loudthings

thanks, man. which original code do you mean? for the implementation of the languages? i have a metalinguistic implementation of a scheme interpretter (i. e. written in scheme). or do you mean for my project? i will post both! let me go get them.

ha, ...mishaps. what about this fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic business? i think that it is the future of AI. fuzzy sets and fuzzy classes are close to the way the human brain classifies and processes. and i disagree, i think that the human mind is just a very complex computer and that a computer could be created that would have "free will" in the sense that humans are said to have free will. fuzzy logic is very interesting, it is has to do with the philosophy of vagueness, and it does away with arbitrary points of distinction. at what point does something become something else when you replace its many pieces one by one? the point of distinction is arbitrary. fuzzy logic does not depend on on distinct inclusion or exclusion. this seems to be much the way the human mind processes data. our brain is constantly filling in holes in the in the data we get from stimulus. is filling holes in order to identify patterns. this is very fuzzy.

Marathon was my introduction to computer gaming. I remember first playing when i was ten years old on some of my dad's old macs in his neurobiology lab. He would let me play on the computers while he worked. One the very hip grad students most have loaded the programs. Since I first played it, i became totally fascinated. It is definitely a cult classical, and will remain so, only known to the hip and privledged of the computer gaming world.

I am writing, using the scheme implementation in JavaScript that I posted earlier, a program that is a performance artwork. It is based on the digital artwork Galapagoes. Yet instead of evolving images, it evolves poems using user preference as natural selection. And instead of being in a galary somewhere it will be posted on the web so that many users can access it. It works be generating six poems by randomly picking words from a word bank. These initial poems are pretty much incoherent. Then the user picks the two of these poems that he or she likes best (likely the most coherent of these six). then the program takes a sort of numerical dna that encode the positions of the words in the two poems in the word bank. These two dna sequences are combined and slightly mutated, in effect creating an offspring of the two that has traits of each. The reproduction process is sufficiently random and variably that many offspring can be produced that are all different, but all have traits of the parent poems. The two poems are reproduced six times to create six new poems, the next generation. Then the user picks two from this generation, and the process continues. As this goes on, with many different user's input, each picking up with the last generation created by the last user, a sort of evolution occurs in the poems. They get more and more coherent and more and more interesting. User input in preference is the element of natural selection in the evolution. I hope to have the work up on a website soon. Im still working on the php to be able to record the last generation, so a new user can pick up the process where the last left off. I will post the URL of the website as soon as it is running.

I have implemented the basic Scheme primitive procedures as well as some of the most useful higher-order procedures in JavaScript. They are as follows: /* Scheme implementation in JavaScript*/function cons(e1, e2) {return function(msg) {if (msg == 0) return e1;else return e2;}}function car(aPair) {return aPair(0);}function cdr(aPair) {return aPair(1);}function list() {var theList = cons(arguments[arguments.length - 1], null);var c = 2; while (c <= arguments.length) {theList = cons(arguments[arguments.length - c], theList);++c;}return theList;}function length(lst) {var c = 0;while (lst != null) {lst = cdr(lst);++c;}return c;}function item(pos, lst) {var c = pos;while (c != 0) {lst = cdr(lst);--c;}return car(lst);}function append(lst1, lst2) {var c = length(lst1) - 1;while (c >= 0) {lst2 = cons(item(c, lst1), lst2);--c;}return lst2;}function map(func, lst) {var c = length(lst) - 1;theList = cons(func(item(c, lst)), null);--c;while (c >= 0) {theList = cons(func(item(c, lst)), theList);--c;}return theList;}function filter(pred, lst) {var c = length(lst) - 1;theList = null;while (c >= 0) {if (pred(item(c, lst)) != false)theList = cons(item(c, lst), theList);--c;}return theList;}function accumulate(func, initial, lst) {if (lst == null)return initial;elsereturn func(car(lst), accumulate(func, initial, cdr(lst)));}function position(e, lst) {if (e == car(lst))return 0;elsereturn 1 + position(e, cdr(lst));}function isAtom(x) {return typeof x == "string" || typeof x == "number" || typeof x == "boolean";}function not(x) {if (x == false)return true;elsereturn false;}function isPair(x) {return not(isAtom(x));}function flatten(lst) {if (lst == null)return null;else {if (isPair(car(lst)))return append(flatten(car(lst)), flatten(cdr(lst)));else return cons(car(lst), flatten(cdr(lst)));}} I have tested all the procedures, though not thoroughly, and they appear to work. This allows Scheme to be easily used for interesting web programs. Please feel free to add to these, report bugs, and post fixes. Contact me at tberg@berkeley.edu

I would like this topic to be a place where information about these two languages can be shared. LISP is a conceptual beautiful list based language. It is the language used to teach structure and interpretation of computer programs at UC Berkeley and is the language used to write the infamous chess-playing Deep Blue.

I think that Weiner should be taken more seriously. I might be wrong, but I feel that he is greatly overlooked and so is the field of cybernetics. Cybernetics has spawned many other fields that we are well aquainted with today, such as computer science and certain aspects of neurobiology. However, as field of its own, it has sort of fizzled out.

Norbert Wiener fathered cybernetics. He spent the first half of his life setting the foundations of cybernetics, and the second half warning the world about its implications. He had great fears that as computers were further and further integrated into the workings of society, the role of the human would change in a dangerous way.