I am a First year phd student. I like to work with algorithms and theoretical stuff, as well as Machine Learning and all its experimental applications. I consider Artificial Life as one of those things you will have to be familiar with in the future, so it is best to start early on.

Tentative title: Achieving global communication: From individual behavior to complex patterns.

Abstract: Life is something that has the amazing property of developing complexity over time, huge periods of it. Adverse circumstances push individuals to find new ways of persisting (living), leading to all sorts of interactions that will eventually produce the development of more complex individuals, composed by smaller conglomerates of beings in which every single one of them has a very specific behavior. Studying the causes and consequences of such interactions presents a very interesting challenge for scientist, however it is not always an easy task to prove the conjectures made by experimentation and observation. This is where Artificial Life plays an immensely important role; because most of the environmental conditions can be emulated (even better, imposed) in an artificial setting, the study of complexity and evolvability of organisms becomes a much more manageable task (still a non-trivial one nonetheless). Communication plays a determinant factor when evolvability is brought into the picture, this is why the development of communications protocols that are simple enough to be performed by an individual atom, yet robust and complex enough to flourish the birth of new more complex individuals is determinant for the advance of artificial life.

Conclusions: Finding a stable yet extremely simple protocol that can be executed by every single atom in the MfM architecture. So far explore with one element, and afterwards create a whole hierarchy that will allow elements to just inherit from certain element, and this will allow communication amongst elements of that type. Also, try reducing the amount of space used by the protocol.

You can see both videos I took of my element, the first one only shows the simplest behavior I was trying to achieve, the second one, shows how a line of elements disperses itself to form a very interesting structure. I will continue to play with it and keep posting interesting videos or show demonstrations in class.

Here are the two videos

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• From atoms to pacman: The provable security idea was extremely interesting and valuable regarding the challenges it provided, however, I realized for it (and for many other project ideas) to be carried out, there had to be something else, something that allows some sort of cooperation or communication among individuals, so that evolution is possible. That's why I decided to stick with this project of taking the interaction between elements to another whole new level. intro
• Provable Security: This idea first started as something regarding privacy of the users when doing some sort of computation, but after some thought, I realized making it about security is much more valuable, and possibly much more understandable.

• 06-Oct-2014 10:14:58AM-0600: Completed the first draft of the title, abstract and “conclusions” for the paper.
• 02-Oct-2014 05:59:37PM-0600: Finally made a very first stage of my element, called ASDF_Element. At this point it only groups himself together with other of its kind.
• 08-Sep-2014 01:20:33PM-0600: Finished my presentation for today.
• 08-Sep-2014 12:13:03PM-0600: I have changed my project idea yet again, but this time I have decided to stay. Check the project section to know more about it.
• 25-Aug-2014: Created this page.
• 20-Aug-2014: I decided I wanted to start seeing some action, so I installed MFMv2 on an Ubuntu system, just pulling out from the repo.
• 19-Aug-2014: Tried to install MFMv2 on a mac system. Realized my knowledge of makefiles was not nearly enough, started reading more in depth material about makefiles.