Amorphous Computing Reviews

I'm posting a draft article reviewing Amorphous Computing written by me, Hal, and Gerry, and an informal talk I gave to the Friday bull session a couple months back. These were both really fun chances to look back over where things started and how far along they've come, though the review article was fairly stressful given my looming thesis.

Also, I decided that the "Engineered Emergence" section of my web-page ought to be below the sections that have been there longer and have more formal stuff.

Thesis fragment appearing at AAAI

One of the things I've had to wrestle with in my work is how to explore architectural ideas freely while still keeping things connected to human intelligence. I finally managed to write down a clear explanation of my approach for my thesis, and that fragment is going to be appearing this summer at a AAAI workshop on "Evaluating Architectures for Intelligence."

Here it is: Developmental Cost for Models of Intelligence

Slides, and a new section

In March, I gave an invited talk at a workshop on Unconventional Computation, in which for the first time I drew together the scattered threads of my research into a single theme: "engineered emergence." I'm not really happy with the name, since the word "emergence" carries a lot of flakiness baggage. For the moment, though, it's the best way I know to describe engineering a bunch of unruly parts so their interactions will produce coherent behavior of the whole.

The slides from the talk are here, and I've reorganized my page to give engineered emergence its own section, pulling in the Assassin's Guild talks which push me towards thinking this way.

Tech Report: "Building Spatial Computers"

Lots of stuff in flight, waiting to see whether it gets accepted or not. Also, I'm deep in the thesis-writing process.
Anyway, we've memoized an amorphous computing paper that got rejected, since it might be a while before its next turn around the wheel of submission:

Building Spatial Computers, Jonathan Bachrach and Jacob Beal, MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2007-017, March 2007.

This was a submission to HotOS, talking about the operating system level problems of building Proto and making the amorphous medium abstraction actually work. Half the reviewers thought we'd already published the paper---no! This is the one where we actually talk about implementation, rather than sweeping it under the rug to focus on why somebody should care about our abstraction. A third complained that we didn't focus on the programming abstraction. The fourth had good, helpful feedback that will actually help us on the next turn of the wheel.

It seems to me like there's a fundamental problem in trying to present a non-incremental change in a computer science paper. If you try to present it all in five to ten pages, you can't give enough details to satisfy anybody. If you slice off a bite-sized chunk to talk about, then either you've already published on the idea or the reviewers complain that they wanted the other parts. I don't know whether other fields are like this too, or if this is just to be expected when you're working on problems that don't come with a pre-existing focussed sub-community dedicated to their study.

If I were a better writer, I might know how to present things to get the readers to reliably take that leap in five pages. For now, I'll keep struggling and getting frustrated every time I get a review that says something like "But why aren't you programming in C?"

New material posted on my website

A bunch of amorphous computing work:

• An extended abstract and poster that Jonathan Bachrach and I took to DCOSS 2006 in June.
  
• A presentation on manifold programming semantics, presented at the Space-Oriented Computing seminar at Dagstuhl.
  
• A brief overview of the amorphous medium approach, presented to new grad students at the CSAIL Open House.
  

Also, I've put up the abstract and slides that I gave at this year's CSAIL Student Workshop, "Sidestepping Impossibility: Combat Consensus in the Assassins' Guild," a fun piece extending my previous Assassins' Guild analysis.

Why a blog?

Why am I starting a blog? A few days ago, a friend mentioned that he thought I should put one together so that I could periodically announce papers and other creative output that friends and colleagues might be interested in. I agree, and thus a blog.

If you're here, you probably know me. Welcome. I recommend subscribing to this blog as a news-feed and expecting infrequent updates, on the order of once a month.