Assimov, Strugatskii Brothers, and History

A remarkable idea of the Foundation trilogy of Isaac Assimov’s was that of psychohistory; a branch of mathematics that could predict the future, but only on a large scale; it was error-prone for anything smaller than a planet or an empire. It worked on the principle that the behavior of a mass of people could be predictable.

A similar idea was alluded to in the novel “Hard to be a God” by Arkadi and Boris Strugatskii in which Earth’s Institute for Experimental History had been intervening in the history of other planets – which, by implication, meant the existence of a science of theoretical history.

Both of these ideas are now in the process of being realized.

Consider:

A quantitative theory of physical and cultural co-evolution was first pioneered in “Genes, Mind, And Culture: The Coevolutionary Process” by Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson but they did not really delve into the process of history or the behavior of individuals. [A remarkable work nevertheless that was ignored for the most part.]

The task of modeling human history was performed in the book “Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall” by
Peter Turchin. However, Turchin’s book does not model the individuals [as autonomous agents] either. What he does do is the application of differential equations to obtain gross features of the rise and fall of pre-industrial societies. He pays homage to ibn Khaldun's insights in Al Muqaddamah by incorporating his ideas into these models and arrives at quantitative agreements that would make ibn Khaldun proud!

A quantitative framework for the modeling of the individual agents was proposed by Michail Zak in 2 papers: “Dynamics of Intelligent Systems” and “Self-supervised Dynamical Systems”. The essential idea of Zak is the incorporation of the idea of “Self-Image” into stochastic non-linear set of differential equations that describe the behavior of a single individual (of an specific species).

One would think that a synthetic model that combined the gross approaches of Lumsden, Wilson, and Turchin, on the one side and the individual agent approach of Zak on the other would be an even more robust and powerful model to account for some features of human history.

A possible bridge between the two approaches may be found in the work of David Wolpert and his team at NASA’s Ames Research Center ( http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/is/AR/tasks/ColInt.html ). His approach is based on giving goals to individual agents that would naturally optimize the collective. Wolpert is not interested in history, he is interested in engineering design optimization but his approach provides the glue between the two approaches discussed above.

So, in my opinion, all the ingredients for the construction of theoretical history/psychohistory are there, including very cheap hardware computing resources and computer languages and database technologies. I can imagine constructing a model with 1 million coupled Zak-like agents, subject to Wolpert optimization, which are subject to overall dynamics of Turchin, Lumdsen, and Wilson.

More on Cyclomatic Complexity

In a column titled "Debunking Cyclomatic Complexity" by Andrew Binstock, in the Software Development Times, we read the following:

"... cyclometric complexity does not correlate directly to defect probability.

... routines with CCNs of 1 through 25 did not follow the expected result that greater CCN correlates to greater probability of defects. Rather, it found that for CCNs of 1 through 11, the higher the CCN the lower the bug probability.

... The majority of routines written in object-oriented languages today ... have CCNs in this range. This means that for most code you write, CCN does not tell you anything useful about the likelihood of your code’s quality. (Above 25, CCN does correlate to greater bug probability.)"

The Architecture of the Jumping Universe

Take a look at the book "The Architecture of the Jumping Universe: A Polemic : How Complexity Science Is Changing Architecture and Culture" by Charles Jencks.

The book presents the basic ideas of the Sciences of Complexity and shows many buildings based on this new language by leading architects (such as Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind) along with ecological and organic designs.

More than a decade ago, the architectural ideas of Christopher Alexander (see for example, "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction") greatly influenced many practitioners of Object-Oriented Design and Programming; which, in turn (at least indirectly), led to the (Software) Design Patterns movement and the now famous book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John M. Vlissides.

Road Coloring Problem

Avraham Trahtman has solved the "Road Coloring Problem" conjecture. The "Road Coloring Problem" was first posed in 1970 by Benjamin Weiss and Roy Adler.

The conjecture essentially states that it's possible to create a "universal map" that can direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of starting point.

The solution may be found @ http://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.0099v4

Jack Ganssle On Cyclomatic Complexity

One of the tragedies of software engineering is that, in industry at least, we've successfully avoided the metrics-based quality revolution that transformed manufacturing. Few companies know their pretest bug rates in, say, defects per line of code. ...

Thirty-one years ago, Thomas McCabe proposed a metric called "cyclomatic complexity" to attach a quantitative measure to a function's complexity. It's one of many such measures but is by far the one most used. It measures the number of "edges" and "nodes" in a function, where a node is a computational statement and an edge represents the transfer of control between nodes. Cyclomatic complexity is then:
v(G)=edges–nodes+2

Check out the Web references in the article!

And the comments as well!

Nature Best Photo Awards

Embedded CORBA

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) needed to solve one of the world’s most challenging distributed system control problems for a $1.2 billion nuclear fusion facility.... For this demanding engineering task, NIF depends on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).

Is There a Real IT Labor Shortage?

http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Is-There-Really-an-IT-Labor-Shortage/

Genome Projector

Kazaharu Arakawa of Keio University in Japan has launched a colorful and intuitive bio-informatics tool. Drawing inspiration from iTunes and Google Maps, using AJAX and EXT 2.0 technologies, the database browser, called Genome Projector (www.g-language.org/GenomeProjector/), was developed at Keio’s Institute for Advanced Biosciences over the past year.

It contains four “maps:” Genome Map, Plasmid Map, DNA Walk, and Pathway Map. Each map indicates genes in various colors, such as rRNA in red stripes and tRNA in green stripes in the Genome Map.

The Genome Projector is available @ http://www.g-language.org/g3/.

Note the usage of the Google MAP API to deliver data visualization services; something that many other organizations and businesses could do for BI and Data Mining information.


Quote:
"Genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is prime information; it is digital information. Itis precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte into any other kind of information.” – Richard Dawkins at DLD 08, January 2008, in Munich, Germany

Cognitive Radio

Cognitive radio, a phrase coined by Joe Mitola, is described by him as "a really smart radio that would be self-aware, and that would include language technology and machine vision, along with a high-fidelity knowledge of the radio environment."

To learn more take a look at the following sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=000C7B72-2374-13F6-A37483414B7F0000&print=true


http://www.fcc.gov/oet/cognitiveradio/

Neuromorphic Engineering

Neuromorphic engineering is the construction of devices that process information in a manner similar to a brain - often in an analogue manner.

It was invented by Carver Mead at Cal Tech 20 years ago.

These are a few links to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic

http://www.iguana-robotics.com/index.htm

http://www.ine-web.org/

Biomedical Electronics Research

http://www.rle.mit.edu/avbs/

stateWORKS Studio

stateWORKS Studio, from stateWORKS, is a professional software development environment based on state machine. It has a VFSM editor, a VFSM software simulator, monitoring and debugging tools, I/O interfaces and a user interface framework.

Find it @ http://www.stateworks.com/product/product/

3 From CrossTalk Magazine

3 Interesting and useful articles from CrossTalk Magazine:

Improving Consistency of Use Case Points Estimates Dr. David J. Coe. This article presents experimental data on the use of the Use Case Points method to estimate development effort for a semester-scale software product.


Good Practices for Developing User Requirements by Ellen Gottesdiener. This article provides a requirements model road map that helps software development teams understand the effective use of requirements models.


Tabular Notations for State Machine-Based Specifications by Markus Herrmannsdörfer, Dr. Sascha Konrad, and Brian Berenbach. This article describes five approaches using tabular notations for state machine-based spe cifications and evaluates these approaches for use in software development.

Newspeak

Newspeak is a new language from one of the co-authors of Java. It's heavily Smalltalk influenced, and runs on Squeak. Learn about it @ http://www.langnetsymposium.com/talks/Slides/newspeak-langnet08.pdf

Lang.NET '08 Edition

The Lang.NET '08 Edition talks will be availabe @ http://langnetsymposium.com/ in a few weeks. They are worth watching for new areas of software development languages.

Resolver One

Resolver One has a product that bridges the gap between spreadsheets and applications, entirely written in IronPython (around 30,000 lines of app code and 110,000 lines of test code, all in IPy). If you do any kind of complicated spreadsheet based analysis, you should check out their product.

Also check out these demonstrations on YouTube:

Resolver One Web Server @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dujk1pHEZR8

Resolver One Spreadsheet @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKbKJL8kQi4

Intentional Computing

Check out Charles Simonyi's Intentional Sofware @ http://www.intentsoft.com/

Open-Source Java Code Analyzers

http://java-source.net/open-source/code-analyzers

Japan Looks to a Robot Future

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080301/ap_on_re_as/japan_robot_nation;_ylt=ArZMxO0wTWJsU_kuRnNQ9pi73MMF