On Life, aLife and Death

Fig. – Knight, Death and the Devil (1513). This is one of three metal engravings by Albrecht Dürer in a series called Meisterstiche (since I have started this blog, I have also chosen a woodcut engraving done by Dürer, – his Rhinoceros – for several reasons, one being that it appeared in Europe for the fisrt time trough Lisbon in 1515). The others are Melancholia I and Saint Jerome in His Study. The engraving is dated 1513, two hundred years after the dissolution of the Knights Templar in 1313. We see a skull in the bottom left corner; the night in full armour (shining armor?) carries a lance; behing him is a pig-snouted horned devil and he is passing Death on his pale horse, who is carrying an hourglass. Under the knight’s horse runs a long-haired retriever, a hunting dog. Dürer called this picture Reuter, which is, Rider. (source).

“Every evil leaves a sorrow in the memory, until the supreme evil, death,
wipes out all memories together with all life“. Leonardo da Vinci.

Carlos Gershenson (Complexes blog), some days ago just uploaded a short (5 pp.) philosophical essay about life, death and artificial life (*) (aLife), which I vividly recommend. He starts his “What Does Artificial Life Tell Us About Death?” with this precise Leonardo’s quote (above). Among other passages it’s interesting to see how different notions of death are deduced from a limited set of different notions of life (in many situations, opposing terms could be used to define each other). Carlos points us out to six currents, or lines of thought:

• If we consider life as self-production (Varela et al., 1974; Maturana and Varela, 1980, 1987; Luisi, 1998), then death will the the loss of that self-production ability.
• If we consider life as what is common to all living beings (De Duve, 2003, p. 8), then death implies the termination of that commonality, distinguishing it from other living beings.
• If we consider life as computation (Hopfield, 1994), then death will be the end (halting?) of that computing process.
• If we consider life as supple adaptation (Bedau, 1998), death implies the loss of that adaptation.
• If we consider life as a self-reproducing system capable of at least one thermodynamic work cycle (Kauffman, 2000, p. 4), death will occur when the system will be unable to perform thermodynamic work.
• If we consider life as information (a system) that produces more of its own information than that produced by its environment (Gershenson, 2007), then death will occur when the environment will produce more information than that produced by the system.

I was aware of Kauffman’s “blender thought experiment”, however Gershenson adds much more into it. A variation. He goes on like this. Nice reading:

[...] Focussing on our understanding of death, this will depend necessarily on our understanding of life, and vice versa. Throughout history there have been several explanations to both life and death, and it seems unfeasible that a consensus will be reached. Thus, we are faced with multiple notions of life, which imply different notions of death. However, generally speaking, if we describe life as a process, death can be understood as the irreversible termination of that process. The general notion of life as a process or organization (Langton, 1989; Sterelny and Griffiths, 1999; Korzeniewski, 2001) has expelled vitalism from scientific worldviews. Moreover, there are advantages in describing living systems from a functional perspective, e.g. it makes the notion of life independent of its implementation. This is crucial for artificial life. Also, we know that there is a constant flow of matter and energy in living systems, i.e. their physical components can change while the identity of the organism is preserved. In this respect, one can make a variation of Kauffman’s “blender thought experiment” (Kauffman, 2000): if you put a macroscopic living system in a blender and press “on”, after some seconds you will have the same molecules that the living system had. However, the organization of the living system is destroyed in the blending. Thus, life is an organizational aspect of living systems, not so much a physical aspect. Death occurs when this organization is lost. [...]

(*) even if, I do not recommend this Wikipedia entry. Extremely poor.

Can you trust your own eyes, or hears?

Fig. – Illusion created by Prof. Akiyoshi Kitaoka (Dep. of Psychology, Ritsumeikan Univ., Kyoto, Japan). If you don’t see any illusion at all, don’t worry. That’s exactly why this optical illusion is so great. The illusion is not there, or is it?! Meanwhile over his page, Akiyoshi warns: This page contains some works of “anomalous motion illusion”, which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy, you had better leave this page immediately (more).

Where’s the illusion, right? Well,… what if I just tell you that no blue at all is used over this picture! No matter how strongly you want to believe you are seeing blue and green spirals here, there is no blue color in this image. There is only green, red and orange. What you think is blue is actually green. Don’t worry, … you are not daltonic. I mean, I’m a little bit but, you could check this out through Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, if you need an affirmation. Indeed, these are just “Vain speculation un­deceived by the senses” (1670’s Scilla’s treatise) .

In fact, Relations here, between different colors (green, red and orange), are more important than each color by itself. Relations plus context are the key (more here over Generative Art, and here over Swarm Intelligence based Pattern Recognition). Through these relations, much probably using Gestalt’s principles (the German word Gestalt could be translated into “configuration or pattern”), here Akiyoshi manages to emerge us the blue color over our perception. This does not cheat a computer of course, however could cheat our own eyes. In other areas the opposite could also be found. For instance, Humans can easily recognize a car over background trees (segment it, in just tiny lapses of a second), while this natural task could be extremely painful for computers over some cases (here is one example).

Born in Prague (inspired by 1890’s works of Christian von Ehrenfels, Austrian philosopher), then later absorbed by a great and tremendous intellectual period occurred from Germany back to Austria (Bauhaus), the Gestalt Laws of Organization have guided the study of how people perceive visual components as organized patterns or wholes, instead of many different parts. I would say that most certainly some Wertheimer’s gestaltic principles were used in here: Figure and Ground, Similarity, Proximity or Contiguity, Continuity, Closure, Area, and Symmetry (check Gestalt Theory of Visual Perception). We could see this happening also in other areas, … in Music for instance:

[...] Gestalt theory first arose in 1890 as a reaction to the prevalent psychological theory of the time – atomism. Atomism examined parts of things with the idea that these parts could then be put back together to make wholes. Atomists believed the nature of things to be absolute and not dependent on context. Gestalt theorists, on the other hand, were intrigued by the way our mind perceives wholes out of incomplete elements [1, 2]. “To the Gestaltists, things are affected by where they are and by what surrounds them…so that things are better described as “more than the sum of their parts.” [1, p. 49]. Gestaltists believed that context was very important in perception. An essay by Christian von Ehrenfels discussed this belief using a musical example. Take a 12 note melody. Play it in one key, say the key of C. Now change to another key, say the key of A flat. There might not be any notes the same in the two songs, yet a person listening to it knows that it is the same tune. It is the relationships between the notes that give us the tune, the whole, not which notes make up the tune. [...], from “Gestalt Principles of Perception“, Bonnie Skaalid, Univ. of Saskatchewan, Canada, 1999.

Care for an contemporary example? Well, … the first thing that comes to my mind is DUB music genre. In fact, I do have several albums from different musicians over my house. Dub music evolved in Jamaica (1968) from early rastafarian instrumental reggae music and versions that incorporated fairly primitive reverbs and echo sound effects, being found by accident (engineer Byron Smith left the vocal track out by accident). Over decades, it inspired immense groups of musicians from well-known bands such as The Police, The Clash, UB40 up to reputed musicians such as Bill Laswell. Of course !, it was not far from what John Cage have made for the solo piano Music of Changes, to determine which notes should be used and when they should sound. In the fifty’s, Cage start it to use the mechanism of the I Ching (Chinese “Book of Changes”) in the composition of his music in order to provide a framework for his uses of chance.

Other most recent bands include, Leftfield, Massive Attack, Bauhaus, The Beastie Boys, Asian Dub Foundation, Underworld, Thievery Corporation, Gorillaz, Kruder & Dorfmeister, and DJ Spooky. But what is then so special about Dub? Well, one of this genre’s most striking features is the fact that some if not all musical sentences are incomplete. Those special sentences (Gestaltic, let me add), are normally followed by a pause. The most amazing thing however, is that us, Humans could perceive the entire sentence being formed on the back of our minds! So the music is not there, and at the same time, we are listening to two adjacent simultaneous melodies, as we were a composer. By just using relations among a few notes, we soon start to emerge a perception for the whole sentence, as if they were self-organizing! Being it extremely rhythmic, this often could lead us to a sweet soft state of overwhelming emotion, or exalted organic feel to the music .

As you will probably know by now, the same could happen over misplaced letters over an entire phrase. Even if some letters are not at their right proper place, at each word, we could still perceive the whole sentence meaning. Up to your gestaltic neurons to decipher.

Next time you go to a rave party (I never did, neither pretend to), do think about the title of this post, the figure above, as well as on all those great past musicians, along with – unfortunately – awkward current DJ’s, who pass on for hours strident music mixes without knowing at all what Gestalt is all about! Oh, … by the way, should you feel extremely dizzy, do follow Akiyoshi’s advice: If you start feeling unwell when using this website (rave party), immediately cover one eye with your hand and then leave the page (leave the party). Do not close your both eyes because that can make the attack worse!

TENSEGRITY – English words I am in love with #2

Fig. – One of the images used by R. Fuller on his original article back in 1961 (Portfolio and Art News Annual, No.4). [...] There have been recent news references to structures which I have designed for firing to the Moon. Six hundred pounds is the approximate weight of my thirty-six foot diameter sphere self-openable from a thirty-six inch diameter ball. There can, and probably will, be much larger units, which I will discuss later in this disclosure. Of first interest to engineers and artist-conceivers is the fact that my potential prototypes of satellite- and moon-structures are tensional integrity, omni-triangulated, high-tensile-cabled, spherical nets in which local islands of compression act only as local sprit-stiffeners. The local stiffeners are so oriented that they angle inwardly and outwardly between comprehensively finite, exterior and interior, tensional, spherical nets, thus producing positive and negative waves of action and reaction in inter-stabilized dynamic equilibrium. [...]

Tensegrity: 1. Definition coined by R. Buckminster Fuller (architect, engineer and cosmologist), who is best known for his geodesic domes (surely, you will recognize some of these).  Tensegrity is a portmanteau of tensional integrity (check below some passages from his original article in Portfolio and Art News Annual, No.4, 1961). It refers to the integrity of structures as being based in a synergy between balanced tension and compression components. The term “synergetics” may refer more abstractly to synergetic systems of contrasting forces. 2. Structure using distributed tension to hold islands of compression. 3. “The tension-bearing members in these structures – whether Fuller’s domes or Snelson’s sculptures – map out the shortest paths between adjacent members (and are therefore, by definition, arranged geodesically). Tensional forces naturally transmit themselves over the shortest distance between two points, so the members of a tensegrity structure are precisely positioned to best withstand stress. For this reason, tensegrity structures offer a maximum amount of strength.” (Donald Ingber). 4. Was also a term used (unfortunately, let me add) by Carlos Cesar Arana Castaneda (guru! born 1925, Peru) to refer to some movements called magical passes (a series of meditative stretches, stances and movements) that he said were developed by Native American shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest. 4. Tensegrity Ritual Suicides?! Patricia Partin and several other Tensegrity activists went missing after Castaneda’s death in 1998. Later Partin’s body was found in Death Valley Desert. She had apparently committed ritual suicide.

[...] One cannot patent geometry per se nor any separate differentiated-out, pure principle of nature’s operative processes. One can patent, however, the surprise complex behaviors of associated principles, where the behavior of the whole is unpredicted by the behavior of the parts, i.e. synergetic phenomena. The latter is what is known as an invention, a complex arrangement, not found in nature, though sometimes superficially similar to nature. Though superficially similar in patternings to Radiolaria and Flies’ Eyes, geodesic structuring is true invention. The Radiolaria collapse when taken out of water. Flies’ Eyes will not provide structural precedent or man-occupiable structures. [...]

[...] It is a sad fact that the world of patronized design is the last area of commonly accepted social behavior where piracy is considered ethical. Patrons hire designers to steal their competitors’ work. Patrons hire designers to steal other non-professional designers’ fresh-new crops of potential economic growth. Only by joining forces will the architect-, scientist-, engineer-artists be able to eliminate this intellectual cancer of the regenerative processes. [...]

[...] All these Geodesic events were news items simply because they were synergetic surprises, ergo contrary to the obvious. Copied geodesic ventures in higher modular frequency of triangular Geodesic subdivisioning, or other less symmetrical employments of the Geodesic structural integrity than I have as yet undertaken, do not constitute invention.Nor does the variation warrant exemption from the temporary economic authority granted to me as a patent. [...]

On Self-Regulated Swarms, Societal Memory, Speed and Dynamics

 

a) Dynamic Optimization Problems (DOP) tackled by Swarm Intelligence (in here a quick snapshot of the dynamic environment)

b) Swarm adaptive response over time, under severe dynamics, over the dynamic environment on the left (a).

Figs. – Check animated pictures in here. (a) A 3D toroidal fast changing landscape describing a Dynamic Optimization (DO) Control Problem (8 frames in total). (b) A self-organized swarm emerging a characteristic flocking migration behaviour surpassing in intermediate steps some local optima over the 3D toroidal landscape (left), describing a Dynamic Optimization (DO) Control Problem. Over each foraging step, the swarm self-regulates his population and keeps tracking the extrema (44 frames in total).

 [] Vitorino Ramos, Carlos Fernandes, Agostinho C. Rosa, On Self-Regulated Swarms, Societal Memory, Speed and Dynamics, in Artificial Life X – Proc. of the Tenth Int. Conf. on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, L.M. Rocha, L.S. Yaeger, M.A. Bedau, D. Floreano, R.L. Goldstone and A. Vespignani (Eds.), MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-68162-5, pp. 393-399, Bloomington, Indiana, USA, June 3-7, 2006.

PDF paper.

Wasps, bees, ants and termites all make effective use of their environment and resources by displaying collective “swarm” intelligence. Termite colonies – for instance – build nests with a complexity far beyond the comprehension of the individual termite, while ant colonies dynamically allocate labor to various vital tasks such as foraging or defense without any central decision-making ability. Recent research suggests that microbial life can be even richer: highly social, intricately networked, and teeming with interactions, as found in bacteria. What strikes from these observations is that both ant colonies and bacteria have similar natural mechanisms based on Stigmergy and Self-Organization in order to emerge coherent and sophisticated patterns of global foraging behavior. Keeping in mind the above characteristics we propose a Self-Regulated Swarm (SRS) algorithm which hybridizes the advantageous characteristics of Swarm Intelligence as the emergence of a societal environmental memory or cognitive map via collective pheromone laying in the landscape (properly balancing the exploration/exploitation nature of our dynamic search strategy), with a simple Evolutionary mechanism that trough a direct reproduction procedure linked to local environmental features is able to self-regulate the above exploratory swarm population, speeding it up globally. In order to test his adaptive response and robustness, we have recurred to different dynamic multimodal complex functions as well as to Dynamic Optimization Control problems, measuring reaction speeds and performance. Final comparisons were made with standard Genetic Algorithms (GAs), Bacterial Foraging strategies (BFOA), as well as with recent Co-Evolutionary approaches. SRS’s were able to demonstrate quick adaptive responses, while outperforming the results obtained by the other approaches. Additionally, some successful behaviors were found: SRS was able to maintain a number of different solutions, while adapting to unforeseen situations even when over the same cooperative foraging period, the community is requested to deal with two different and contradictory purposes; the possibility to spontaneously create and maintain different sub-populations on different peaks, emerging different exploratory corridors with intelligent path planning capabilities; the ability to request for new agents (division of labor) over dramatic changing periods, and economizing those foraging resources over periods of intermediate stabilization. Finally, results illustrate that the present SRS collective swarm of bio-inspired ant-like agents is able to track about 65% of moving peaks traveling up to ten times faster than the velocity of a single individual composing that precise swarm tracking system. This emerged behavior is probably one of the most interesting ones achieved by the present work. 

 

Stigmergic Optimization (Springer Book)

Abraham, Ajith; Grosan, Crina; Ramos, Vitorino (Eds.), Stigmergic Optimization, Studies in Computational Intelligence (series), Vol. 31, Springer-Verlag, ISBN: 3-540-34689-9, 295 p., Hardcover, 2006.

TABLE OF CONTENTS (short /full) / CHAPTERS:

[1] Stigmergic Optimization: Foundations, Perspectives and Applications.
[2] Stigmergic Autonomous Navigation in Collective Robotics.
[3] A general Approach to Swarm Coordination using Circle Formation.
[4] Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimizers: a powerful and promising approach.
[5] Parallel Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithms with Adaptive
 Simulated Annealing.
[6] Termite: a Swarm Intelligent Routing algorithm for Mobile
 Wireless ad-hoc Networks.
[7] Linear Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization.
[8] Physically realistic Self-Assembly Simulation system.
[9] Gliders and Riders: A Particle Swarm selects for coherent Space-time Structures in Evolving Cellular Automata.
[10] Stigmergic Navigation for Multi-agent Teams in Complex Environments.
[11] Swarm Intelligence: Theoretical proof that Empirical techniques are Optimal.
[12] Stochastic Diffusion search: Partial function evaluation in Swarm Intelligence Dynamic Optimization.

The Notificator (London, 1935). First Twitter?

Fig. – For a small sum Londoners may leave messages for friends in public spaces. When writing on “notificator” messages moves up behind window, remaining in view for two hours.  Known as the “notificator,” the new machine was installed in streets, stores, railroad stations or other public places where individuals may leave messages for friends. Appeared in the American Modern Mechanix magazine (August, 1935) (via Modern Mechanix blog) + Maikelnai’s blog).

World’s first Twitter? Hell no! First World Twitter is kind of old, … it were Public Bathrooms !! As well as Hobo signs.

EXAPTIVE – English words I am in love with #1

Fig. – The famous frontispiece from Scilla’s treatise of 1670 defending the organic nature of fossils. The solid young man, representing the truth of sensory experi­ence, shows a fossil sea urchin in his right hand to a wraithlike figure represent­ing the former style of speculative thinking. With his left hand, the solid figure points to other fossils found in Sicily. The text proclaims: “Vain speculation un­deceived by the senses.” (from, Stephen Jay Gould, “The Structure Of Evolutionary Theory”, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press”, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002).

Exaptation: 1. The use of a biological structure or function for a purpose other than that for which it initially evolved. 2. An evolutionary process in which a given adaptation is first naturally selected for, and subsequently used by the organism for something other than its original, intended purpose. 3. Exaptations – Features (such as feathers) that evolved by selection for one purpose (such as warmth) and were later adapted to a new purpose (such as flight). [more]. Exaptive: to show exaptation – featuring it.

Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars

Video – “Intel Star” TV ad – Who’s your rock star? – Rather than focusing on a new product, the 2009 “Sponsors of Tomorrow” ad campaign celebrates what makes Intel different culture, personality, heroes – and ways Intel has helped change the world for over 40 years. Featuring Ajay Bhatt co-inventor of USB !

408 seconds of positive feedback

Video – Merci! (referred also as Bodhisattva in metro), short film by Belgian director Christine Rabette awarded in 2003 with a Golden Wave for best Short Film (Court-Métrage), now climbing to more than a half-million views on YouTube. Along with yawning and the flu, few things are as contagious and viral as laughter. After all, we are humans not androids, for god’s sake!

[...] In contrast to negative feedback, positive feedback (f+) generally promotes changes in the system (the majority of SO systems use them). The explosive growth of the human population provides a familiar example of the effect of positive feedback. The snowballing autocatalytic effect of f+ takes an initial change in a system (due to amplification of fluctuations; a minimal and natural local cluster of objects could be a starting point) and reinforces that change in the same direction as the initial deviation. Self-enhancement, amplification, facilitation, and autocatalysis are all terms used to describe positive feedback [9]. Another example could be provided by the clustering or aggregation of individuals. Many birds, such as seagulls nest in large colonies. Group nesting evidently provides individuals with certain benefits, such as better detection of predators or greater ease in finding food. The mechanism in this case is imitation2: birds preparing to nest are attracted to sites where other birds are already nesting, while the behavioral rule could be synthesized as “I nest close where you nest”. The key point is that aggregation of nesting birds at a particular site is not purely a consequence of each bird being attracted to the site per se. Rather, the aggregation evidently arises primarily because each bird is attracted to others (check for further references on [7,9]). On social insect societies, f+ could be illustrated by the pheromone reinforcement on trails, allowing the entire colony to exploit some past and present solutions. Generally, as in the above cases, positive feedback is imposed implicitly on the system and locally by each one of the constituent units. Fireflies flashing in synchrony [49] follow the rule, “I signal when you signal”, fish traveling in schools abide by the rule, “I go where you go”, and so forth. In humans, the “infectious” quality of a yawn of laughter is a familiar example of positive feedback of the form, “I do what you do”. Seeing a person yawning3, or even just thinking of yawning, can trigger a yawn [9]. There is however one associated risk, generally if f+ acts alone without the presence of negative feedbacks, which per si can play a critical role keeping under control this snowballing effect, providing inhibition to offset the amplification and helping to shape it into a particular pattern. Indeed, the amplifying nature of  f+ means that it has the potential to produce destructive explosions or implosions in any process where it plays a role. Thus the behavioral rule may be more complicated than initially suggested, possessing both an autocatalytic as well as an antagonistic aspect. In the case of fish [9], the minimal behavioral rule could be “I nest where others nest, unless the area is overcrowded”. In this case both the positive and negative feedback may be coded into the behavioral rules of the fish. Finally, in other cases one finds that the inhibition arises automatically, often simply from physical constraints. [...], in, Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes.

Some animals can bet at the Stock Exchange while beating the market up to ten times

Last year, at the beginning of October I decided to dedicate my second post on financial markets (I, II) to Black Swans. Swans are beautiful animals, but while white swans are vulgar and omnipresent at every pond, black swans are rare! Meanwhile, 2 days ago (June 1) the Wall Street Journal comes with this very awkward - and by all means for that precise reason - interesting article written by journalist Scott Patterson, where Mr. Taleb’s name pops-up again (image below).

Well, … let’s face it: you could put your money in the bank and have – let’s say – a 3% revenue at the end of your fiscal year. Or you could apply it to raise a new fancy gourmet restaurant at your local vicinity. Restaurants and local food stores are known to have 5-7% revenues in one year, not to speak on the immense burden they represent as well as for some associated risks – specially these days. But then you may think – better than banks, right? Right! Or, just to give you another example on this increasing scale - raising a little bit the risk -, on the other hand you could apply your money in stock markets. Main financial indexes (Dow Jones, NASDAQ, etc) are known to have an annual average revenue of 10-12% (since 1918). Not these days of course, where high volatility and entropy in the markets are installed. Well,  emergent countries like China are raising themselves at 12%/year also. We could go on and on with so many other examples. Some say that Eolic parks could achieve 40%. Normally the cost of one eolic tower is around 1 million euros, which could be paid back after one year producing energy trough wind at normal operating conditions. The rest are maintenance costs, as well as initial investment in terrains, etc. So, what’s new? Consider this. For moments imagine yourself having 100% in revenues, just last year, at this precise dramatic context. That’s 10 times what the market does in regular years, 20 times what your favorite restaurant does. Moreover, there is a substantial difference between all these examples. If you keep dropping money at the restaurant (for instance the revenue you have earned in the last year), still liquid revenues will be the same in the next year (unless you open a new dinner room next to the first one, while the awful burden keeps increasing). Some business are static and linear in time while others are exponential. As Alice in the wonderland, you will need to keep running twice as faster in order to be at the same place. Amazing those differences, no? Well, not for those “lovely” animal creatures known as Black Swans. According to Patterson, … Funds run by Universa, which is managed and owned by Mr. Taleb’s long-time collaborator Mark Spitznagel, last year gained more than 100% thanks to its bearish bets. Universa now runs about $6 billion, up from the $300 million it began with in January 2007. Excerpts from the Wall Street Journal article (Black Swan Fund Makes a Big Bet on Inflation) follow below. So, why the hell I do not feel at all surprised by this?! Really, I am not. Let me just say, I do have my own reasons:

  [...] A hedge fund firm that reaped huge rewards betting against the market last year is about to open a fund premised on another wager: that the massive stimulus efforts of global governments will lead to hyperinflation. The firm, Universa Investments L.P., is known for its ties to gloomy investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the 2007 bestseller “The Black Swan,” which describes the impact of extreme events on the world and financial markets.

Funds run by Universa, which is managed and owned by Mr. Taleb’s long-time collaborator Mark Spitznagel, last year gained more than 100% thanks to its bearish bets. Universa now runs about $6 billion, up from the $300 million it began with in January 2007. Earlier this year, Mr. Spitznagel closed several funds to new investors….

Mr. Taleb doesn’t have an ownership interest in the Santa Monica, Calif., firm, but he has significant investments in it and helps shape its strategies. The term “black swan,” which has become a market catchphrase in the last few years, alludes to the once-widespread belief in the West that all swans are white. The notion was proven false when European explorers discovered black swans in Australia. A black-swan event, according to Mr. Taleb, is something that is extreme and highly unexpected. … [...]

Bottom line

… meanwhile, … at the bottom of our food chains everything seems to be blooming. Here recently over the Atlantic within Spain (south) and France (east) at the bay of Biscay. Plankton (phyto-plankton and zoo-plankton) are some of the most important living things on planet Earth. Phyto-plankton absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen and are at the foundation of the food chain, followed by zoo-plankton. Plankton blooms are so massive that they are visible from space (image from NASA’s Visible Earth).

 

Colour Image Segmentation using Evolutionary Computation

With the current ongoing dramatic need of Africa to have contemporary maps (currently, Google promises to launch his first and exhaustive world-wide open-access digital cartography of the African continent very soon), back in 1999-2000 we envisioned a very simple idea into a research project (over my previous lab. – CVRM IST). Instead of producing new maps in the regular standard way, which are costly (specially for African continent countries) as well as time consuming (imagine the amount of money and time needed to cover the whole continent with high resolution aerial photos) the idea then was to hybridize trough an automatic procedure (with the help of Artificial Intelligence) new current data coming from satellites with old data coming from the computational analysis of images of old colonial maps. For instance, old roads segmented in old maps will help us finding the new ones coming from the current satellite images, as well as those that were lost. The same goes on for bridges, buildings, numbers, letters at the map, etc. However in order to do this, several preparatory steps were needed. One of those crucial steps was to obtain (segment – know to be one of the hardest procedures in image processing) the old roads, buildings, airports, at the old maps. Back in 1999-2000 while dealing with several tasks at this research project (AUTOCARTIS - Automatic Methods for Updating Cartographic Maps) I started to think of using evolutionary computation in order to tackle and surpass this precise problem, in what then later become one of the first usages of Genetic Algorithms in image analysis. The result could be checked below. Meanwhile, the experience gained with AUTOCARTIS was then later useful not only for digital old books (Visão Magazine, March 2002), as well as for helping us finding water in Mars (at the MARS EXPRESS European project – Expresso newspaper, May 2003) from which CVRM lab. was one of the European partners. Much often in life simple ideas (I owe it to Prof. Fernando Muge and Prof. Pedro Pina) are the best ones. This is particularly true in science.

Figure – One original image (left – Luanda, Angola map) and two segmentation examples, rivers and roads respectively obtained through the Genetic Algorithm proposed (low resolution images). [at the same time this precise Map of Luanda, was used by me along with the face of Einstein to benchmark several dynamic image adaptive perception versus memory experiments via ant-like artificial life systems over what I then entitled Digital Image Habitats]

[] Vitorino Ramos, Fernando Muge, Map Segmentation by Colour Cube Genetic K-Mean Clustering, Proc. of ECDL´2000 – 4th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, J. Borbinha and T. Baker (Eds.), ISBN 3-540-41023-6, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1923, pp. 319-323, Springer-Verlag -Heidelberg, Lisbon, Portugal, 18-20 Sep. 2000.

Segmentation of a colour image composed of different kinds of texture regions can be a hard problem, namely to compute for an exact texture fields and a decision of the optimum number of segmentation areas in an image when it contains similar and/or non-stationary texture fields. In this work, a method is described for evolving adaptive procedures for these problems. In many real world applications data clustering constitutes a fundamental issue whenever behavioural or feature domains can be mapped into topological domains. We formulate the segmentation problem upon such images as an optimisation problem and adopt evolutionary strategy of Genetic Algorithms for the clustering of small regions in colour feature space. The present approach uses k-Means unsupervised clustering methods into Genetic Algorithms, namely for guiding this last Evolutionary Algorithm in his search for finding the optimal or sub-optimal data partition, task that as we know, requires a non-trivial search because of its NP-complete nature. To solve this task, the appropriate genetic coding is also discussed, since this is a key aspect in the implementation. Our purpose is to demonstrate the efficiency of Genetic Algorithms to automatic and unsupervised texture segmentation. Some examples in Colour Maps are presented and overall results discussed.

(to obtain the respective PDF file follow link above or visit chemoton.org)

Things fall apart, … that’s what they do

A couple of years ago, while G.W. Bush was comfortably seated at the White House, Gore Vidal, the American novelist, was invited by the Canadian TV show THE HOUR (June 6, 2007). What follows is an amazing first response by Gore Vidal to a trivial question. I suspect that Gore Vidal on his spare time, do thinks a lot on the nature of what complex systems really are. Here is an extract from the introductory part of that interview:

THE HOUR – Here’s Mr. Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal (GV) – Nice too see you. See you good.
THE HOUR – How are things?
GV – … Things, … aaahhhh, … fall apart. That’s what things do. And we are things… so I promise not to crumble on the program.

(…) later on;

GV – … they have demonized the word “liberal”. We were a liberal republic, to start with. What does the liberal word mean? It comes from those who favour legislation tending towards greater democracy.

Financial crisis seen from the sky

[via Foreign Policy / Contrafactos Twitter] (…) Want to get a sense of just how bad things are? Take a spin on Google Earth. The above image, pulled yesterday  from Vesseltracker.com’s Google Earth file, shows container ships languishing off the Singapore coast. Welcome to the largest parking lot on Earth. International Economy explains (…):

“The world’s busiest port for container traffic, Singapore saw its year-over-year volume drop by 19.6 percent in January 2009, followed by a 19.8 percent drop in February. As of mid-March 2009, 11.3 percent of the world’s shipping capacity, sat idle, a record.”

Extremely bad news. Meanwhile, someone have made a huge mistake…

Tiny Giant Architects + stigmergic indirect information flows

For some seconds, just imagine having these 50 m² – 8 meters tall artifact constructed (above) by tiny Giant Architects in a plaza over a big city near you. Over this youtube video several scientists have filled the big city unearthed with 10 tens of cement during 3 days. Then calmly (taking several weeks), have digg it to the bone. To have a clue on what I mean just imagine having all these at Times Square  plaza in New York! or at the front-door of the  Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (in fact a giant spider is also there – check photo below). Colonies of eu-social insects use stigmergy in order to do this, being a good reference the work done by Karsai back in 1999 at the Artificial Life MIT Press Journal (here is the abstract – unfornately I have it on paper but not scanned):

# István Karsai, “Decentralized Control of Construction Behavior in Paper Wasps: An Overview of the Stigmergy Approach“, Spring 1999, Vol. 5, No. 2, Pages 117-136.

Grassé [26] coined the term stigmergy (previous work directs and triggers new building actions) to describe a mechanism of decentralized pathway of information flow in social insects. In general, all kinds of multi-agent groups require coordination for their effort and it seems that stigmergy is a very powerful means to coordinate activity over great spans of time and space in a wide variety of systems. In a situation in which many individuals contribute to a collective effort, such as building a nest, stimuli provided by the emerging structure itself can provide a rich source of information for the working insects. The current article provides a detailed review of this stigmergic paradigm in the building behavior of paper wasps to show how stigmergy influenced the understanding of mechanisms and evolution of a particular biological system. The most important feature to understand is how local stimuli are organized in space and time to ensure the emergence of a coherent adaptive structure and to explain how workers could act independently yet respond to stimuli provided through the common medium of the environment of the colony.

Another interesting paper (available online) is the more recent work by Mason at the 8th Artificial Life conference, in 2002. Below I have selected part of the introductory text:

# Zachary Mason ,”Programming with Stigmergy: Using Swarms for Construction“, in Artificial Life VIII Conf., Standish, Abbass, Bedau (eds)(MIT Press), New South Wales, Australia, pp. 371-375, 2002.

(…) Termite nests are large and complex. A nest may be as much as 104 or 105 times as large as an individual termite (Boneabeau et al. 1997) a ratio unparalleled in the animal kingdom. The nests of the African termite sub-family Macrotermitinae are composed of many substructures, such as protective bulwarks, pillared brood chambers, spiral cooling vents, galleries of fungus gardens and royal chambers. For all the architectural sophistication of termite nests, termites themselves are blind, weak and apparently not responsive to a coordinating authority. This work attempts to borrow and generalize the termite construction-algorithm, permitting artificial, decentralized swarms to be programmed to build complex, composable structures.
How do small, blind termites manage to build (relatively) huge, intricate nests? Work on this question includes a simple, decentralized building model (Grasse 1959) (Grasse 1984), an empirical study of termite building behavior (Bruinsma 1979), a mathematical model of the synthesis of pillars in termite nests (Deneubourg 1977), and a model explaining how modest environmental variation can cause the same termite behaviors to generate qualitatively different structures (Boneabeau et al. 1997). Most relevant to this work is (Bruinsma 1979), which records three feedback mechanisms governing termite behavior. In the first, a termite picks up a soil pellet, masticates it into a paste and injects a termiteattracting pheremone into it. When the pellet is deposited, the pheremone stimulates nearby termites to pellet-gathering behavior and makes them more likely to deposit their pellets nearby. Second, small obstacles in the terrain stimulate pellet deposits and can seed pillars. Finally, a trail pheremone allows more workers to be drawn to a construction site. Termites and many social insects interact stigmergically - that is, communication is mediated through changes in the environment rather than direct signal transmission. Computer simulations have used stigmergy to reproduce termite’s pillar-making behavior and ant’s foraging and the spontaneous cemetery building. These applications rely of qualitative stigmergy | individual agents react to a continuous variations in the environment. An example of quantitative stigmergy is (G. Theraulaz 1995), a simulation of wasp nest building. Wasps build nests by depositing cells on a lattice. Whether an empty cell is lled depends on the adjacent cells. Because all wasps have the same deposit-triggers, multiple wasps are able to simultaneously work on a single nest without without ruining each others work. A set of deposit-triggers is coherent if each no stage in the building process can be confused with an earlier stage by making only local observations, thus obviating the need for centralized control.
The goal of this work is to generalize the construction methodologies of the social insects and create a language for stigmergically assembling complex structures. Such a language permit swarms of agents to erect interesting architectures without benefit of a central controller or explicit inter-agent communication. The primary advantage of this approach is that stigmergically controlled swarms have minimal communication and no coordination overhead. Also, very little processing is demanded of agents, and the swarm can tolerate a degree of agent error. On a more abstract plane, this work is an example of designing emergent behavior. (…)

At Bairro Alto + Complexity in Social Sciences (COSI)

Back in 2003 I was photographed by João Bracourt, a friend and professional photograph which among other things (web design + painting) travels around the world within big professional surf events (he is right now on it’s way to Indonesia), covering it for main surf magazines. Back then (Sept. 2003) we were enjoying ourselves with a big group late nigth at Bairro Alto, the main bar and restaurant district in Lisbon.

The t-shirt I’m wearing here is from COSI – Complexity in Social Sciences Summer School. One month earlier have been invited among other people to give a lecture in Spain about my work, there at COSI (Baeza, Andaluzia). After all these years the PPT file (Stigmergy as a possible exploratory walk up to collective life-like complexity and behaviour) is still available. As well as those from Gerard Weisbuch (Research Director of the Complex Networks and Cognitive Systems Team within the Statistical Physics Laboratory of the l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France) and Rosaria Conte (head of the Division of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Modelling & Interaction at the Institute of Psychology of the Italian National Research Council), among others. Many other research materials concerning complexity and social sciences are still available at COSI’s 2003 main site.

(at Bairro Alto, Lisbon, Sept. 2003 - taken by João Bracourt)

(at Bairro Alto, Lisbon, Sept. 2003 - taken by João Bracourt)

 

The Economy

Two “The Economist” covers. The first one was manually created and posted by Richard Dawkins himself, … – yes – the evolutionary Biologist. The second one is real as well recent (as of April 4th) – UNDER ATTACK, a 14-page special report on the rise and fall of the wealthy. Do note the Blackberry on top of the dead guy in the front and the skyline of London’s Canary Warf financial district in the background (via HS Dent blog). The Laissez-faire Economy lead to all this (more).

 

Stock Market Prediction using Multi Expression Programming

[] Crina Grosan, Ajith Abraham, Sang Yong Han, Vitorino Ramos, Stock Market Prediction using Multi Expression Programming, in ALEA´05, Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Algorithms at EPIA´05 – Proc. of the 12th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, C. Bento, A. Cardoso and G. Dias (Eds.), IEEE Press, pp. 73-78, 2005.

The use of intelligent systems for stock market predictions has been widely established. In this paper we introduce a genetic programming technique (called Multi-Expression programming) for the prediction of two stock indices. The performance is then compared with an artifcial neural network trained using Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, support vector machine, Takagi-Sugeno neuro-fuzzy model, a difference boosting neural network. We considered Nasdaq-100 index of Nasdaq Stock MarketSM and the S&P CNX NIFTY stock index as test data.

(to obtain the respective PDF file follow link above or visit chemoton.org)

My chess problem to the South Pole

A few days back I decided to send a postcard to the South Pole (Rothera Research Station). On the back of it, a chess problem was drawn by me (see diagram above): White to play and win in several moves. If you want to solve it, here is a tip: don’t be too greedy. Use your patience. If you think everything is solved, then wait a little more! The following Sun Tzu words seems to me rather appropriate (I will post the solution in incoming future posts):

“First put yourself beyond the possibility of defeat, and then wait for an opportunity to defeat the enemy. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.” -SunTzu.

Just received a postcard from… Antarctica!

Antarctica - Rothera British research station is situated North in the West Coast - about 13000 Kms from Europe. Ian MacNab postcard came from there.

In the era of instant messaging, I know this would sound awkward to you all. From Borneo to India, from Chile to Russia, over the years I have received postcards from friends all over the world. Just for curiosity, I specially love those coming from very remote locations. In 1995 I have even once send a postcard to myself, while being at the Nepalese-Tibet border. Being at 6450 meters high in the Himalayan range (Kathmandu was 5000 meters bellow me in the “valley”!) I decided to check how many days my postcard will take to arrive in Paris (back then I was living there). I knew that my postcard will need a few hours from Kathmandu to Paris via airplane (though I did not ask for air mail on purpose), however the problem was to arrive in Kathmandu at all. After spending 3 months in Nepal, India, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia I finally returned to Paris and to my surprise the little postcard needed just 1 month and 7 days to arrive from the top of the world into Europe. Anyway, that was my record at that time.

Well, today that record as just been beaten! A few hours ago, I received a postcard coming from… Rothera Research station – British Antarctica Survey (67º34´S, 68º07´W): Adelaide Island, Grahamaland. Yes, in Antarctica! How come?! Let me start by the beginning. From time to time I enjoy playing chess online at GameKnot (not these last months though, due to a lot of work). Over GameKnot I have played chess against, from Theoretical Physicists in Germany up to Taxi drivers in New York (one of my best online chats ever), from steel workers in Denmark up to American soldiers fighting over Iraq. About 4 months ago I played chess against Ian MacNab. Ian is the chief scientific expedition guide from the British Rothera research station. So while playing a game with him (at that time he was enduring the long cold Antarctica night) I decided to challenge him also with a postcard correspondence experience. Ian replied me back online saying that postal correspondence with Rothera was extremely difficult, since it’s mainly done through sporadic research ships, while they could only arrive when ice allows. So, I am glad he now writes: [...] It’s summer here now – lot’s of sun, it will soon be 24 hours of daylight! [...].

Ian’s “chessman – Antarctica guide” postcard was shipped on Oct. 1, when the winter in Antarctica officially ends. It arrived today from the South Pole, constituting a new postal record, at least for me: 1 month and 19 days long. It’s now time to reply him back with a warm Lisbon postcard. But I wonder if it will not take longer? After all, somehow distributed, postal services around the world would have to collectively cooperate and digest this “weird” address, deciding a optimal path into Rothera. Through Chile, Argentina, or maybe South Africa. Who knows? Anyway, thanks to postal services around the world, Ian will now receive along with text, a hard, difficult nevertheless funny chess problem on the back of my postcard!