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Table of Contents
Christopher Symonds
Hello, I'm TV's Christopher Symonds. You might know me from such classics as “2 and a Half Threads”, “Special Victims Unit Testing”, and the mind-bending movie “Exception”.
News
20-Sep-2014 02:15:22PM-0600
Just a celebratory news update: as of the timestamp I finally have the mfm built and running on an ubuntu partition at home. Now to figure out emacs and do the tutorial.
19-Sep-2014 07:46:22PM-0600
I'm a little behind on my news, but since last update, I've settled on a project and will move ahead with a study of parochial altruism and the evolution thereof with the hopes of pinning down a good fitness behavior that a robust program might engage in to ensure suitability in a resource-competitive environment. My presentation and the ensuing discussion helped reveal some potential pitfalls I might encounter like my approach to reproduction, as well as some great improvement ideas in having PA elements rove around in bands.
Today I had a great primer in developing for the MFM via Trent's boot camp. I think I've got my work cut out for me and it's a good thing that I only have essentially one element to develop.
This evening I am going to attempt getting a usb drive set up with Ubuntu to be able to boot from it.
This weekend I will be working on the Element_Creg tutorial and flesh out my element.
07-Sep-2014 04:27:05PM-0600
Still playing catch-up from 5 days out of town. Too early to feel like I'm drowning. Perused the options for ALife researchers and chose Dr. Thomas Ray. He seems really interesting; especially with lines like “My current research: The diverse set of psychoactive drugs collectively represents a rich set of tools for probing the chemical architecture of the human mind.” I read that one sentence and said “Sold.” I've found no additional time to get into the labs at school and play with the fishes. I guess I'm left floundering at 80kAEPS.
27-Aug-2014 10:17:54PM-0600
Read Professor Ackley's paper Altruism in the Evolution of Communication. Was relieved to discover that it was a different angle of altruism than I was thinking of. However, am still considering what lessons might be carried over to a study of a population of individuals sharing resources in varying degrees of altruism. Also, attempted to get MFM running through a putty session which was laughably unsuccessful.
27-Aug-2014 04:06:33PM-0600
Spent some time with Ezra in the CS lab playing with the fish and sharks. Best results so far only made it to 80 kAEPS. Have not hit on a stable solution yet. Strongly considering changing my research topic, but haven't hit on any bright ideas yet. Trying to think outside the box, but I'm not even really sure what the box looks like…
8/20
Today I made a people page for myself.
Project
Profile on Dr. Thomas Ray
I've selected researcher Tom Ray as my subject for the researcher profile section of the course.
Project Idea(s)
| Altruism | I am interested in studying the effects of altruism in the form of resource sharing between individuals in a population living in a given state of scarcity. Is there a 'sweet spot' of this kind of altruism that benefits the species as a whole that arises as a function of a given level of scarcity? How does one measure that kind of thing? Is it possible to model an environment of scarcity in a quantifiable way that is useful? Possible paper title might be “Optimal Altruism in Scarcity Systems' or 'Hey brother, can you spare an artificial dime?' |
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| FrobWorld+ | Other possible topics include FrobWorld+, wherein we take peaceful frobs and put weapons in their hands, give them a sense of tribalism, maybe even allow them to specialize as gatherers, warriors, etc. Other wishlist capabilities include hoarding and resource management, communication, breeding and genetic crossover as opposed to spontaneous mitosis wherein the genetic propagation relies solely on mutation for evolution. Pack them with as much human-like capabilities we can give them within time constraints and see how their evolutionary paths unfold, and if we converge on any particular genetic pattern as dominantly successful. This is a bit weaker as I'm not sure what specific questions we might ask of this, rather it's a “This sounds like it would be fun, let's do it and see if something interesting falls out of it” kind of thing. |
Third Idea
The previous two ideas are, as you can see, both inside the box. This idea space is reserved for an idea that is outside the box. And when I've thought of one, I will put it here.
Comments
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