the game of life

Thinking Machine 4 created by Martin Wattenberg, with Marek Walczak, using Processing, explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

When it is your (White's) turn to move, the chess board will gently pulse to show the influence of the various pieces. in the left image below, you can see waves over the squares around the king and (very lightly) over the squares where the pawns might capture. When the machine (Black) is thinking, a network of curves is overlaid on the board; see image at right. The curves show potential moves--often several turns in the future--considered by the computer. Orange curves are moves by black; green curves are ones by white. The brighter curves are thought by the program to be better for white.

fully awake emerges from the dust....

we're back in slo! sorry for the very long delay with the postings... but things have been hectic lately arriving back in CA and getting to work on thesis.

I've got new work I want to post, but I need to work on some formatting and hopefully get my book sent out to get published within the next two days... so! for now, here's something interesting I stumbled upon today while reading through my daily link searches...

It's about the use of brain-computer interfaces to create virtual worlds that can be controlled mentally.

"In addition, there is no need for the operator to wear a head-mounted display – they sit inside a room (located at UCL) inside which stereo video footage is projected onto three walls and the floor. A pair of shuttered glasses creates the illusion of 3D to intensify the overall feeling of being inside the simulated reality."

you can find the full article at:
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn12136-virtual-world-sharpens-mindcontrol.html

ALSO! now I wont be the only one posting... so check the bottom of the post for the author's name and give them credit!

there will be a meeting this week... I'll post more info on that later, TBD.

Sci-Arc Lecture: Emergent_Dragonfly

A couple of weeks ago a group of us went out to Sci-Arc to participate in the lecture series. Even though I only made the last 20 minutes (LA Traffic), it was a very interesting conversation between Tim Wiscombe and Eric Owen Moss on the Dragonfly exhibition. I believe the discussion was about how will this type of architecture be used, how can designers make it easy for others to understand, lighting effects, computers as design tools, and the process of the design. For those of you interested in learning more, you can check out www.emergentarchitecture.com, it should be one of the links that Wilson added to the forum. We hope more of you can join us in the next lecture. We find it educational to attend these lectures and then discuss it amongst ourselves. We discussed it over dinner at Roscoes Chicken and Waffles last time so the next would be Pink's Hotdogs, then I have a whole list of our eateries ready to go for future meetings in SoCal.