Nova Spivack – Minding the Planet

The New Scientist published a nice overview of the emerging theory of Loop Quantum Gravity. I’ve been following this for a number of years, ever since my friend Bram turned me onto it. It’s related in some ways to other models of discrete space-time, such as cellular automata and digital physics.
LEE SMOLIN is no [...]

Today I read this nice article which provides a short consumer-friendly overview of the history of the Digital Physics paradigm. Digital Physics is not mainstream physics — but it is growing and someday could become huge. It brings together computer scientists and physicists in an interdisciplinary approach to physics. While many advocates simply take the [...]

In a very interesting new finding, researchers have discovered the people’s brains contain individual neurons, or small groups of neurons, that seem exist only to recognize particular people or concepts. This would imply that there is one neuron, or at least a small group of neurons, in our brains for every unique thing that we [...]

Researchers in Europe have completed the first phase of what may be the largest computational physics experiment in history: They built and ran a simulated universe through 14 billion years of development. The experiment used up 25 million megabytes of memory, and the biggest supercomputer in Europe for a month. The result was a “Cube [...]

These visualizations were produced at MIT — they look like modern art but are actually visualizations of electromagnetic fields. Pretty!

Many years ago I spoke with Will Wright — one of the most interesting visionaries I’ve met (and who happens to be the creator of Sim City) about his dream of a universe game — one in which the player could evolve life from the simple cellular level all the way up through galactic scale [...]

Big news coming — a radical high-performance, ultra-miniaturized parallel processing chip is about to go mainstream in a variety of consumer devices, giving Intel some serious competition…
Semiconductor designers from International Business Machines,
Sony and Toshiba will reveal on Monday the inner workings of a
“supercomputer on a chip” they claim could revolutionise
communications, multimedia and consumer electronics.

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Here is a book that readers who are interested in multi-agent systems will find useful. The author, Andrew Ilachinski is also a reader of this blog, by the way — it’s called “Artificial War: Multiagent-Based Simulation of Combat” and provides an examination of the thesis that what happens on a battlefield (though the arena can [...]

Here’s an interesting article on another theory that suggests our universe is just an experiment in someone’s lab.

Here is a cool new kind of complex system I am thinking about a lot that we might call a “network-automaton” or a “graph automaton” — a system that evolves networks (graphs) over time. This rule is similar to cellular automata rules such as the famous “Life” rule discovered by John Conway, however instead of computing [...]

This is a really nice visual pattern generator based on quilt patterns. Try it out.

This is a very good article on the physics of scale-free networks such as the Web.
Lately I have been getting increasingly interested in graph theory and also in knot theory. There is a similarity between networks and knots and it should be possible to do a mapping such that the theorems and algorithms of knot [...]

A new approach to computing called

It just occurred to me that distribution of primes looks VERY much like the output of a cellular automaton rule. This makes me wonder whether it might be possible to use a cellular automaton to generate prime numbers. If we can find the rule that generates the prime numbers, perhaps this rule has other important [...]

This evening I had an interesting idea for a new way to look for patterns in the distribution of numbers such as the prime numbers and the digits of Pi. In a nutshell I propose that there may be patterns in these number sequences that might not be evident to a computer but could be [...]

I am having an interesting conversation with Howard Bloom, author, memeticist, historian, scientist, and social theorist. We have been discussing network models of the universe and the underlying “metapatterns” that seem to unfold at every level of scale. Below is my reply to his recent note, followed by his note which is extremely well written [...]

Hello all, I have been thinking about the general problems of social networks on the Internet. It occurs to me that these issues are closely related to digital physics. For more on digital physics see the work of Ed Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, Norman Margolus, Tomasso Toffoli, and other pioneers of the field of cellular automata. [...]

Here’s an interesting follow-up thought on my suggestion of some Hypothetical Laws of Social Networks.
What if in fact there is an entirely new way to design social networks, based on the mathematics of tilings? A tiling is a method of filling a space with geometric shapes. For example, you can tile a space with squares, [...]