“A new kind of Plagiarism”

I won’t follow Stephen Wolfram’s example and I’ll tell you I got the title from the Reviews of A new kind of science in amazon.com. After some hesitation I decided to read A new kind of science (from the library) to see if the book had anything original in it. And it doesn’t. All of the things he talks about in the book were invented by: Konrad Zuse, Von Neumman, Turing and Chris Langton and probably other people that I didn’t recognize in the writing. Don’t bother reading it.

For an article on this check this site:

 http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/wolfram.html

The amazon reviews of the book are here.

Regarding Chris Langton; I’m not 100% sure he invented the classification of simple cellular automata before Wolfram but he did a way better job than him. Here is Chris Langton’s paper. Also found in Artificial life II Proceedings.

Google’s top ten videos

Here is a list of the ten google videos of 2006 chosen by Google’s Research blog.

Excellent physics demonstrations

While I was reading the latest edition of Make magazine in a Chapters bookstore, I came across this really interesting physics demonstration: a bar that is on top of two wheels rotating in opposite directions. At first you’ll think the bar will just slide of but it actually moves back and forth on top of the wheels if they spin the right way. If not the bar falls off. If you do the math, if the wheels spin in one direction the force on the bar is opposite to the acceleration (causing ocillatory motion like in a mass-spring system), but if you spin them the other way the force on the bar is in the direction of the acceleration, causing positive feedback. The magaine has a link in it that redirects you to the link below. The link is part of a website showing other good physics demonstrations.

Here’s the link:

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/scenario/demos.htm#plank

Scientific linux

After being recommended to use scientific linux I decided to find out more about it. After looking for it in wikipedia I found out that it is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to work when compiling avida as described in my previous post. Another good thing about it is that it’s free and it has the same windows like interface as Red Hat Enterprise. If you are not into c++ developing or hacking I recommend Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. They mail you the installation CD for free and the CD has “a lot” of rpm packages (like intall programs in windows). If you download a package and you need dependancies, just put the CD in and it downloads the dependancies for you! You don’t have to download them from the internet.

You can find more about Scientific Linux at:

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Trump’s talk about Bush

I woudn’t say I like Donald Trump (he is a “little” shallow) but after reading his book The art of the deal he seems to know what he is talking about, and the video below is no exception: 

I highly recommend his book.

Compiling Avida in windows (sort of)

I’m actually using Linux Red Hat Enterprise 5, running inside the program VMware running in windows.

Here is some info about Avida.

What you’ll need: any of the vmware versions (they have free ones on their website), a version of red hat linux that is higher than Red hat 5.2, the file avida-1.3.1 from this site and the file gcc-2.95.3.tar.gz from one (any) of the mirror sites in this site.

Instructions: install vmware and then install red hat linux in it. There are lots of tutorials on how to do it and it’s not that hard. The version of linux that you can use has to be from Red Hat or something really close to it like Fedora and scientific Linux (I haven’t tried the last two) because we are just going to change the version of the compiler  so the rest of the c, c++ in the linux version you are using has to be close to what they used originally in Red Hat 5.2.  I used Red Hat Enterprise 5. After installing go to this site (the same one as in my previous post) and follow their instructions up to and including section 4.2. After that save the avida-1.3.1 folder (untarred) in a folder of your choice, go to it in the shell window, go to the source folder and type:

PATH=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin:$PATH [space]

CC=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin/gcc ./configure

If you got a permission denied error even if you are signed in as root, type the following line and then try again:

chmod -x configure  

Then type:

PATH=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin:$PATH [space]

CC=/opt/gcc-2.95.3/bin/gcc make

After that although the installation instructions in the folder say that you have to type make install, all you need to type is: ./avida in the source folder to run the program. That’s all there is to it.

 

Success!

Rare site about hacking and alife

www.romanpoet.org is a great website about hacking and other questionable activities including: the “where do you fit in?” diagram and a “data mining” presentation. There is also some hard to find papers by Tom Ray and others. Those rowdy teenagers are at it again!  

Google’s extra search syntax

A week ago I went to a talk by Robert Zubrin about his Mars Direct Plan. It was a great talk and I wanted to look at the powerpoint slides again after the talk. So I searched in google something like: robert zubrin presentation and as expected I didn’t find any results. But this week I started reading the book Google Hacks and after 20 pages into it I tried searching for the slides again by typing: “mars direct” “robert zubrin” filetype:ppt. This time I got four sites and the slides were in the third site! And that was just reading 20 pages of this book. I highly recommend it.

Jim Carrey talking about physics

From Late night with Connan O’brien

Typogenetics

Typogenentics is an attempt to change the rules of genetics into a formal system. The idea was invented by Douglas Hofstadter, and written down in his famous book Godel, Escher, Back. When I read about the system a few days ago I coudn’t help wondering about using the system to test all those RNA world theories for the origin of life. Like for example programming the rules into a genetic algorithm that looks for self replicating strings in typogenetics. But after a few searches on google I found out someone did just that:

 http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/hons/projects/1999/Andrew.Snare/

There are also some papers writen about the subject:

A study of Replicators and Hypercycles in Typogenetics form the journal: European Conference on Artificial Life

But what about adding some thermodynamics laws in the system and seeing if replicators come out without using any fitness function? That could be a more relevant simulation. Here’s a nice page about that:

Overview of Computing for Biologists