Complexes

I finally was able to update my webpage. Its new location is http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/

When Google was released, it revolutionized the quality of search engines, transforming the world society: it enabled anyone with Internet access to find almost any information. Knowledge available to everyone. The next big technology to have a global effect might be WolframAlpha , to be released in a few weeks. Its main goal is in line with the main vision of the Internet: to make expert-level knowledge accessible to anyone. It is complementary to search engines, which find data. WolframAlpha computes structured data. I just listened to a preview webinar by Stephen Wolfram, the leader of the project where already several hundred people are working. In exploits the computational capabilities of Mathematica, huge databases and live feeds of structured data, an impressive free form linguistic analysis, and an automated presentation of relevant results. It does much more than mathematics (from sums to integrals) It can calculate interesting comparisons, e.g. GDP of countries, weather of ...

Call for Papers: Swarm Cognition Workshop http://laral.istc.cnr.it/swarm-cognition/Main_Page ----------------------------------------------------------------- The workshop is part of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2009 - http://cognitivesciencesociety.org/conference2009/ ) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Overview Swarm Cognition" is the juxtaposition of two relatively unrelated concepts that evoke, on the one hand, the power of collective behaviours displayed by natural swarms, and on the other hand the complexity of cognitive processes in the vertebrate brain. With this premise, the Swarm Cognition Workshop aims at promoting synergies between diverse disciplines such as cognitive neurosciences, psychology, ethology and swarm intelligence. Research work in Swarm Cognition aims at identifying the operational principles of cognitive behaviour by calling upon the underlying mechanisms of self-organising systems, i.e...

Recursive Yin Yang 4 by ~ hawmkoonstormbringer on deviant ART The basic construction of a yin-yang symbol is to take a circle and two circles of half the radius, sitting along one axis. I used this substitution recursively with a 90 deg. rotation: For the smaller circles, add two more circles of half their radius (one fourth of the original circle). Continue substituting, and you end up with this figure. The interesting thing is that not only the surfaces are fractal, but also the line separating the two colors. The figure can carry several messages, apart from those of yin yang: e.g. there is also struggle, balance, and interaction at different scales. This work is dedicated to our friend and compadre Dr. Igor Lugo, who recently defended his PhD.

All phenomena can be described as information, so these laws try to describe general features found across all scales. Law of Information Transformation . Information will potentially be transformed by interacting with other information. Law of Information Propagation . Information propagates as fast as possible. Law of Requisite Complexity . More complex information will require more complex agents to perceive, act on, and propagate it. Law of Information Criticality . Transforming and propagating information will tend to a critical balance between its stability and its variability. Law of Information Organization . Information produces constraints that regulate information production. These tentative laws are generalizations of Darwinian, cybernetic, thermodynamic, and complexity principles. More details and examples in: Gershenson, C. (2007). The World as Evolving Information . In Proceedings of International Conference on Complex Systems ICCS2007 .

Gottfried Mayer died last January 25th, after more than a year of fighting with cancer. I've taken his position as editor of Complexity Digest . I will try to keep up the standards that Gottfried set. We will miss him.

The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive has been recently launched. Ashby was one of the most prominent Cyberneticians . His work has been only recently rediscovered, which includes great contributions to the study of the brain, systems, adaptation, and self-organization. He has been an inspiration for my work on self-organizing systems . The digital archive includes Ashby's journal, biographies, pictures, bibliography, a few letters (I didn't know that he was acquainted with Turing ...), and aphorisms (one of my weak spots (in need of an update)). A couple of them that I liked especially: A "system" is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay [constant] long enough for us to discuss it. Science is the Observer's Digest.