Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

  34. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, The Yage Letters, City Lights Books, San Francisco 1963, pp. 54, 55. Although the hypens are Ginsberg's, the quote is condensed.

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  Polyhedra in virtual reality.

  (Generated by Hypercube98.)

  Virtual Reality

  Virtual reality represents a practical step that interface designers have taken to try and make for a more brain-plug-like connection to computers.

  In 1968 Ivan Sutherland built a device which his colleagues at the University of Utah called the Sword of Damocles - it was an intimidatingly heavy pair of TV screens that hung down from the ceiling to be worn like glasses. What you saw was a topographic map of the U.S. that you could fly over and zoom in on. The map was simple wire-frame graphics: meshes of green lines. Two of the main essentials of virtual reality were already there: (1) graphical user immersion in a 3-D construct, and (2) user-adjustable viewpoint. Soon to come as the third and fourth essentials of virtual reality were: (3) user manipulation of virtual objects, and (4) multiple users in the same virtual reality.

  By 1988, cyberpunk science fiction had become quite popular, and the word "cyberspace" was familiar to lots of people. John Walker,

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  then the chairman at Autodesk, Inc., of Sausalito, had the idea of starting a program to create some new virtual reality software, and to call it "Cyberspace." In fact Autodesk trademarked the word "Cyberspace" for their product, "The Cyberspace Developer's Kit." William Gibson was rather annoyed by this and reportedly said he was going to trademark ''Eric Gullichsen," this being the name of the first lead programmer on the Autodesk Cyberspace project. I was employed by Autodesk's Advanced Technology Division at that time, and I helped write some demos for Autodesk Cyberspace.

  Graphical user immersion was brought about by using a lot of hacking and a lot of tricks of three-dimensional graphics. The idea was to break a scene up into polygons and show the projected images of the polygons from whatever position the user wants. It's not much extra work to make two slightly different projections, in this way you can get stereo images that are fed to "EyePhones." The only available EyePhones in the late '80s were expensive devices made by Jaron Lanier's company VPL.

  User manipulation was done by another of Lanier's devices, the DataGlove. So as to correctly track the relative positions of their hands and heads, users wore a magnetic field device known as Polhemus. The EyePhones, DataGlove and Polhemus were all somewhat flaky and unreliable pieces of hardware, as were the experimental graphics accelerator cards that we had in our machines. It was really pretty rare that everything would be working at once. I programmed for over a year on a demo called "Flocking Topes" that showed polyhedra flocking around the user like a school of tropical fish, and I doubt if I got to spend more than five minutes fully immersed VR with my demo. But what a wonderful five minutes it was!

  Supporting multiple users turned out to be a subtler programming issue than had been expected. When you have multiple users you have the problems of whose machine the VR simulation is living on, and of how to keep the worlds in synch.

  In the end, the Autodesk product was a flop. It was too expensive and too constrictive. People were writing plenty of VR programs, but they didn't want to be constrained to the particular set of tools that the Autodesk Cyberspace Developer's Kit was supposed to provide.

  One of the biggest growth areas for VR has been video games.

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  Initially, home computers couldn't support these computations, so one of the early forms of commercial cyberspace were expensive arcade games. One in particular was called "Virtuality." Each player would get on a little platform, strap on head-goggles and gloves, and enter a virtual reality in which the players walked around in simulated bodies carrying pop-guns and trying to shoot each other. The last time I played this game was in a "Cybermind" arcade in San Francisco. I was by myself, scruffily dressed. My opponents were two ten-year-old boys with their parents. I whaled on them pretty good - they were new to the game. It was only after we finished that the parents realized their children had been off in cyberspace with that - unshaven chuckling man over there.

  Of course now games like Quake and Half-Life show fairly convincing VR simulations on home computer screens. For whatever reason, head-mounted displays and glove interfaces still haven't caught on. But the multiple-user aspect of VR has really taken off. There are any number of online VR environments in which large numbers of people enter the same world.35

  I just recently got a good enough computer to make it practical to visit some of these worlds. The online VR is amazing at first. You can run this way and that, looking at things. And there's lots of other people in there with you, each in one of the body images known as "avatars." Everyone's talking by typing, and their sentences are scrolling past at the bottom of the screen.

  What still seems to be missing from these worlds is any kind of indigenous life, although this may yet be on the way. As the writer Bruce Sterling once remarked to me about VR worlds, "I always want to get in there with a spray-can. It's too clean." It would be nice for instance to have plants, animals, molds, and the like. But for now, it's the presence of the other people that makes these worlds compelling.

  35. A large number of these worlds are described in Bruce Damer, Avatars: Exploring and Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet, Peachpit Press, San Francisco 1997. Links to many interactive VR sites can be found on Damer's page, http://www:digitalspace.com/avatars. There is a particularly interesting VR chatroom called Active-Worlds. This is accessed by downloading a special Web browser from http://www. activeworlds.com.

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  Cyberculture

  In the late eighties there was suddenly a big cultural interest in cyberpunk, cyberspace and virtual reality. Part of this was due to the weird Berkeley magazine Mondo 2000, which presented these ideas as something like a new form of LSD.

  In point of fact, the Mondo crew were mostly not very technical. Some of them were quite devoted to psychedelics, and you might say that cyberspace and virtual reality were new forms they used for thinking about drug visions. Tripping and calling people on the phone can seem a lot like being in cyberspace, for instance. In any case, Mondo did a lot to popularize what might be called "cyberculture."

  One way to explain the word "cyberpunk" is that "cyber" means computer/human interface and "punk" means rebellious countercultural people. The computer gives power to the punk. More broadly speaking, cyberpunk science fiction is about the fusion of humans and machines. It isn't really about the future, it's about the present. It's a way for us to step back and look at what's happening right now. The brain plug is you with your keyboard and your screen. The virtual reality is you watching television.

  Mondo added on additional layers of meaning to the word, and in 1992 I helped edit a collection of their articles called the Mondo User's Guide. The book got good publicity, and even occasioned a cover story on cyberpunk by Time magazine.36 Cyberpunk suddenly stood for a whole independent culture and reality, far beyond what I thought it had meant. It began to seem that by paying attention to the world in certain ways you could begin to live in cyberspace.

  The writer John Perry Barlow remarked, for instance, that "cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone." A few weeks later I was at a conference in Toronto. It was evening, I was walking down a deserted city street alone and I missed Audrey. At every second corner there was a telephone. I stopped at one and tried to call Audrey, punching in all the twenty-five necessary numbers for a credit card call. The phone was busy. It was too cold to stand there waiting. I kept walking, and at every second block was an identical deserted phone, and at each one I punched in the numbers.

  36.Time, Feb 8, 1993.

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  At the fifth phone I got her. It struck me that as I'd been walking, I'd been moving through a kind of continuous jelly of cyberspace.

  The Web

  In a way, the focu
s on virtual reality was a diversion, a detour. For a computer reality to engross, it isn't so important after all that it have really great 3-D immersive graphics. It's more important that it react to what you do, and that it include other people.

  Your mind is rich enough that in fact you can get mesmerized by very low bandwidth things. People can completely get into, for instance, something as graphically crude as text-based conversations in a chat room.

  And the system's turnaround reaction time doesn't even have to be very high. If you do a lot of electronic mail, you get used to checking your email once or twice a day, and it's like there is a big buzz of conversation going on that you are part of. If you can't get to your email you're kind of uncomfortable. It's a big thrill to find a cybercare in a strange city and suddenly be able to plug into your familiar email corner of cyberspace.

  One definition of something being a reality is that several people can go there and see the same thing. This is certainly the case with the Web. It's a space that we go out into all the time, and interesting things are happening there. Unlike watching television, the Web is interactive. You can move around and look at whatever it is that you want to see.

  An advantage of the Web over physical reality is that it's physically safe inside your computer, that is, it's not like the real world where you can get into a car accident, trip and fall down, get wet, have to walk home, etc. A disadvantage is that you're sitting in a chair punching a plastic keyboard.

  But the real attraction of the Web's cyberspace is that you don't need to be lonely in there. You can say things and people will hear you. Email flits back and forth. People put things up for you to look at. It's a kind of community. It's a global computer. It's everywhere. Cyberspace is a pleasant, anarchistic alternate universe that we're all free to live in.

  Original version appeared as "Brain Plug" in 21C, #/4, 1996.

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  Life and Artificial Life

  Artificial life is the study of how to create man-made systems which behave as if they were alive.37

  It is important to study life because the most interesting things in the world are the things that are alive. Living things grow into beautiful shapes and develop graceful behavior. They eat, they mate, they compete, and over the generations they evolve.

  In the planetary sense, societies and entire ecologies can be thought of as living organisms. In an even more abstract sense, our thoughts themselves can be regarded as benignly parasitic information viruses that hop from mind to mind. Life is all around us, and it would be valuable to have a better understanding of how it works.

  Investigators of the brand new field of artificial life, or A-life, are beginning to tinker with home-brewed simulations of life. A-life can be studied for its scientific aspects, for its aesthetic pleasures, or as a source of insight into real living systems.

  In the practical realm, artificial life provides new methods of chemical synthesis, self-improving techniques for controlling complex systems, and ways to automatically generate optimally tweaked computer programs. In the future, artificial life will play a key role in robotics, in virtual reality, and in the retrieval of information from unmanageably huge data bases.

  One can go about creating A-life by building robots or by tailoring biochemical reactions - and we'll talk about these options later

  37. There are a number of very comprehensive anthologies of technical and semi-technical papers presented at the biennial conferences on artificial life. The first conference was held at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1987, and its papers appear in C. Langton, ed., Artificial Life, Addison-Wesley, 1989. Further volumes are named Artificial Life II, III, and so on, and appear from various publishers. A good popular book on A-life is: Steven Levy, Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation, Pantheon Books, 1992.

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  in this essay. But the most inexpensive way to go about experimenting with A-life is to use computer programs.

  What are some of the essential characteristics of life that we want our A-life programs to have? We want programs that are visually attractive, that move about, that interact with their environment, that breed, and that evolve.

  Three characteristics of living systems will guide our quest:

  Gnarl

  Sex

  Death.

  This essay includes sections on Gnarl, Sex, and Death, followed by three sections on non-computer A-life.

  Gnarl

  The original meaning of "gnarl" was simply "a knot in the wood of a tree." In California surfer slang, "gnarly" came to be used to describe complicated, rapidly changing surf conditions. And then, by extension, ''gnarly" came to mean anything that included a lot of surprisingly intricate detail.

  Living things are gnarly in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected. The grain of an oak burl is of course gnarly in the traditional sense of the word, but the life cycle of a jellyfish, say, is gnarly in the modern sense. The wild three-dimensional paths that a hummingbird sweeps out are kind of gnarly, and, if the truth be told, your ears are gnarly as well.

  A simple rule of thumb for creating artificial life on the computer is that the program should produce output which looks gnarly.

  "Gnarly" is, of course, not the word which most research scientists use. Instead, they speak of life as being chaotic or complex.

  Chaos as a scientific concept became popular in the 1980s.38 Chaos can be defined to mean complicated but not arbitrary.

  38. The classic popular book on chaos theory is: James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking, 1987. There is a useful companion program written by me, Josh Gordon, and John Walker: James Gleick's Chaos: The Software, Autodesk, 1990, available for free download from the "Chaos" page of my Web site.

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  The surf at the shore of an ocean beach is chaotic. The patterns of the water are clearly very complicated. But, and this is the key point, they are not arbitrary.

  For one thing, the patterns that the waves move in are, from moment to moment, predictable by the laws of fluid motion. Waves don't just pop in and out of existence. Water moves according to well understood physical laws. Even if the waves are in some sense random, their motions are still not arbitrary. The patterns you see are drawn from a relatively small range of options. Everything you see looks like water in motion; the water never starts looking like, say, cactuses or piles of cubes. The kinds of things that waves "like to do" are what chaoticians call "attractors" in the space of possible wave behaviors.

  Note that the quantum uncertainties of atomic motions do in fact make the waves random at some level. As Martin Gardner once said to me, "Quantum mechanics ruins everything." But quantum mechanics is something of a red herring here. The waves would look much the same even if physics were fully deterministic right down to the lowest levels.

  As it turns out, you don't need a system as complicated as the ocean to generate unpredictable chaos. Over the last couple of decades, scientists have discovered that sometimes a very simple rule can produce output which looks, at least superficially, as complicated as physical chaos. Computer simulations of chaos can be obtained either by running one algorithm many times (as in a simulation of planetary motion), or by setting up an arena in which multiple instances of a single algorithm can interact (as with a cellular automaton). A sufficiently complex chaotic system can appear fully unpredictable.

  Some chaotic systems explode into a full-blown random-looking grunge, while others settle into the gnarly, warped patterns that are known as strange attractors. A computer screen filled with what looks like a seething flea circus can be a chaotic system, but the fractal images that you see on T-shirts and calendars are pictures of chaos as well. Like all other kinds of systems, chaotic systems can range from having a lesser or a greater amount of disorder. If a chaotic system isn't too disorderly, it converges on certain standard kinds of behavior - these are its attractors. If the attractors are odd-

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&nb
sp; The Mandelbrot set is gnarly.

  (Generated by Chaos.)