For those of you who do not know great anguish, aka Runestone, you are luckier than you know. Today, I spent seven hours working fruitlessly on this project. Initially, I admit that part of the problem was mine. You see, for the first three hours I was trying to establish communication between the computer and the robot using legOS. I tried multiple distributions only to suffer utter failure time and time again. Eventually, it came to light the reason I was not able to send programs to the robot was because I was typing “1″ (one) rather “l” (L). The issue was that programs for the robot are compiled to .lx format, and I was tying .1x, which looked the same. Thus, in honor of my inability to read a Linux screen for three hours, we have named the robot �1x.�

The second hurdle that we faced was trying to compile programs for the robot. It seems that he old style distributions we were trying to use did not have an effective implementation, so we turned to getting all the new resources, only to suffer utter failure again. This time, it seems that we do not have enough space on the drive to install brickOS. I cannot explain my frustration at this issue. So, after having wasted several hours, we could not finish the robot commutation ordeal.

The third issues actually worked out to be ok. For the streaming video on the project, I planned on using JMF. It was already installed on the system, so I thought we were good to go. Luckily, before we spent too much time trying to get the broken system to work, another group member explained that the version on EOS is broken, so you have to install your. So, we got that up and working in less than an hour. That was the only highlight of the entire ordeal.

Well, I now understand all the frustrations that other people have had with this project. It is utterly horrid in every way. Imagine being given a relatively simple task to complete, but you are thwarted at every turn, and people go out of the way to make things more difficult for you. That is the essence of the runestone project. It is entirely sadistic in nature.

In the reading, Libman talked quite a lot about using different postures to portray different characters within a story. In practicing these postures, it is suppose to help the storyteller switch between the characters, and is supposed to help the listener follow allow more easily between characters. What I would like to do is work on emphasizing the closed verse open postures. Quite generally, I maintain the same posture throughout a presentation. So, I am going to try to practice slightly altering my posture in order to portray different characters more effectively. In all likelihood this will take a considerable amount of practice, so when preparing for my story I will likely try various extremes as were described by Libman, and work towards more subtle changes to capture the essence of the characters.

I mean honestly, Linux has to be the worst thing ever. And, of course, since it is free it must burden our poor EOS lab, and cause my endless strife on the Runestone Project. WHY!? The particular problem that I am referring to today (I have several, generally any time I have to do anything on Linux), is that I am trying to get the USB camera to registered in the JMFRegistry so that I can use in for the project. I know that JMF works on Windows machine, and Sun machines. But, not god forsaken Linux machines…no that would make life too “easy.” Honestly, I am so pissed right now I can hardly type. I’ll leave it at that for now. But, I am sure that before this project is over there will be many more posts about how awful Linux is.

Originally written 12 February 2004, during one of the worst “fix-it” work orders I have ever done

There are times in life that you are given time to reflect on the universe, in this case, spending 40 minutes waiting for an old Mac to boot. Rather than ponder anything profound, I elected to catch up on Brian’s blog. I have to say that posting more often was a good idea, though there is repitition it is no longer as redundant. And, he sounds a lot more like himself than Rusty.

Writing on this PDA is starting to get old fast. Maybe I should see why this Norton scan has locked up…huh I guess it was just resting because everything seems to be ok now. I hope you all enjoyed this little bit of useless information.

I have to admit that I don’t have anything interesting to say. In all likelihood it is probably because of the work load that I have been shouldering. At the moment I have two major projects: the CS senior, and my swarm intelligence project. Now I also have all the work from my other classes in addition to trying to get into grad school and get an internship at Apple.

Humans Actual, Imagined, and Implied

This chapter begins by taking a look at the study of minds. The work of Claude Shannon is first examined, as he proposed information could be conceptualized mathematically as a kind of inverse function of probability. It goes through some of his studies dealing with randomly selecting letters from a page based on their probable conjunction with other letters. Since he lived before computers, they expanded his work using a computer model to show how things began to make more and more sense the further out you branched.

The next area they address was the fall of the behaviorist paradigm. Here they talked about the traditional aspects of psychological study based on behavior. Through the section they try to explain the basis of the behaviorist perspective, and begin to look at the problems that plagued it. This was immediately followed by the cognitive revolution. Here they begin talking about the shift in paradigm where minds were beginning to be thought of in terms of cognition rather than behavioral. They also talk about the impact this had on the development of AI systems at the time. These discussions worked towards the Bandura Social Learning Paradigm. This is the system that provided the foundation for social psychology, or looking at the learning/abilities of individuals in terms of the group they were in.

Social psychology is the focus of the next section. They begin the section by talking about the history, and development of the disciplines proponents. Initially, they focus on discussion of the principles of Gestalt psychology brought over by Germans in the mid twenty century. The main point here was that they were trying to establish that the mind attempts to make sense of the object in a coherent manor regardless of their actual nature. The next discussion takes a look at the Lewin field theory. Here they discuss his proposed life space and how it was portrayed at the time. His work is considered the stage for modern complex systems theory in psychology. Social influence is examined as the first prime example of social psychology. Here they look into how and why humans establish norms, conform, and the impact of social influence. They review various studies that show how powerful the influence of others can impact an individual. The next area covered is sociocognition. They talk about examples by where people can share collective understanding where by each individual only knows a fragment of the whole picture.

Pulling this all together into a more useful form, the next section begins to talk about simulating social influence. Here they are examine what exactly the difference is between a simulated mind, and a real mind. Though there is no definitive point, they seem to put forth the idea that a simulated mind is an actual mind. They then begin talking about trying to figure out how various modes of thought are conducted in order to model them properly in simulation. The next area of discussion is the shift from traditional AI to evolution methods. They start by taking about the history of bad blood between the two. Then talk about the strengths and weaknesses of both. It boils down to the fact that tradition AI is not good at handling simple tasks that evolutionary methods excel at. From here they begin talking about the evolution of cooperation. Through a discussion of the prisoners dilemma they examine how cooperation between individuals can greatly influence the rewards each member receives. The next area of discussion was an attempted explanation for the need for coherence. From there they begin to talk about networks in groups. Here they began to look at how groups of people were able to communicate, and thus come to some kind of consensus. To do this they used constraint satisfaction networks (which were explained in chapter 2).

In the following section, there is discussion about culture in theory and practice. The section begins by trying to establish whether or not culture is a thing that actually exists, or an abstraction. Eventually, they decide it is something, and begin to pursue principles based on that conjecture. First they begin to illustrate how computer simulations can represent the behavior of individuals in a social context. To demonstrate this point they use the example of the prisoners dilemma. The El Farol problem was then examined (Irish drinking night), this showed simulated interaction between agents that developed sophisticated negotiation techniques in order to trick other agents. It is basically a situation were you think you know what the other knows, but they know what you know soSugarscape was then discussed, here they were trying to grow artificial societies. The most interesting note here was the emergence of sophisticated immune systems that developed in the agents. The next system was Tesfatsions ACE. This was a system that modeled complex economic systems based on a modified version of the prisoners dilemma. The following sample was Pickers competing-norms model, where he tried to show how some behaviors might remain dominant when better behaviors are available in the environment. Latens dynamic social impact theory. This talked about how more people yield less impact on the system, and also showed concepts such as minority attitudes in populations are achieved at steady state. The evolutionary culture model established by Boyd and Richerson was then talked about. It basically discusses the link between cultural, and biological evolution. To further this discussion they follow up by talking about memetic (first talked about in chapter 1), and their relevance. Memetic algorithms are then talked about. One good example is the one created by Burke and Smith. Advancing another step in the scale, they begin talking about cultural algorithms. They end the section by talking about the convergence between social scientists and computer simulations.

The chapter wraps up by taking a look at what life might be like without culture. In the section they take a look at multiple instances of feral children that are found in the wild, and they talk about their tendencies and inability to become civilized. The picture they paint is very dismal, as they try to say that advanced intelligence comes from culture, rather than the individual.