CALENDAR Human
Complex Systems 110 Winter 2006 |
Tuesday
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Thursday
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From Sylvie and Bruno Concluded by Lewis Carroll, first published in 1893. |
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Joanna Newsome, "This Side of the Blue." (2004 Drag City) |
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Rushworth Kidder (President, Institute for Global Ethics). Radio Interview, "The World," November 22, 2005 |
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German
Workshop on Artificial Life - Jena
July 26-28, 2006 |
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Genetic
& Evolutionary Computation Conference - Seattle |
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Week
1
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January 10 - INTRODUCTION Movies on Complexity: Syriana
- Munich Epistemology: We know the world around
us through representations (literally
re-presentations of reality): Things-That-Think: The cognitive intermediation between outselves and our technologies: artifacts, living and work spaces, architectures, settlement patterns and our social and physical environments. Evolution - the Creative Force behind our Intelligence captured in Evolutionary Computation. Video - Karl Sims, "Evolved Virtual Creatures." Our mission: To describing, understanding and explaining the complexities of our world computationally. We jump right in to Borland C++ Builder and write "Half Way There" from scratch. Handout: Borland and C++ Basics / Language and Functions |
January 12 Collect $20 for "course reader" to be handed out in segments throughout the quarter. For those who are advanced. Please use this time to develop ideas or prototypes for three simulation projects. I will distribute some "inspirational" books for you to look at. The projects should focus on "social" or "cultural" problems and I would like to see progress on a weekly basis. This is a good opportunity to work up something publishable! USC's Institute for Creative Technology (ICT): A collaboration between Paramount Studios and DARPA to "build the holodeck." DVD introduction... DVD - ICT, "60 Minutes." Break: Photos for our "Participants" page, which will look something like this! Handout: Managing and Turning in Your Borland Projects. Handout: "Half-Way-There" as a sample programming challenge, the project files of which are conveniently available for download from our Simulations pages. For the rest of us, I will go over the basics of Borland and C++ again, the sample program, and the handouts, in detail. If you have any questions, now is the time to ask them. I would like you to practice "cranking out code" so that you begin to feel comfortable with it. Have fun. Write silly stuff. Experiment now before we get into more serious simulations, hopefully next week... You will make mistakes. I will make mistakes. Borland will sometimes be flakey. That is how we all learn. Once we get over the first hump on the learning curve we can begin to have fun... "I guarantee it!" |
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Week
2
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January 17 DUE TODAY: "Half Way There." DVD - ICT, "Overview." Color space: the RGB Color Cube -
PhotoShop. Representing agency, space and time - some formalisms. We cut-and-paste a simulation using: Growth by Diffusion Limited Aggregation... Enhancements? |
January 19 !!! Survival
Research Labs !!! SWARM Exhibition, Philadelphia Brian introduces Andy
Lomas on aggregation. Borland Help. Other ideas for the Growth application:
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Week
3
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January 24 Growth Application is due today. Participant Demonstrations of "tweaks"
to "Growth." The best way to learn a component is to play with it! |
January 26
We cut-and-paste a simulation using: Conway's "Game of Life." This is a well-known and well-studied cellular automata rule-set that exhibits many of the notions embraced by the idea of emergence. ??? Ideas for tweaks and experiments ??? |
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Week
4
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January 31 Mirek's Cellebration - A Compendium of Cellular Automata. VPRO Amsterdam - Documentary Video
on Artificial Life: |
February 2 Conway's
"Game of Life" Application is due today. Text processing:
Handling
strings. More complex agents, cellular (raster) space, random scheduling: Schelling's "Segregation III." |
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Week
5
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February 7 MouseWheelUp, MouseWheelDown, MouseDown(2). Some tweaks on Schelling's Segregation model. VPRO Amsterdam - Documentary Video
on Artificial Life: Demetri Terzopoulos, "Artificial Fishes" (12 minutes). Artificial Life III Video Proceedings: John Koza on "The Genetic Programming Paradigm" (10 minutes). |
February 9 Shelling's
"Segregation" Application is due today. More complex agents, cellular (raster) space, random scheduling: Iterated Prisoners Dilemma. |
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Week
6
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February 14 Prisoners Dilemma with evolution: the poorest scorer gets a random strategy each 100 iterations. Coevolution: Brainstorming:
Nightline, "Brave New World:" Danny Hillis, Andrea Loche, Paul Ashtown on evolving human-like behaviors (6 minutes). MS-NBC, "The Site:" Nick Gessler, Chuck Taylor, Hugo de Garis, David Fogel on evolutionary computation. |
February 16 Iterated
Prisoners Dilemma Application is due today. The creative power of evolution, which led to us, now captured in our technologies: hardware and software. Evolutionary Computation:
An example of IP: The Evolutionary
Concert Tour This weekend: Please think about and prepare a synopsis of your proposed course project. (Arif Amlani and Jack Sutton drop by at noon.) |
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Week
7
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February 21 Turn in a synopsis of your proposed course project and be prepared to discuss it: What will it do? Break it down into pseudocode. What functions will you need? Evolutionary Concert Tour - 100 Runs... Adding new forms... |
February 23 Evolutionary
Concert Tour Challenge is due today. Feature Movie Challenge: THIRTEENTH FLOOR |
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Week
8
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February 28 Thirteenth Floor Challenge is due today. DVD: John Koza and Genetic Programming (2003) - the method and human/competitive results. The "A/I" ratio. Please turn in on Thursday, a thoughtful assessment of how these techniques could be used for social science applications. (e.g. controllers & economies, programming structures & cognitive structures, circuit diagrams & social organization...) Terra Nova - Exploring Virtual Worlds (Blog) Course projects. p/u 13th Floor video |
March 2 Assessment
of GP and social science is due today. Reed Hutchinson Miscellaneous topics. Course projects. |
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Week
9
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March 7 Movie View. Online Amateurs Crack Nazi Codes... Snake revisited... remove
most flags, set focus only at end of button handlers. Work on course projects. |
March 9 10:00 - We meet at the VISUALIZATION
PORTAL for a demonstration of their facilities. Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters, by Craig Reynolds (courtesy of Stuysonnie). Some updates on the Evolutionary
Concert Tour. Friday, March 10, Art Exhibit Opening of "The Algorists" in Santa Barbara. Any takers? Monday, March 13: 4:00-6:00 p.m. Penthouse (8500 Boelter Hall). Institute for Digital Research and Education: "The Technology of Evolution." A talk by Dr. Francine Berman, Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center Professor and HPC Endowed Chair, UC San Diego. RSVP here. |
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Week
10
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March 14 3d
printing in metal Course project presentations. |
March 16 Course project presentations. 12:30 Demonstration of the secret Cold-War Russian "Fialka" cipher machine. |
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No
Final
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Thank
you for your insights and ideas...
Have a great Spring Break! |