Complexes

Following the Fractal Tessellation inspired by the Alhambra, I made a few more: here's one with octagons, and another with curved triangles...

I was among the researchers consulted for the production of this Slate video...

A special issue on the "Evolution of Complexity" I co-edited with Tom Lenaerts was just published in Artificial Life 14 (3) : Editorial Introduction Evolution of Complexity Carlos Gershenson , Tom Lenaerts Artificial Life Summer 2008, Vol. 14, No. 3: 241–243. First Page | PDF (55 KB) | PDF Plus (57 KB) Articles Hierarchical Self-Organization in the Finitary Process Soup Olof Görnerup , James P. Crutchfield Artificial Life Summer 2008, Vol. 14, No. 3: 245–254. Abstract | PDF (211 KB) | PDF Plus (217 KB) On the Gradual Evolution of Complexity and the Sudden Emergence of Complex Features Charles Ofria , Wei Huang , Eric Torng Artificial Life Summer 2008, Vol. 14, No. 3: 255–263. Abstract | PDF (180 KB) | PDF Plus (189 KB) The Emergence of Overlapping Scale-free Genetic Architecture in Digital Organisms P. Gerlee , T. Lundh Artificial Life Summer 2008, Vol. 14, No. 3: 265–275. Abstract | PDF (270 KB) | PDF Plus (253 KB) LinMap: Visualizing ...

I designed this pattern for a T-shirt of the New England Complex Systems Institute . I took the NECSI logo, which represents five "people working together". Then I overlayed different sizes of it over patterns of a Penrose tiling, which is a tesselation with five-fold symmetry. In other words, it fills the space without repeating itself. Since the logo appears of different sizes, I see this pattern as "people working together at different scales". You can find a high resolution PDF here.

A couple of years ago, while living in Granada, I got inspired by the Moorish patterns at the Alhambra. Playing around with Inkscape , I came up with the idea of a Sierpiński -style fractal that would be more interesting and also tileable. Only recently I put several tiles together, and I was amazed to see that there were more and more patterns emerging as tiles interacted... I can spend hours finding patterns in this image... I should get these tiles for my bathroom... You can find a high resolution PDF here.

Francis sent me a link to an article from the newspaper De Morgen (in Dutch), where they mention a simulation of the Wetstraat (a main avenue in Brussels) where my student Seung Bae Cools implemented self-organizing traffic light controllers I developed. The news are that the Flemish parlament wants to approve the implementation of self-organizing traffic lights in busy intersections in Flanders. They hope to approve budget for a pilot study this year. Those are good news! You can find more details about this work in my PhD thesis . It seems that the media coverage had its effect.

One measure of people's knowledge is the amount of information that a person can come up with. In the "old" days, this information would come mainly out of your head. From experience, you can know what things are, e.g. facts, dates, etc. With a good memory , you can reproduce much learned information. Add reasoning , and you can combine your experiences to produce novel information and know how things work. Thus, people will have more knowledge if they are able to store and manipulate information. This was the game humankind played... until a decade ago. Blame it on Google . What is the use of memorizing information when you can find it in an instant? Before you had to go to a library to search for information, so it was a big advantage to have a good memory. Now remembering and reasoning are not enough. You need to know where to find information. Certainly, this does not displace reasoning, only encyclopedic memory. The thing is that having such an accessible inform...