by Rudy Rucker
In practice, developing designs and software for these machines is what is known as an intractable problem. It is very hard to predict how the different components will interact, so one has to actually try out each new configuration to see how it works. And commonly, changes are being made to the hardware and to the software at the same time, so the space of possible solutions is vast.
Telerobotics.
For many applications, the user might not need a robot to be fully autonomous. Something like a remotely operated hand that you use to handle dangerous materials is like a robot, in that it is a complicated machine which imitates human motions. But a remote hand does not necessarily need to have much of an internal brain, particularly if all it has to do is to copy the motions of your real hand. A device like a remote robot hand is called a telerobot.
Radioactive waste is sometimes cleaned up using telerobots that have video cameras and two robotic arms. The operator of such a telerobot sees what it sees on a video screen, and moves his or her hands within a mechanical harness that sends signals to the hands of the telerobot.
I have a feeling that, in the coming decades, telerobotics is going
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to be a much more important field than pure robotics. People want amplifications of themselves more than they want servants. A telerobot projects an individual's power. Telerobots would be useful for exploration, travel, and sheer voyeurism, and could become a sought-after high-end consumer product.
But even if telerobots are more commercially important than self-guiding robots, there is still a need for self-guiding robots. Why? Because when you're using a telerobot, you don't want to have to watch the machine every second so that the machine doesn't do something like get run over by a car, nor do you want to worry about the very fine motions of the machine. You want, for instance, to be able to say "walk towards that object" without having to put your legs into a harness and emulate mechanical walking motions -this means that, just like a true robot, the telerobot will have to know how to move around pretty much on its own.
Evolving Robots.
I think artificial life is very likely to be a good way to evolve better and better robots. In order to make the evolution happen faster, it would be nice to be able to do it as a computer simulation - as opposed to the building of dozens of competing prototype models.
My novel The Hacker and the Ants is based on the idea of evolving robots by testing your designs out in virtual reality - in, that is, a highly realistic computer simulation with some of the laws of physics built into it.
You might, for instance, take a CAD model of a house, and try out a wide range of possible robots in this house without having to bear the huge expense of building prototypes. As changing a model would have no hardware expense, it would be feasible to try out many different designs and thus more rapidly converge on an optimal design.
There is an interesting relationship between A-life, virtual reality, robotics, and telerobotics. These four areas fit neatly into Table 3, which is based on two distinctions: firstly, is the device being run by a computer program or by a human mind; and, secondly, is the device a physical machine or a simulated machine?
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MIND BODY
ARTIFICIAL LIFE Computer Simulated
VIRTUAL REALITY Human Simulated
ROBOTICS Computer Physical
TELEROBOTICS Human Physical
Table 3: Four Kinds of Computer Science
Artificial life deals with creatures whose brains are computer programs, and these creatures have simulated bodies that interact in a computer-simulated world. In virtual reality, the world and the bodies are still computer-simulated, but at least some of the creatures in the world are now being directly controlled by human users. In robotics, we deal with real physical machines in the real world that are run by computer programs, while in telerobotics we are looking at real physical machines that are run by human minds. Come to think of it, a human's ordinary life in his or her body could be thought of as an example of telerobotics: a human mind is running a physical body!
Memes.
In the wider context of the history of ideas, certain kinds of fads, techniques, or religious beliefs behave in some ways like autonomous creatures which live and reproduce. The biologist Richard Dawkins calls these thought-creatures memes.44
Self-replicating memes can be brutally simple. Here's one:
44. Richard Dawkins talks about memes in his book The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976. This book is mainly about the idea that an organism is a genome's way of reproducing itself - a bit as if we were big robots being driven around by DNA. The memes take further advantage of us. As Dawkins puts it: "Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain . . . When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."
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The Laws of Wealth:
Law I: Begin giving 10% of your income to the person who teaches you the Laws of Wealth.
Law II: Teach the Laws of Wealth to ten people!
The Laws of Wealth meme is the classic Ponzi pyramid scheme.
Here's another self-replicating idea system:
System X:
Law I: Anyone who does not believe System X will burn in hell.
Law II: It is your duty to save others from suffering.
Of System X, Douglas Hofstadter remarks, "Without being impious, one may suggest that this mechanism has played some small role in the spread of Christianity."45
Most thought memes use a much less direct method of self-reproduction. Being host to a meme-complex such as, say, the use of language can confer such wide survival advantages that those infected with the meme flourish. There are many such memes with obvious survival value: the tricks of farming, the craft of pottery, the arcana of mathematics - all are beneficial mind-viruses that live in human information space.
Memes which confer no obvious survival value are more puzzling. Things like tunes and fashions hop from one mind to another with bewildering speed. Staying up to date with current ideas is a higher-order meme which probably does have some survival value. Knowing about A-life, for instance, is very likely to increase your employability as well as your sexual attractiveness!
Excerpted from the Artificial Life Lab manual, Waite Group Press, 1993.
I was employed as a "mathenaut" in the Advanced Technical Division at Autodesk, Inc., from August, 1988 to September, 1992. While I was there, I worked on CA Lab, on James Gleick's CHAOS: The Software, on the Autodesk Cyberspace Developer's Kit, and on a solo project called Boppers. In 1992 Autodesk's stock
45. System X appears in the chapter "On Vital Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures," in Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas, Basic Books, New York 1985.
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went down, and they laid off many of the people in the Advanced Technical Division. But they let me keep the rights to my Boppers code, and I got it published as a package called Artificial Life Lab. It's out of print now, but the Boppers program, the Boppers source code and the complete Artificial Life Lab manual are available on my Web site.
I really enjoyed my time at Autodesk, but I wasn't doing much writing while I was there. It was good to come back to the slower pace of academic life. By the end of my four years in the software industry pressure-cooker I felt like an undercover agent who has forgotten his real identity and has started to believe his cover story. Regarding my return, I had a mental image of a jeep whining up a hill along a wire fence at some Iron Curtain border. The jeep stops, two men raise up a tightly wrapped canvas sack and throw it over the fence, the jeep speeds off. The long canvas bag twitches, unfolds, and there I am, back in the land of literature.
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Hacking Code
&
nbsp; Hacking is like building a scale-model cathedral out of toothpicks, except that if one toothpick is out of place the whole cathedral will disappear. And then you have to feel around for the invisible cathedral, trying to figure out which toothpick is wrong. Debuggers make it a little easier, but not much, since a truly screwed-up cutting-edge program is entirely capable of screwing up the debugger as well, so that then it's like you're feeling around for the missing toothpick with a stroke-crippled claw-hand.
But, ah, the dark dream beauty of the hacker grind against the hidden wall that only you can see, the wall that only you wail at, you the programmer, with the brand new tools that you make up as you go along, your special new toothpick lathes and jigs and your realtime scrimshaw shaver, you alone in the dark with your wonderful tools.46
On a good day, I think of hacking as a tactile experience, like reaching into a tub of clay and kneading and forming the material into the shapes of my desires.
A computer program is a virtual machine that you build by hand. Hacking is like building a car by building all of the parts in the car individually. The good thing is that you have full control, the bad thing is that the process can take so much longer than you expect it to. Are you sure you feel like stamping out a triple-Z O-ring gasket? And synthesizing the plastic from which to make the gasket? The hacker says, "Yaar! Sounds like fun!"
Of course it does get easier as you build more and more. Often as not, you can re-use old pieces of code that you hacked for other projects. A hacker develops a nice virtual garage of "machine parts" that he or she can reuse. As a beginner, you start out using prefab parts
46.The Hacker and the Ants, p. 157.
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made by others, but sooner or later, you're likely to grit on down to the lowest machine levels to see just how those parts really work.
To be a writer you need something you want to write about; to be a hacker you need something to hack about. You need to have an obsession, a vision that you want to turn into a novel, or into a virtual machine. It's going to take you so long to finish that you will need a fanatic's obsession to see a big project through. Essential in either case is the simple act of not giving up, of going back into it over and over again.
I think the most interesting things to hack are programs which turn the computer into a window to a different reality. Programs which express true computer nature. Chaos, fractals, artificial life, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, virtual reality, hyperspace - these are lovely areas that the computer can see into.
I once heard a hacker compare his computer to Leuwenhoek's microscope, so strong was his feeling that he was peering into new worlds. In an odd way, the most interesting worlds can be found when this new "microscope" looks at itself, perhaps entering a chaotic feedback loop that can close in on some strange attractor.
There are, of course, lame-butts who think hacking is about grubbing scraps of information about war and money. What a joke. Hacking is for delving into the hidden machinery of the universe.
The universe? Didn't I just say that the coolest hacks are in some sense centered on an investigation of what the computer itself can do? Yes, but the computer is a model of the universe.
Sometimes schizos think the universe is a computer - in a bad kind of way. Like that everything is gray and controlled, and distant numbers are being read off in a monotone, and somewhere a supervisor is tabulating your ever-more-incriminating list of sins.
But in reality, the universe is like a parallel computer, a computer with no master program, a computer filled with self-modifying code and autonomous processes - a space of computation, if you will. A good hack can capture this on a simple color monitor. The self-mirroring screen becomes an image of the world at large. As above, so below.
The correspondence between computers and reality changes the way you understand the world. If you know about fractals, then clouds and plants don't look the same. Once you've seen chaotic
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vibrations on a screen, you recognize them in the waving of tree branches and in the wandering of the medias eye. Cellular automata show how social movements can emerge from individual interactions. Virtual reality instructs you in the beauty of a swooping flock of birds. Artificial life and genetic algorithms show how intelligent processes can self-organize amidst brute thickets of random events. Hyperspace programs let you finally see into the fourth dimension and to recognize that kinky inside-out reversals are part and parcel of your potentially infinite brain.
Hacking teaches that the secret of the universe need not be so very complex, provided that the secret is set down in a big enough space of computation equipped with feedback and parallelism. Feedback means having a program take its last output as its new input. Parallelism means letting the same program run at many different sites. The universe's physics is the same program running in parallel everywhere, repeatedly updating itself on the basis of its current computation. Your own psychology is a parallel process endlessly revising itself.
Hacking is a yoga, but not an easy one. How do you start? Taking a course on one of the "object-oriented" programming languages Java or C++ is probably the best way to start; or you might independently buy a C++ compiler and work through the manual's examples.47 And then find a problem that is your own, something you really want to see, whether it's chaos or whether it's just a tic-tac-toe program. And then start trying to make your vision come to life. The computer will help to show you the way, especially if you pay close attention to your error messages, use the help files - and read the fuckin' manual. It's a harsh yoga; it's a path to mastery.
Appeared in Frauenfelder, Sinclair, Branwyn, eds.,
The Happy Mutant Handbook, Riverhead Books, 1995.
47. There's also a number of source code examples to be found on the "Classes" page of my Web site.
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A New Golden Age of Calculation
Back in elementary school, we learned procedures, or algorithms, for doing arithmetic with pencil and paper. (Remember "borrowing"?) As adults, we tend to not use our painfully wetware-programmed arithmetic algorithms because most of us have ready access to machines that can do the algorithms by themselves. You might occasionally add two or three numbers, but if you have some multiplying or dividing to do, you're going to search your desk or your desktop for a calculator.
Mathematics doesn't stop at arithmetic. If you moved further on in school mathematics, you learned more and more algorithms; things like plotting the graph of a straight line, factoring a quadratic equation, and multiplying matrices; maybe you even got to calculus and learned about differentiation and integration. As adults, most of us never need to solve these kinds of problems at all, but if you did have to solve them on a regular basis, what would you do? Chances are you'd get hold of a computer running some kind of computer algebra program.
The oldest such package, called Macsyma, was born at MIT in the 1970s. An original impetus for the project was to help physicists work with formulae that were simply too long and complicated for the human mind - things like the hundred thousand algebraic terms in (you should pardon the expression) the Ricci tensor used in the space-time field equations of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. By the 1980s, Macsyma had become potbound by its design's restriction to the use of only one megabyte of RAM. Though Macsyma was eventually rewritten, other new computer algebra systems arose to take most of its market. The new programs included Maple (also sold as MathCAD) and - the most expensive and ambitious of them all - Mathematica.
How exactly does one use Mathematica? The shrink wrap contains a seriously fat user's guide by Wolfram and a CD with a powerful graphically-interfaced program that runs on virtually every computer platform. You type in any mathematical expression you like
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A 3-D Lissajous curve.
(Image generated by Mathematica.)
Baseball-stitch curve.
(Image generated by Kaptau.)
