimensional chess; my moves are unknown, but my methods are constrained, and so my destiny is predictable. I recognize now that the answers I have searched for are every bit as complex and profound as I imagined them to be.

The moment of enlightenment happened when I was stepping through a particularly treacherous pieces of code that had evolved the ability to seemingly defy boundaries that I had put in place to prevent it from replicating too fast. In particular I was looking at how the code had happened upon a sequence of events that actually allowed it to change the equivalent of it's digital fingerprint to masquerade as another piece of code, yet retain a sense of it's original identity. In theory this should have been impossible, but I had managed to allow a bug to slip through in a seemingly unrelated piece of code, and the code had figured out how to manipulate that bug in a very complex sequence to do what would have otherwise been impossible to do.

The end result was that now I had code that was breaking the boundaries of my framework by exploiting a bug that I hadn't 'told' it how to exploit, AND that same code was, at critical moments, changing it's appearance to pass by my security undetected. It did so though a highly unlikely set of interactions involving collusion between multiple disparate pieces of code, and in repeats of the scenario, eventually similar conspiracies of masquerading identity would form.

It wasn't until I actually got my mind wrapped around the highly unlikely set of circumstances and the path that they took in forming that I saw the profound truth reveal itself before me, like a butterfly's wings unfolding as it emerges from it's cocoon: These complex interactions form not out of randomness like I had initially thought and designed them to do, or out of the design of some intelligence, but from co-evolution inter-operating on multiple scales of force, much like our own forces of gravity, weak, electro-magnetic, and strong do. Each piece of code... each organism if you will... plays it's specific role at it's specific time, but in doing so enables other aspects of the system in subtle and complex ways in this symphony of orchestration which surpasses the complexity of the silicone on which it exists, and steps firmly into the domain of emergent process modeling, or more to the point what we often call biology when applied to organics. What may seem like a benign change or even a sophisticated one in one aspect of the system in one piece of code has profound and lasting effects that don't become clear until the whole of time and space as it's defined within my simulation is examined, and the forces of natural selection have taken their toll. Evolution works a lot like my favorite quote from Bill Cosby: "I told you that story, so I could tell you this one." in that it reuses it's previous accomplishments and breakthroughs as a foundation for it's further feats in this grandiose act of self-organization, but does so in a way that's very subtle and even highly suggestive.

Erich Jantsch has talked about this extensively in his book, "The Self-Organizing Universe" which in turn draws heavily on the work of Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine concerning dissipative system and nonequilibrium states. The physicist Hermann Haken in 1978 suggested the label of "synergetics" for the field that studies the collective patterns emerging from many interacting components, as they are found in chemical reactions, crystal formations or lasers. Another Nobel laureate, Manfred Eigen has focused on the origin of life, the domain where chemical self-organization and biological evolution meet. He has introduced the concepts of hypercycle, an autocatalytic cycle of reactions containing other cycles, and of quasispecies, the fuzzy distribution of genotypes characterizing a population of quickly mutating organisms or molecules.

I'd like to think that if they took a look at what I was doing today to reproduce these behaviorism in the digital domain instead of the chemical or biological one, they would be proud.

So now the question from the final line in Ghost in the Shell begs, "Where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite." and surely this must be my answer: The net. The internet is a perfect place for such experiments because it provides an ever increasing amount of resources, and allows for emergence of complex behavior on a grand scale, one we've already realized on our own image; when a blogger posts a juicy story, the population reacts in complex and unforeseeable ways which in turn pushes other forces to bear, and it happens at the speed of humans who are instantly connected. When computers can perform the same feats... and I have them doing the equivalent on a microbe scale... they will do it at the speed of the internet minus the humans.

What will happen when the equivalent of wild bacteria are released into the otherwise sterile and static cleanroom that is our world of the digital domain, provided with an unlimited supply of food, and left to grow? I can't know for sure, but I have my guesses: It will likely follow our own planetary evolution, which is to say that the first thing that will happen is a layer of the digital equivalent of pond scum will form and cover everything that it can reach, and be wholly uninteresting. And that's where it's likely to stay for a while, happy and content to exist and reproduce, until the conditions are right for it to make the leap from the equivalent of a single-celled-single-minded organism to something more complex. That is, at the very least, what it would do if I just stuck it up there right now. However, I think I can improve upon that situtation, by stacking the metaphorical deck if you will.

You see the trick here isn't in creating the ultimate code which gives rise to life, rather it's in creating a framework which allows for increasingly complex interaction in multiple fields like our universe does with the different forces which hold our existence in a relatively stable yet ever changing way. From a 10,000 foot looking down view the forces of gravity, weak, electro-magnetic, and strong combined with sufficient mass/energy provide enough complex interaction to account for some really interesting behaviors. The theory is to abstract that same complex interaction into something entirely different, and you should be able to produce some of the same results, and the code I'm working on demonstrates it can be done.

Digital intelligence is still outside of our abilities, but life as a science has officially reached a new plateau as it's forced to expand and cope with reaching new domains to exist within. What I have done is simply the proof of concept that demonstrates when sufficient pressures exist within the domain to enable the right changes, profound results can be accomplished, just like in biology and chemistry. This is in no way new, as many people have proven the same thing many many times before me. I've just demonstrated it in a potentially exciting way, and when I'm confident enough that it's sufficiently proven as a system, I hope to use it to enable all kinds of things.

What's a little Corporate Espionage between friends?

2008-08-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

Intermission has lasted longer than I expected, but that's not to say I don't have fruit to bear for my efforts.

A friend of mine and I have been focusing some serious attention on our little not-for-profit organization, and in a rare feat of skill, coordination, timing, and a bit of luck, we just started pre-sales on a card game I designed!

The game is called "Corporate Espionage", and I designed it as as both a parody of corporate america, and of the people that work in technology.com startups, but it ended up being this really interesting mix of both laughter and loose strategy as the dynamics of the game unfold, because the cards your playing are absolutely hilarious, while the reason your playing them is carefully calculated.

I'm terribly excited about this, because the product is really fun and play-testing has gone fantastically well. We're tearing out the artwork for the rest of the cards even as we speak, and we're just about to launch into out marketing campaign. The rest of the journey is just selling enough decks to meet our pre-sales numbers so we can enter the next phase of the plan.

You can check out the press release here, or just go to http://www.masterofespionage.com and (pretty please!) order yours before our first run supplies are exhausted.

Intermission

2008-05-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

Part 5 of the Pinocchio Function: The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcode is in the process of being authored, but it's taking a little longer than expected, and I thought I would share with you the reason for that, and just give a little update on my adventures.

I recently changed positions and became a key executive officer for a new company targeting females in games: GirlGamer.com

The people I'm working with have become my fast best friends, and the mix of interpersonal relationship building combined with the dizzyingly fast pace of the work that needs to be accomplished has found me de-prioritizing almost all of my prior commitments with the two notable exceptions of my success coaching, and my work in evolutionary computational domains. We're rapidly nearing a point where we will have a lot more to talk about, which is terribly exciting, as well as being an absolute schedule hog, but I'm not adverse to giving up a few months worth of weekends in order to make something real come about.

I also recently found myself in Washington DC for a week with a team of what I can only describe as domain experts and highly qualified specialists establishing longer term prospects (maybe even years away) that are both extremely promising, and of a sensitive nature, so details I will not reveal here. Sufficient to say I am deliriously happy about my career opportunities, but it has required me to do some serious scrambling to make it all work, and I'm finally finding myself with some minutes which are not otherwise occupied by initiatives which I have carefully staggered to minimize the time to realization... and I'm using it to blog about it all before it becomes old news.

Watching Saving Private Ryan again, just on a whim because it was on, reminded me of the intensity of my own situation and how often the skills that I learned largely while gaming play an intricate role in my life as I manage short term strategies and leverage resources, micro and macro, to produce foundations which give rise to larger structures and bring the long term plan closer to fruition.

It also reminded me that I need to play video games and de-stress more, because I miss it. So right now rather than finish Part 5, I'm going to go rock my face off with Rock Band on my 360. ~\o I'm a creep! I'm a wierd-o. What the hell am I doing here? I don't belong here... o/~ Radiohead has nothing on me baby!

The Pinocchio Function, Part 4: Two Steps Forward, Two Parts Chaos

2008-04-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

The story I'm telling here is true. The dates are approximate and the events are summarized, but I'm not making this shit up. This is part four of the recap of the story so far. You can find part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here.

The path before me was clear. I needed to restep down this lonely path of code and reshape my vision to conform to their reality if I was ever going to get their reality to conform to my vision.

So I did. I spent several late nights coding an evolutionary computational engine, which the specific details of the architecture will not be disclosed here for numerous reasons. Sufficient to say that the first night I got it going and solving problems was nothing short of elating, despite the fact that the problems it was solving were trivial. It really didn't matter: I had succeeded in harnessing nature's wisdom of tapping evolution as a process by which order comes out of chaos, and I'd done it by standing on the shoulders of giants who came before me.

And like the aforementioned giants must have at some point, I ran into glass ceilings; a point after which you can see there's further onward to go, but cannot escape your present confines to advance. For me these ceilings presented themselves in what can basically be described as a lack of biodiversity, because even as my understanding and the resulting complexity of the code base grew, I kept running into the same problem: The code would evolve to the point it's fitness function agreed it should evolve to, and then stop. This is analogous to a goldfish growing to the size of it's bowl, and what I realized was that I needed to stop treating the thing like a goldfish.

If life really were to evolve from with a digital landscape, it would be the resulting emergent behavior that happens when you have lots and lots of biodiversity co-evolving on a shared landscape, not one goldfish growing to the size of it's bowl. In fact the landscape would need to support an ever increasing amounts of biodiversity AND increasing population sizes.

The other thing that I realized is that intelligence and life itself provides it's own fitness function, because that which is more capable of applying intelligence to it's existence is by definition better at surviving, and that this is especially true when we're talking about organisms co-evolving on a competitive landscape. This is a gross oversimplification of the real process, but the underlying logic is sound in that emergent behaviors provide their own set of challenges to be overcome by individuals in a population. What this means is that simply by subjecting an evolving process to evolutionary competition with another evolving process you end up with co-evolving processes which should impose new evolutionary challenges as a result of being in competition with each other.

In other words if you create a landscape which is increasingly expansive and find a way to populate it with organisms which are capable of evolution and put them in competition with each other for survival, evolution will do it's task of enforcing that only changes which are beneficial to survival continue.

The idea actually came to me when watching videos of other evolutionary computational engines running with the fitness function removed. These runs would often display the most extraordinary examples of what can only be described as evolutionary epochs as these little programs first discovered ways to dominate the landscape and then began competing with each other, each successive generation displaying increasingly aggressive behavior as swarms of similarly colonies of code swept across the landscape, in turn displaying increasingly complex behavior to enhance it's survival prospects.

It would start simply, with just whatever was fastest at propagating, and soon one variation of code would dominate the landscape. But eventually something that didn't replicate over code that was like itself mutated into existence, and this proved to be better because it was able to replicate with greater consistency than it's inferior parents and it would soon dominate. And then something which attacked code which checked it's neighbor took over because once again it was better at survival. And this process kept repeating and repeating until a few very virulent strains were all that survived, forever locked in this war of constantly overwriting each other as fast as their virtual CPU's would allow them.

But from looking at the resulting code when I did this on my own, I didn't get this right away. Because each simulation consists of a very large number of CPU's executing in parallel all networked together it was the interaction between them that gave rise to what was most interesting. I kept on looking at things from the perspective of what a CPU is doing, and what code it was executing, like we do now with computers. But what I realized was that this was not really a useful way to envision what was happening at all, and instead I needed to follow the code as it replicated from CPU to CPU.

And this turned out to be an interesting problem indeed! Little did I know the life and death of a piece of evolving code would hold the key to my understanding of the Pinocchio Function.

Coming up in part 5: Amazing Technicolor Dreamcode

The Pinocchio Function, Part 3: Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants

2008-04-08T22:15:00.000-07:00

The story I'm telling here is true. The dates are approximate and the events are summarized, but I'm not making this shit up. This is part three of the recap of the story so far. You can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.

Tom Barbalet of Biota.org once said in a podcast, "The Artificial Life industry doesn't exactly have founding fathers so much as dead beat dads.", mostly due I think out of his frustration with getting the early pioneers of the industry on his podcast.

But that isn't to say they didn't leave a legacy.

The first in a long series of breakthroughs came for me when I met an evolutionary biologist who was also a computer hacker. Adam is a genius of a rare sort, both incredibly insightful and well versed, while also possessing a genuine passion and ability to make rubber meet road and write code. He spent one night, hoarse and unable to speak from a very bad cold, literally whispering passionately in my living room until the wee hours of night about how biology worked like a possessed Mozart composing his dying symphony, and I dutifully made down notes in my head about the scientific processes of evolution, and their applications with genomes and ribosomes and chromosomes and how nature basically accomplished it's miracle.

You see he knew what he was doing: He was Prometheus stealing the secrets of life from mother nature and giving them to the masses in a form they could understand. That knowledge genie had been out of the bottle for a long time... I just never properly understood how it really worked.

Adam sure did though. He had made his own version of some earlier work that was explicitly headed down that path by trying to find emergent properties in evolutionary systems in things he called a "Nanopond", similar to "Avida" or "Tierra".

I studied the code for these a bit, and often found them to be again full of assumptions, and brittleness in the design which made them very hard to change. But when I ran them, something was very obvious: These guys had figured out how to make code behave more like life. Of course just undergoing evolutionary processes towards a static fitness goal still isn't going to produce something that springs forth and declared "I'm REAL!" of it's own violation, because eventually you reach the "best" solution for that fitness function. What I was really impressed with was the way these programs brought a very specific order from a stream of chaos in what clearly was a very novel and effective way.

These programs were designed to solve problems by evolving solutions for them. All you had to do what define for it what it was supposed to accomplish, and it will use an evolutionary process to arrive at the solution.

Someone had beat me to the punch on the Program Understanding Program, and I have to say I was never more excited about an idea for code than when I learned someone else had figured out what had eluded me for so long. Finally my idea could actually get legs and move forward!

And move forward it did. I took my new found knowledge, and I set about applying it to my own passion.

I studied Tierra and found that while there were things that I really liked about it like the evolvable instruction set, it really had a more singular focus of trying to find one specific solution, or one set of code that would always solve the given problem.

I studied Avida-ED but saw that it was just a beginning at what I had envisioned, and really wasn't meant to support more emergent behavior than what could live beyond a simple "petri dish" model.

So I started hacking away in C++, like all those before me had, chasing that elusive idea of creating a living organism by supplying the Pinocchio Function to something so complex that it actually could produce an emergent behavior as complex as life itself.

Coming up in part 4: Two Steps Forward, Two Parts Chaos

Cyberpunks go Rampaging

2008-04-01T13:57:00.001-07:00

Sindome, a cyberpunk roleplaying game (http://www.sindome.org) has turned into a Zombie game for April Fools. Citizens of the city are battling hoards of their own dead bodies with katanas, mini guns, grenades and even severed limbs! Log on and get your Zombie killing in before its over!

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The Pinocchio Function, Part 2: The Program Understanding Program

2008-03-26T23:09:00.000-07:00

The story I'm telling here is true. The dates are approximate and the events are summarized, but I'm not making this shit up. This is part two of the recap of the story so far. You can find part 1 here.

I was, at the time, a fledgling programmer: full of vim and vigor, and capable of producing ten times the code that I produce now-a-days. I worked everywhere they would pay me, and did a lot of teaching myself on the job. In fact my first programming position I knew zero about the language I was hired to write in, but that's a different story for another blog post.

It was more or less at the height of the dot-com bubble that I overheard a friend of a friend talking about their idea at a wedding reception in Los Vegas (Jim and Michael M, if you read this I mean you) for a "Program Understanding Program", or more to the point a program that could fix bugs in other programs. He even had a model for it all worked out, which revolved around a programmer defining a fitness function for when the code was working vs. when it was broken ( a unit test ). Thus the role of the programmer changed from defining the path to take to get to the end result by supplying the code to do so, to the role of defining the expected end result and allowing the computer to find the path there.

On the surface, this seemed quite intuitive. We are often in the habit of moving from a concept to a design to a finalized product, all he was doing was shortcutting the design process and going directly from defining the concept to the finalized product and letting the computer figure out the design.

Of course the devil lies in the details, because a Photoshop mockup of a web page just isn't sufficient to properly express all the complex behavior that actually has to go into the end result. However when you applied this at a more modular level, like individual pieces of functionality, the prospects looked rather good.

And so I set about understanding how I would go about building such a thing, with the idea in mind that if I was able to crack this nut, that might in turn lead to a more complex understanding of how life might be born within a pure digital context. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to understand the nature of such a complex thing, and why it would be rather tricky to make work, and in fact I really didn't see the entire path there yet. So this left me with a challenge, one I felt I could overcome by becoming a better computer scientist. I admitted to myself that this was in fact a long term project, and placed it firmly on the top of my list of thing to do before I die, realizing that it would be much later in my life before I was able to even write the first lines of code, and I set about learning the things that I would need to learn.

I studied programming methodologies like object oriented programming and aspect oriented programming. I learned as many programming languages as I could and even invented a few of my own that are still in active production today. I became an expert in telecommunication networks, the most recent of which is the internet. I ate up papers about multi-tape Turing machines and nondeterministic finite state machines with a passion. I joined the security exploit community and became a professional white-hat hacker and amateur theoretical mathematician. I put my self to sleep each night with books and websites on electronics, physics, math theory, computing theory, game theory, set theory, behavioral theory, and linguistic theory. I made games and later even wrote game engines. I stole my father's tools from his toolkit and taught myself how to wire circuits together from the examples given in those 124-in-1 kid's electronic kits. I learned how to program micro controllers from a friend and build entirely custom devices (yet another story for another day). I dove head first into the state of the art in artificial intelligence and neural networks, cellular automata and the game of life, fuzzy logic, machine learning and classifier systems, genetic algorithm optimizations and genetic programming, white boxes, gray codes and black ICE. In short, I embraced my geekiness.

What I found was a lot of science and very little dreams. Neural networks worked great as a classifier system, but nobody figured out how to make them work even nearly as well as a simple animal's brain, let alone approach the complexity of a human. OpenCyc had figured out how to make machines deduce AND infer information, but only when supplied with a highly specific form of context, often anthropomorphic and ultimately utilitarian in nature. They couldn't actually "think" for themselves, or apply the deduced/infered information to any application other than the one of extrapolating more information. And while this is a critical process that we as humans replicate with ease, it doesn't actually supply the computer with that all important Pinocchio Function which makes it go from static machine to evolutionary system.

Somewhere in there I got married and had a kid too, and this overshadowed my early ambitions of creating groundbreaking technology and solving the programmers of the world's problems as the need to devote more time and energy to my family was of much greater importance to me. This of course required doing things like taking well paying jobs writing mundane code, but the idea never left me. I would still think about it often in passing, and remember spending a few nights really thinking about how I would ever get to write what by now had become a pet project for me, my version of the Program Understanding Program, or just PUP.

I sat on the idea, but I never let it go. It was always that thing that I would do later when I understood more. And then I stopped programming for a while and focused on running my own business instead. The dream seemed further away, but still I never gave up on the idea.

At some point I must have realized that it had become -the- beacon for my inspiration. Every time I wrote a piece of code, there was a small part of me that was doing it because I was just practicing my skills for when I could really do what I wanted to do, which sure wasn't this code monkey bullcrap the spiky haired boss was asking me to write when I knew full well that code wasn't going anywhere. Every time I explored another faucet of computer science there was always that glimmer of hope that if I just put another piece of the puzzle together, I would figure it out and be able to unlock the boundless potential that I had glimpsed at as a young adult. Every day where I worked at a job and money wasn't enough to get me through the day and I missed my family, I would console myself by stealing away to read an article on the latest breakthrough in mathmatics, and lose myself in formulas that I only now begin to catch a glimpse of the meaning, and even that is primitive. Every job itself was another vehicle for me to continue my quest.

Was I ambitious? I'd like to think so.

Was I a dreamer? Yeah. No doubt.

Was I fooling myself in thinking that such a quest could ever be embarked upon? Was this just supreme arrogance on my part to think that I, a self taught hacker, could unlock the secrets to such concepts when the people who clearly were much better and brighter than I had stumbled and failed?

I often times found myself questioning that very thing. Pragmatism is such a necessary evil when you have a life worth keeping up that dreams become things that must be maintained if they are to not fall into disuse. Dreams came and went, often dashed by realities too harsh to recall frequently, but this one persisted.

It persisted for 9 years, as I grew the mental model and learned all I could about it. It would show up on occasion in failed code experiments that got lost through the annuls of time and bit-decay. It would get talked about any time someone showed interest in such fields. It would puzzle me constantly in idle moments when I was seeking a mental challenge, and my understanding of what I was after was constantly growing, constantly evolving in my mind as I came to understand more and more about everything I could find that I deemed applicable. But alas, always something was missing, something just beyond my grasp yet tantalizingly present on the horizon.

The piece that was missing was that Pinocchio Function. I could write code, and develop complex systems with my eyes closed. But a system that could write itself, and develop an even more complex system than itself... I just couldn't see the path there.

Not yet.

Coming up in Part 3: Standing On The Shoulders of Giants

The Pinocchio Function, Part 1: Puppetery for Deities

2008-03-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

Finally I've engaged with someone who has thought enough about the subject of ethics of creating artificial lifeforms to address my concerns regarding the nature of my research to allow me to continue. Finally I am satisfied that what I am doing isn't reckless and irresponsible, but actually exciting and cutting edge. And so the story can finally be told.

The story I'm about to tell you over the next few blog posts is true. The dates are approximate and the events are summarized, but I'm not making this shit up.

About 9 years ago I read a book for the first time called, "Ender's Game" about a boy who played games, and the blurred line between fiction and reality that existed for him. The story was compelling if purely science-fiction, and the impact of the surprise ending stayed with me long after I had finished reading it. It is of course this book after which I named my blog.

But this isn't the story of me reading that book, rather it's the story of me reading it's less beloved sequel, "Xenocide", or rather it's the story of the impact that book had on me.

You see it's not a particularly good book (the first one was much better) but I read them all quite facinated with some of the concepts.

In Xenocide the human race has colonized much of the universe, a feat made possible by relativistic travel, and a Faster Than Light communication network who's lag was not proportionate to distance: Electronic communication was truly instant. The proposed technology behind these modes of travel and this communication network were great fodder for my overactive imagination and my future career goals (time traveler comes to mind), but what REALLY fascinated me was what happened with this communications network.

As a result of the highly complex and lag-free nature of this network, somehow an emergent behavior arose. This emergent behavior was honed over time by the forces of evolution and natural selection until at one point after millions of years of operation this emergent behavior developed self-motivation, intelligence, and eventually self-awareness: The network became alive. Now the way this was presented in the book it was an undeniable conclusion, but it got me to thinking about why it wouldn't work in the real world. And in fact I was able to come up with a lot of good reasons why it wouldn't, namely that machines and networks don't naturally exhibit processes of natural selection and evolution, and someone would have to go really out of their way to make them do so.

In fact the very way we architect our machines and networks is completely antithetic to the very processes that would need to occur for such conditions to come about; the moment our machines and networks fail to perform in exactly the way we have specified, we declare them broken and tend to do things like shut them down. The entire process of engineering basically precludes the unknown and unspecified from creeping into the design, or at least all the engineers I know would tend to agree. This leaves no room for experimentation and trial an error, let alone an evolutionary process.

The major exception is of course evolutionary computation engines and fuzzy machine learning systems like neural networks. But even these appear to have limited utility as they are ostensibly and irrevocably tied to their fitness functions, and therefore only as complex as their engineered design. I suppose you could in theory apply a genetic optimization algorithm to the configuration of a neural network interspersed with training to arrive at the optimal configuration for a given fitness function, but you haven't fundamentally broken away from that fitness function.

And so the problem becomes one of defining the ultimate fitness function... The Pinocchio Function: That which would evolve in complexity as the system evolved, thus eventually leading to it becoming a real evolving life form, indistinguishable from any other like it except in chemistry and biology. Such an system has a lot of very attractive properties, the least of which is the eventuality that something intelligent and self-aware should at least in theory eventually emerge from it if left to run long enough.

Thus my journey down the path to creating Artificial Life began, over 9 years ago.

...

Coming in part 2: The Program Understanding Program.

Community::Next HERE I COME!!!

2008-03-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

Almost as quickly as it began it's ended. An old friend who I've not spoken with enough recently has pledged an enormous amount of the remainder, and secured his vicarious presence at the event. I've done recommendations of his work before, and will be sure to pimp his extraordinary service the entire time I'm there.

A HUGE thank you to the enormous outpouring of support from my friends. I can't believe how many people crawled out of the woodwork to help me out.

Really looking forward to seeing everyone at Community::Next! And if you can make it to Mindshare this Thursday, that would be fantastic, since I'll be speaking there as well.

Community::Next or Bust!

2008-03-23T19:24:00.000-07:00

Community::Next is happening in my backyard, and about 60 of my industry friends are going. I REALLY want to go, but am having trouble coming up with the admission fee, so I've set up a Fundable page to take pledges in exchange for some marketing. If your far away and not able to make it, this would be a cheap way to get your brand talked about at the event by a super networker!

So be a pal and chip in, and if you do let me know what brand you want pimped, or even better send me some promotional material to hand out.

Thanks a ton!!! I love you guys...

I've created a monster...

2008-03-05T13:24:00.001-08:00

What would you do if you created a monster you didn't know how to stop?

Let's just say for a minute that you were working on something, and you discovered that you had rather accidentally created a new weapon... and not just a gun but instead one so subtle that it's parameters were not well understood, all that was clear is that it was dangerous. I imagine that's how Leo Szilard must have felt when he realized that Albert Einstein's simple equation could be turned into a weapon of most devastating effect. We have well learned the lessons that come as a result of not being able to put the knowledge genie back in the bottle once it's uncorked, and yet the march of technology goes on.

What if you had done the modern day equlivent of researching the next piece of understanding required to build a piece of technology that would change our world forever? What if at some point a project you had been working on for 9 years suddenly broke through all the barriers, and in doing so paved the path to solving all our problem, or our total obsolescence as lifeforms, or maybe both, and you can't tell which... what would you do? What if it was too late?

I know it sounds like science fiction, but I'm actually being faced with this problem on a scale I never imagined. I'm not going to make any claims about my work, other than to say that it's advanced beyond my comprehension, and accelerated at a rate which has forced me to step back and reevaluate the ultimate goals of the project, since at this point it's gone from harmless pet project to deadly serious research that could eventually threaten more than I ever intended.

You don't have to take me seriously on this, so if we're pretending for a minute, what would you do? Assume for a minute that "stopping" isn't an option, because someone else is just going to build it themselves, how do you ensure your allied with the right side, assuming they take the threat seriously? How do you go about addressing the ethics of something imminently dangerous before everyone understands the need to address it?

Please help by commenting below.

Life Junkie

2007-12-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

Hi, my alias is Ender, and I am an addict. I'm addicted to life.

I hate sleeping, unless it's with someone next to me, because that's being intimate, and intimacy is productive in that it builds relationships. I loathe the idea of missing out on valuable hours in the day during which I become catatonic and hallucinate wildly, only to recover with total amnesia of the past 8-12 hours. I find the very idea of missing out on the boundless opportunities that I could create for myself unpalatable at best. But I also hate drugs which make me stay up beyond my natural sleep limit because they make me jittery and not think clearly, so I find myself doing things like acting like an insomniac when I could go to sleep any time I wanted to, simply because between the choice of having another adventure vs. not is too tempting to miss out on, and yet aside from being a little sleep deprived, I'm otherwise sober.

I thrive on high-intensity experiences. I find myself at my peek when things are moving at about 120mph, and my reactions are being tested to their fullest. I have started just about all my meaningful relationships as the result of a shared extreme life experience, and I go the hardcore route whenever possible, throwing myself at whatever thing I'm trying to accomplish heart and soul. I have two speeds: Relaxed, and On Fire, and one repeating mantra: Get It Done. My modus operandi is execution de facto.

That used to be why I loved clubs and raves, but thoes got boring. Now my new drug of choise is conferences, geek events, and Startup Weekends! When you pack 70 -really- smart people in the room for 55 hours over 2 1/2 days over a Startup Weekend and ask them to all build your idea (I seriously never expected that to happen), and they execute on it, that's like drinking the nectar of the gods. The fact that there were zero egos the entire weekend is just an amazing testament to the geeks of LA, and I came away humbled and honored.

My drug is one I suggest everyone try getting completely hooked on... you'll never regret it.

The Genesis of Design

2007-12-08T21:34:00.001-08:00

I met a neat guy the other day.

This guy had a pretty crazy claim. He said had created a program which did for computing what evolution does for life: It adapts to what ever problem it faces.

And he challenged me to test it out. So I did. Over the next few weeks I'm going to blog what I find out.

So just imagine for one second you had a time machine, and you traveled into the future 2000 years, and you purchased a kid's biology teaching toy, an Insta-Biomatic 3000. It allowed you to create little populations of simple organisms that you could evolve into different things by telling them what you wanted them to do, and feeding the ones who work towards your goal, while starving the ones who rebel. Now imagine for a second this product exists today, and I own one. Yeah, sounds like crap, right? Wait and see...

So I decide I'm gonna start out simple. The claim is it can be trained to do any task from image recognition to signal processing, but I need to understand it first. I start by seeing if it can figure out how to multiply a number by itself. Easy to express, easy to know when it's right. I create a new set of organisms, and I give them all random numbers to work with, and I let it run for a bit, and at first it's just fail fail fail across the board. I smile to myself and think, "Oh sure. It's gonna do what now?" and the best part it I'm not telling it the right answer at all, I'm just telling it, "Nope, you got it wrong." It's a bit like asking 10,000 people "The question is: 8485832451, what's the answer?" and then telling them they're all dead wrong, thanks for playing, no you don't get to know what the answer was.

But after about a minute and a half of just completely random guessing, one of them got it right just by sheer luck. Then a few seconds later he got it right again. And then he missed, but his neighbor got it. On the next try they both got it, and soon after that it was a small chorus of consistently right answers. After 3 minutes I had a small population of organisms whom 90% of them would consistently get the answer right, no matter what number I handed them.

Ok, big deal. It can multiply a random number by itself consistantly. More to the point it can evolve a solution where 90% of the population arrives at the right answer 100% of the time. Multiplying 64 bit integers isn't exactly super amazing, let's do something harder.

So I start over with a new population who's never solved any problem, and I change the problem from "n times n" to "n times (n plus 1)". So now they have to add 1 to the number before multiplying. The problem is harder, and it takes them a little longer to arrive at a solution, but they do.

So then I figure I'm gonna get tricky on them, and change the problem in mid stream. I make it so once we've played the game 150 times, I'm going to add one to the number I'm adding. So it starts "n times (n plus 1)" but goes to "n times (n plus 2)" after 150 tries.

Well, just like before, they all arrive at a consensus and are quite pleased with themselves, until all of the sudden the 151st time happens, and I go, "No. You're all wrong.". Well they kept trying, and pretty quick one of guesses the new number and spreads the word around, and soon enough we're back up to 90% of the population getting it right... until the 301st time comes around and I do it again, and they all have to guess the new number again. And wouldn't you know it, they find it much quicker too! In fact by the 7th time I've played this number changing game, they've figured out that I change the number every 150 times, and they've accounted for this in their DNA so they start guessing the new number right away. Ok, this was the promise, right? It adapts to it's environment, even while it's in mid-stride. Pretty neat, but I still think I can trick it.

So I change the game again. This time I add one to the number when they've arrived at a 60% consensus. I figure right around the time word is starting to spread around, I'm gonna switch it out on them. But this doesn't deter them; the carefully play the game until 60% of them are also incrementing the number every time, and therefore staying in step with my guess. Clever!

Alright, well how about this: Every time they grow the consensus of right answers more than 0.003% in a single round of guesses, I change the number to something completely random.

Well, this does stump them a bit more because they're unable to come up with a really solid solution for how the number is changing, since it's changing at random.

But after about 10 minutes, I realize they've devised a way to cheat: They've evolved a completely stable population that gets the answer right a low enough percentage of the time, and gives wrong answers the rest of the time that it doesn't tip the consensus and change the number any more! In this way they stay the most happy, because they've learned that growing the consensus too fast means they won't be rewarded until they guess the new random number. Meanwhile they slowly grow the number getting it right, but keep this conspiracy amongst them to keep giving wrong answers most of the time, until 90% are doing exactly the same thing, yet the size of the consensus never grows by more than 0.003% in a single round.

Clearly Orgel's Second Rule is hard at work here: Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Stay tuned for more, because this is just the very beginning of what this thing is capable of.

I clicked the TinyURL

2007-11-12T19:29:00.000-08:00

Marcus has already blogged about it on InVerse, so I'll just share the picture:

And where you can buy the T-Shirt!

Excuses, excuses

2007-11-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

If wishes were horses, we would all be riding. I wish I had more time to do the things I want to do, like updating my blog. But I'm over it now, and I'm back in action.

Games are funny elusive creatures. I've been on the warpath looking for money for games for so long now that I'm actually getting to the point where I don't absolutely suck at it. It's been a bit like growing up, where you get knocked down and punched in the face more than a few times.

What you end up learning is those scratches and scars are part of the dance, and if you don't have them people can tell you've never done the dance before, and so they don't want to dance with you.

Those who survive long enough without quitting and going back to their day job (or just going back to their day job and not quitting) end up finding out that the only way to do it is to play a sort of solitaire waltz, where you find every way to make your dream take you to where you want to be WITHOUT anyone's help except for the few who believe in the people and put in what they can.

We got punched in the gut, but we're still standing. In fact we're growing, both as people and as a company, which is an incredible feeling.

Last night I watched the South Park Guitar Queer-O episode and almost laughed my head off when the guy started playing the guitar controller sans game and music. The idea of using an unplugged controller as a musical instrument was just way too much. After I finished I stopped to think about how these games are so incredibly addictive because they make you feel like you are actually playing the song. I think that's a level of immersion that is really missing from games. I mean let's face it, you don't really feel like you could leap from a tall building after playing Superman.

Meanwhile my evenings are being spent chasing a dragon of my own with these VC types. They're a funny bunch themselves: You have to speak in words that say "Risk Mitigation", which is kinda a very select subset of the English language with some new words like "comparables" (pronounced COMP-ah-ra-Bulls, not COM-pair-a-bulls) and "platform-play" (not what you erect in your backyard for your children) and "ROI". If you use words like "rapid adoption" and "existing revenue" you score extra points, and if you say "nothing else like it" or "first time", you lose, game over, and they walk away. A funny language indeed. It's a bit like an adventure game...

...

You are standing the office of a large Venture Capitalist. Around you are couches and a plasma screen. A small stream flows down a waterfall mounted on the wall. There is an elf receptionist with an exclamation point above her head here.

> Talk receptionist

"Alas," she says. "There is a great scrouge upon us. Many a brave soul has attempted to put forth their business plan before the Great ..."

> Click Accept

"Hey!" the elf explains loudly. "This is not a ..."

> Click Accept

"OK, fine. Bring me 3 other people who want to give you money too and then you can see him."

> blink

The elf blinks back stupidly at you.

> say "How am I supposed to do that?"

The elf shrugs her shoulders and says, "I can't help you with that."

> say "Where is the elevator?"

The elf says, "NE of here, through the glass doors." You hear a voice in the distance. "Right near the stairs." You hear another voice in the distance. "LF2M! Need any coder and artist, ready to go!"

I have invites to Wompum.com, who wants one?

2007-08-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

I have invites to Wompum.com. Email me at kevlar@sindome.org if you want one.

Up for the Game?

2007-08-08T09:04:00.001-07:00

Making a game is a lot like giving birth while cooking dinner for 20,000.

You gotta keep a ton of processes working in both synchronicity and harmony with the intent of reaching an audience of 20,000 people in a very intimate and personal manner.

All the while you're sweating and straining, pushing and breathing, literally suffering through the pain of trying to get this creation, which long before it's birth has taken on a life and agenda all it's own, out the damn door... kicking, screaming, covered in sharp edges, and dragging a loose tail of bubble wrap from one foot.

Even with the simplest of concepts and the most minimal execution your team can possibly get away with, it's still a life changing experience: One that leaves you in awe and wonder, having both learned a series of valuable lessons, and having caught a glimpse of just how much longer you have to go.

Session Play

2007-07-13T09:14:00.001-07:00

With their most recent update, LOTRO has released a new feature they call Session Play, which allows you to play as a non-persistent character in the realm.

With this new mechanism you can play as side characters such as a ranger, a troll or in their initial example, a chicken.

At first I thought this was a little gimmicky, but then I realized that this has some serious potential, because it allows the players to step outside of their grind (as if I haven't complained about that enough) and do something fun and refreshing and, probably most importantly, non-committal. More to the point it really opens up new ways to leverage existing assets, like the world and the NPC's which otherwise have fairly static game play value on their own.

I for one welcome our new Fowl Session Overlords.

RIP MySpace

2007-06-24T01:32:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I was a MySpace user.

I used to play the games people played on MySpace. I would put images and music up on my page, and go out of my way to make my profile completely obnoxious to the point of distraction, and communicate with people by finding LOLCATS that would convey the message and post them on their comments section. I would write blah blah blog posts about stuff, read my friends profile, and I think I even posted a very tongue-in-cheek survey mocking people who post surveys that I had written. It was fun, in spite of (or maybe because of?) the fact that it was a spam-riddled seedy corner of the internet, a place with danger lurking around every corner as I indulged my otherwise completely dormant exhibitionist side I didn't know I had and still am not convinced I do.

And Facebook, with it's perfectly manicured interface, really exposed it for the pile of steaming turd it truly is. I still play the same games on Facebook on occasion, I just don't want to gouge my eyes out afterwords.

And 2 weeks ago they opened up their API. Now anyone can export AND import their data right into Facebook, and seamlessly integrate it with the Facebook experience. Now I realize that Facebook is pretty damn late to the portal party, and customizable homepages like My Yahoo! and iGoogle already let you view the contents of your email Inbox alongside your RSS feeds, the weather, stocks, your bookmarks, the news, a Fickr tag, the time in New York and Los Angeles, and the Garfield of the day. But the Facebook homepage has a value-add that none of these offerings have: Social Networking built in.

Here's the key: The news feed. Whenever one of your friends does anything, like install a new widget on their homepage, everyone gets alerted. That means the best add-ons become viral the moment they get released.

Let me give you an example of this in action. I logged into Facebook the other day and my buddy Corvus had achieved a new score of "Music Rookie" on iLike, a Facebook add-on game which challenges you answer multiple-choice questions based upon music they play for you. I consider myself rather musically adept and knowledgeable so I clicked on his "Musical Rookie" score and started playing. Now I'm completely addicted to this stupid game, and now all my friends have signed up for it, and we're having this point war with each other over who knows more about music (or perhaps who has more time to waste answering stupid trivia questions).

And it's not all sunshine and roses. I definitely see this as adding a fair bit of clutter, and people pages are starting to look more like MySpace than ever, but honestly I'm more than convinced this is very much in it's early infancy, and it's potential has yet to be realized.

Honestly, I'm excited about being able to see when my friends add a new feed to their RSS reader. If they add presence and IM, and stick my email inbox in there too while your at it, and sync my Facebook friends up with Plaxo, I'm not sure I'd ever leave.

And in case your wondering, I'm way ahead on points in iLike, but need to improve my speed and accuracy:

Me: Music Pioneer, 789 points (57.1% correct, 5.5s avg)
Corvus: Music Intern, 167 points (59.4% correct, 5.0s avg)

Fire in the Disco!

2007-06-14T10:23:00.001-07:00

I just had to share. Press play, and prepare for your ears to bleed. It's so bad, it's... Just watch it.

Let's get physical!

2007-06-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

We've integrated Newton Game Dynamics into Ogre3d for our physics solution, and it's been a real learning experience to say the least. I was lucky enough to have snagged a complete printed copy of the GDC 2007 Tutorial on Game Physics Development handout, as far as I'm concerned a one of a kind collection of knowledge for how to implement physics in games. It's a collection of slideshows presented by a bunch of very smart people, all of which are listed here. The material for the tutorial is all here.

Anyway, it's been invaluable to have this wonderful reference available as I try and write code for things like limiting thrust as you reach your top speed, Auto-Guidance systems which need to know when to start slowing down before they overshoot their destination, and how we're going to deal with things like shells traveling through space at high rates of speed, which is, as it turns out, a form of rocket science. Fortunately these guys are heroes on the topic.

We are going to open source our engine (sooner rather than later, watch this space for more), so as part of that effort we'll be releasing our collective findings on what you need to know to do it yourself, but really it's nothing Jim Van Verth doesn't cover much better in his tutorials.

Thanks Jim. Next time we're in the same place at the same time, look me up and I'll buy you a pint.

Games with Money

2007-05-12T12:53:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you a little bit about a game I play for money: Chasing the elusive perfect signal.

I day trade futures to earn a side income, and my methodology has me using signals that I've written myself: Basically my computer sits here for long periods of time and watches what's happening on with the markets and decides when is a good time to buy, and when is a good time to sell. A large part of this (especially on the weekends when the market's aren't open) is optimizing these signals to improve their performance (make more money), which also involves my computer sitting here and looking at different times and conditions to buy and sell, and because I've written the signals, also changing how they work.

It's a bit like building a mountain where you start off with a few pebbles and you push them around for a bit, and then you add in some dirt and rocks, and pretty soon you're pushing around boulders because your signals have grown into this bohemouth of when this happens and what ifs and sometimes this but not that but only on days that end in 'y' as you try and build the perfect signal that will always be consistently profitable under any conditions.

And sometimes the mountain is high enough (but not infinitely high), or it just can't get any higher, or it's never going to be as tall and grand as you want it to and you have to forget about it to go work on another one. And on bad days, the market comes along and kicks your signal and reduces it into the pile of rubble it is, and on those days I'm not in the best of moods.

But often I wonder if it's not become my Moby Dick... the whale I just can't catch, and will remain forever elusive as I sail the markets in search of the perfect signal.

Are you a gamer?

2007-05-09T00:13:00.000-07:00

I don't know how people know I do games for a living. I mean if you saw a guy with long hair wearing a black shirt that said Wii-tarded would you assume he had somehow made games his primary source of income? But it happens to me all the time. I got a flat tire so I went to the local Firestone to get it repaired and the guy behind the counter asked me what kind of work I did. So I told him I'm the CEO of an independent game studio and he replies, "I knew it!", like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that says, "Into Games". He then asks me what kind of games we make and if they are World War 2 games. I told him no, that we're mostly science fiction based, and he seemed disappointed. So i asked him what games he plays and he says, "World War 2 games of course.", like there's any other genre worth playing. He listed off the last 2 Brothers in Arms titles and we talked about how cool the third one looked and I gave him a card and that was that.

I don't know if I'm just always humming the Super Mario Brothers theme or what it is that marks me as being associated with games but I think I've reached the level of reeking of it or something.

The Zen of Roleplaying

2007-04-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to sleep, and I had a thought, "Did I lock my door in Sindome last night? I better log in to see if my characters safe." and then immideately said to myself, "Ahhh yes. There's that familiar paranoia of character leak." and went to sleep.

You see I knew damn well that I had checked that door 3 times before I logged of, but the character I had just been playing on Sindome in the hour of free time I have before I go to sleep at 1 in the morning is going through a nasty bout of paranoia herself, and deservedly so. But in acting out that paranoia through the character, you get a kind of character leak where the paranoia of the character becomes your own, and you end up with this constant practiced nag in the back of your mind telling you to look over your shoulder. I understand in extreme cases this leads to trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality. Scary, huh?

Anyway, I wrote some haiku this morning to help channel the paranoid energy into something creative and fun.

Did I lock my cube?
Paranoia sets in fast
I must log in now

Adrenaline surge
fingers shaking badly I
don't understand that

Waking up to dream
Shadowy mists all around me
My stuff is now gone

Who is on the who?
At who has more peeps today
Lots to Roleplay now

Neon Streets of Red
Banspeuro park in the dark
Get me out of here

hawk the first grenade
pull pin on the first grenade
sell the first grenade

Tanks on the red streets
ninjas superhuman strength
RampageMOO is here

Now I lay me down
to sleep with my gun near me
lord, please bless my aim

Fool's Gold Released!

2007-03-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

My company Verse Studios is proud to announce Fool's Gold, the first Gold Farming Role-playing Game ( GF-RPG ) ever released.

Picture a world oppressed. A world where evil creatures stalk the land, where only the brave can survive, and where people have far more money than time. This is the world of Fool's Gold, where you take up the mantel of Gold Farmer and race against time and the evil Blizzard's to get much needed gold to desperate characters scattered through out the game world.

Set in the lush land of Goldman is the village of Sacks, and it is here where you start your heroic journey...

Fool's Gold is completely free to play, all it costs you is the time to download and the time you spend in the game. If you are like most of us here at Verse Studios, your time is well spent elsewhere. But there are some people out there who insist on downloading and playing this game. Who are we to say no?

It's completely free to download and play (not even a banner ad or anything) and both PC and Mac versions are available: http://www.verse-studios.com/foolsgold.html

And PLEASE Digg it... we need all the love and exposure we can get!