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January 23, 2007
Svarga SL Ecology Simulation
We've been doing a lot of building and coding in Second Life over the past few months. And it's occurred to me more than once (read: "hourly") that one of the great things about the SL environment is the range of opportunities it creates for fertile improvisation. The LSL script language and building tools are rich and (somewhat) well-structured, and -- like all developer toolkits -- clearly intended to promote and facilitate certain kinds of approaches to problem-solving. But they haven't yet been surrounded by an institutional envelope that dictates thinking about best practice. Too many diverse minds are working simultaneously on too broad a set of problems.
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Posted by John Jainschigg at 12:49 PM Permalink
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December 05, 2006
Minsky's Emotion Machine
Marvin Minsky has just released his first book in 20 years. Titled "The Emotion Machine," its thesis appears to extend and nuance the vision Minsky popularized in The Society of Mind -- the idea that mind is the net result of dynamic interactions within a messily-hierarchical population of more or less-specialized agents, which jockey for position and evolve as a result of their commerce. In the new book, or so the reports of early readers suggest, Minsky shows how emotions work in this context, how they compute and can be computed, and are, at base, just "another tool for thinking with."
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Posted by John Jainschigg at 01:00 PM Permalink
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August 28, 2006
Ant-Colony Algorithms
Andrew Colin's article, Ant-Colony Algorithms is a great introduction to swarm-based autonomous computing. Andrew presents the basics, constraints, rules and working code for using (in this case, simulated) swarms of simple autonomous 'ants' to find good solutions to historically-intractible AI problems (e.g., Traveling Salesman).
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Posted by John Jainschigg at 11:12 AM Permalink
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April 26, 2006
The Community Development Model: Mission Critical or Warm & Fuzzy?
by Jeremy Chan
Bdale Garbee, Open Source & Linux CTO at Hewlett-Packard, presented a keynote speech entitled "Reaping the Benefits of the Community Development Model" at the LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld Conference & Expo in Toronto.
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Posted by Jeremy Chan at 12:24 AM Permalink
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April 24, 2006
The Open Source Security Tool Arena - Part 1
by Jeremy Chan
At a mid-day security session at the LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld Conference & Expo in Toronto, Tony Howlett gave an overview of some of the open-source tools available for performing a network security audit to a small group of attendees, covering Network discovery and Mapping, TCP/IP service enumeration, network vulnerability, firewall and router auditing, and wireless security.
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Posted by Jeremy Chan at 06:52 PM Permalink
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Seaside: A Webapp Framework for Smalltalk
by Jeremy Chan
The sheer abundance of web application frameworks out there is the tipoff that HTTP is a woefully inadequate protocol for building complex web applications.
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Posted by Jeremy Chan at 06:04 PM Permalink
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April 08, 2006
AI vs. UI? Which Way to Smarter Software?
In this month's Fortune magazine, Bill Gates is quoted as saying that he's finally on the verge of achieving a "digital workstyle." What he means by that, apparently, is two things:
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Posted by John Jainschigg at 11:09 AM Permalink
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