Complexes

After the electoral fraud last July in Mexico, the right wing candidate Felipe Calderó n is due to take possession of the presidency on D ecembe 1st. However, things are still uncertain as left wing candidate A ndrés Manuel Ló pe z Ob r ador (w ho was the real winner of the elections), was declared "legitimate president" by millions at the National Democratic Convention, and should take possession on November 20th, t he anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. If the institutions betray the people, the people can deny those institutions... In general, the situation is not violent. However, the conflict in the state of Oaxaca is reaching new heights. The APP O mo vement, formed mainly by teachers and peasants, has the capital of the state "under siege" for several months now. In practice, the governor hasn't been in office since then. The sen tate st udied the disappearance of powers in Oaxaca, but even when they admit that the state is not governable, they di...

frameborder="0" height="45" width="40" align="left">   Cools, S.B., C. Gershenson, and B. D'Hooghe (2006). Self-organizing traffic lights: A realistic simulation . Submitted. Abstract :We have previously shown in an abstract simulation ( Gershenson, 2005 ) that self-organizing traffic lights can improve greatly traffic flow for any density. In this paper, we extend these results to a realistic setting, implementing self-organizing traffic lights in an advanced traffic simulator using real data from a Brussels avenue. On average, for different traffic densities, travel waiting times are reduced by 50% compared to the current green wave method. Full paper at: http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0610040

Special Issue on the Evolution of Complexity Artificial Life journal Call for Papers Guest Editors: Carlos Gershenson Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160, Brussels, Belgium cgershen vub.ac.be Tom Lenaerts SWITCH, Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium tlenaert vub.ac.be Motivation As a result of the quality of the Evolution of Complexity workshop at ALife X last June in Bloomington and the interest of the attendants; we announce a call for papers for a special issue on this theme for the Artificial Life journal. The evolution of complexity is a central theme in Biology. Yet it is not without ambiguity. Complexity has been used to refer to different things. For instance, complexification has been interpreted as a process of diversification between evolving units or as a scaling process that is related t...

I've been away on holidays, but certainly things haven't been easy in Mexico these weeks, in spite of the silence of the international media. After the massive fraud on July 2nd and the days afterwards, the right-wing candidate Felipe Calderón had a lead of about half percent of the votes. The federal electoral tribunal ordered a recount of 9% of the booths, where irregularities were abundant: votes for López Obrador were subtracted, votes for Calderón were added, and in general more than half of the checked packaged had been fiddled. In the last ten years, the electoral tribunal had always nullified electoral booths with such inconsistencies, since it is impossible to know how many votes there were originally. If the booths with irregularities in this election were cancelled, López Obrador would have an easy victory. Note that in the remaining 91% of booths that were not recounted certainly there were further irregularities. In spite of its own jurisprudence, in spite of admit...

These thoughts emerged after speaking with Clément Vidal , from an ongoing discussion at the FRIAM mailing list, and are also related to the so called Singularity . Many people say that in a few decades computers will have the same computational power as the human brain, and then AI machines will take over. This argument is based on Moore's law , which states that the transistor density of semiconductor chips doubles roughly every 18 months, giving an exponential growth in computing power. Ignoring the fact that brains do different types of computations than PCs, these people argue that when we'll have the computational power to model all the neurons of a human brain (100 billion, with about 100 thousand connections each), computers will be smarter than humans. And since their capacity will keep on growing, soon we'll be left in the shadow of obsolence. Now, just imagine that you have all that computational power right now. Even more, let's say with the capacity of 10^...

I am translating these facts from the senderodelpeje blog , trying to spread the information internationally. I would ask anybody reading this to spread it as well, helping the ill Mexican democracy. All of these facts have been reported in the Mexican press. Felipe Calderón, presidential candidate of PAN, who is attempting to steal the election supported by the current government, certain businessmen, and certain media, was a honour witness at the wedding of Luis Carlos Ugalde, head of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), in charge of the elections One of the companies of Diego Zavala, brother-in-law of Calderón, porvided the software for the IFE, and gave "technical support" to the very suspicious preliminary results system (PREP) of the election This same company, gave illegal access to all the data of the Mexican voters to the PAN The PREP was plagued of inconsistencies favouring Calderón, such as this which erased 100 votes for López Obrador: The "final" coun...

Here in Brussels they recently renovated the Atomium, a relic from the 1958 World Expo. It's quite nice, shinny and with lights at night... it seems I should take a tripod the next time...