Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker

This is a good illustration of the principles involved in my PhD work.

Only I'm attempting to evolve more efficient settings for mutation rate and population size, so it's about not just genetic algorithms, but meta-genetic algorithms. Evolving more efficient evolution.

You probably missed this. A game changer.

It's a long video. You can't afford to miss it. The world has changed when we weren't looking.

If that's too long to watch, and too full of marketing hype, here's how it works.

Calling Google Scholar...

Google's good, but not perfect. The number of people linking to sites with egregious nonsense about my personal details written by agenda-driven Kooks has boosted their credibility.

No matter.

A bigger problem is that Google Scholar isn't tracking my work very well. Only 60% of my papers are listed. So here's a definitive list that their webcrawlers should understand. With luck.

 Using Meta-Genetic Algorithms to tune parameters of Genetic Algorithms to fi nd lowest energy Molecular Conformers
ZE Brain, MA Addicoat  
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems

Simulation Case Study - ^x_tUML in agile development
A Vincent, AE Brain  
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Simulation and Training Conference SIMTECT 2004

Optimization of a genetic algorithm for searching molecular conformer space
ZE Brain, MA Addicoat
The Journal of chemical physics 135 (17), 174106-174106-10

Optimization of a Genetic Algorithm for the Functionalization of Fullerenes
MA Addicoat, AJ Page, ZE Brain, L Flack, K Morokuma, S Irle
Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation 8 (5), 1841-1851

Using a Meta-GA for parametric optimization of simple GAs in the computational chemistry domain
MA Addicoat, ZE Brain
Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation

Meta-Genetic Algorithms, Molecules, and Supercomputers
MA Addicoat, ZE Brain
Poster, SC10 Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

EFFICIENCY OF AN OPTIMIZED EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM FOR LOCATING MINIMUM ENERGY CONFORMERS
MA Addicoat ZE Brain
Proceedings Ninth Triennial Congress of the WORLD ASSOCIATION OF THEORETICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTS WATOC 2011

 Please go fetch, there's a good robot. 

The Capability Im-Maturity Model (CIMM)

The Capability Im-Maturity Model (CIMM)

The Capability Maturity Model - CMM - is a powerful tool in process improvement, in Software and in organisations generally. Although replaced by its successor, CMMI, it's still valuable in most cases "out of the box".

From Wiki :

There are five levels defined along the continuum of the CMM and, according to the SEI: "Predictability, effectiveness, and control of an organization's software processes are believed to improve as the organization moves up these five levels. While not rigorous, the empirical evidence to date supports this belief."

1. Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) - the starting point for use of a new or undocumented repeat process.
2. Repeatable - the process is at least documented sufficiently such that repeating the same steps may be attempted.
3. Defined - the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process, and decomposed to levels 0, 1 and 2 (the latter being Work Instructions).
4. Managed - the process is quantitatively managed in accordance with agreed-upon metrics.
5. Optimizing - process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.

However... as was pointed out as early as 1996, some organisations are worse than level 1. Much worse. the CIMM extends the CMM, downwards, where organisations that reached rock-bottom started to dig.

The four levels of software immaturity.

0. Negligent Indifference - Failure to allow successful development process to succeed. All problems are perceived to be technical problems. Managerial and quality assurance activities are deemed to be overhead and superfluous to the task of software development process. Reliance on silver pellets.
-1. Obstructive Counter Productive - Counterproductive processes are imposed. Processes are rigidly defined and adherence to the form is stressed. Ritualistic ceremonies abound. Collective management precludes assigning responsibility. Status quo ueber alles.
-2. Contemptuous Arrogance - Disregard for good software engineering institutionalized. Complete schism between software development activities and software process improvement activities. Complete lack of a training program.
-3. Undermining Sabotage - Total neglect of own charter, conscious discrediting of peer organizations software process improvement efforts. Rewarding failure and poor performance.

In my observation, the best government bureaucracies are at about level -1. Many though are at -3.

Do Not Bend, Spindle, or Mutilate

Gordon R Dickson's 1965 story "Computers Don't Argue". Please go and read it to find out how corrupted data entry can cause things to go horribly wrong...Originally published when I was 7, it was reprinted in "creative computing" when I was an undergrad like my students, and still relevant today.

The technology has moved on; we don't use punched cards - we use relational database management systems (RDBMS). But it's now even easier to

INSERT INTO CourtJudgement
VALUES amount, statute, address

instead of

INSERT INTO CourtJudgement
VALUES statute, amount, address

I'm teaching a course on Databases this semester - and this story is one of the teaching materials I use, in the Ethics section. I don't want any of my students to ever bend, spindle or mutilate someone because of such errors.

Personal names around the world

It's been a long time since I've done a post on Software. Time for this one, and the difficulties faced in making a database about something as simple as a name...

Personal names around the world

In many parts of the world, parts of names are derived from titles, locations, genealogical information, caste, religious references, and so on. Here are a few examples:

the Indian name Kogaddu Birappa Timappa Nair follows the order villageName-fathersName-givenName-lastName.

the Rajasthani name Aditya Pratap Singh Chauhan is composed of givenName-fathersName-surname-casteName.

in another part of India the name Madurai Mani Iyer represents townName-givenName-casteName.

the Arabic Abu Karim Muhammad al-Jamil ibn Nidal ibn Abdulaziz al-Filistini translates as "Father of Karim, Muhammad (given name), The beautiful, Son of Nidal, Son of Abdulaziz, the Palestinian". Karim is Muhammad's first-born son.

Every Home Should Have One

From UniverseToday : Build Your Own Apollo 11 Landing Computer

Remember the computer on the Apollo 11 Eagle lander that kept reporting “1201″ and “1202″ alarms as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin approached landing on the Moon?

Well, yes, I can. But people under 40 cannot. That's most of the people on the planet...

Well, now you can have one of your very own. Software engineer John Pultorak worked 4 years to build a replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), just so he could have one. And then he wrote a complete manual and put it online so that anyone else with similar aspirations wouldn’t have to go through the same painstaking research as he did. The manual is available free, but Pultorak says he spent about $3,000 for the hardware.

The 1,000 page documentation includes detailed descriptions and all schematics of the computer. You can find them all posted on Galaxiki, downloadable in pdf. format (the files are large).
...
The original Apollo AGC cost over $150,000. It didn’t have a disk drive to store any software, and only 74 kilobytes of memory that had been literally hard-wired, and all of 4 Kb of something that is sort of like RAM.

It was developed by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and it a pretty http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifmazing piece of hardware in the 1960s, as it was the first computer to use integrated circuits. The AGC mutlitasking operating system was called the EXEC, it was capable of executing up to 8 jobs at a time. The user interface unit was called the DSKY (display/keyboard, pronounced “disky”); an array of numerals and a calculator-style keyboard used by the astronauts to communicate with the computer.

Each Apollo mission featured two AGC computers – one in the Apollo Command Module and one in the Apollo Lunar Module.

And to feed your inner Space Administrator Geek... there's Race Into Space, a freeware port for Windows of BARIS - "Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space" (1993), itself a port of the Dead-Tree Game "Liftoff" (1989).

Looking at the specs... you could port this onto most mobile phones today.
640k RAM
12 MHz processor
32Mb for the videos
320 x 200 pixel resolution

That's about 500 times as powerful as the actual computers used in the Apollo spacecraft, 24 years earlier.

Note to Self

In my experimentation with meta-genetic algorithms to optimise a Pareto set, be careful that I don't end up with suboptimality in other areas not under consideration.


A lot of my work is based on some research I did in making an artificial intelligence for anti-missile defences over 15 years ago. I guess I was lucky, inasmuch as I used a rules-based system and not a neural net.

On the other hand, the fault-tolerance and self-healing properties I put into FedSat, and helped the MESSENGER spacecraft team with, have proven to be useful in space exploration. I skipped over Terminator-I and went straight to Terminator-II, or as I once wrote, skipped the Battleship approach, armoured but brittle, in favour of "Beware of the Blob".

Babbage Difference Engine made with LEGO

A mechanical programmable computer designed in the 19th century - now buildable using standard Lego parts.

I was fortunate to have Allan Bromley as a lecturer in my undergrad days. He was good at it too, one of the very best. He's missed.

Time Travelling in Computing

Going back 20 years....



Going back 30 years...



A blind alley from 30 years ago - good idea, but soon overtaken by the home computer



Going back 40 years...



And what the future looked like, 40 years ago



And from 55 years ago, around the time I was born. A Computer with 12k of RAM! Less than 25 years later, I owned a machine with 16k of memory, and 100 times as fast. It still used tapes, not disks though.



We are all time travellers on a one-way trip into the future. Perhaps we can teach to new generations the flexibility of mind we've had to have - because in 50 years time, the world will be at least as different from 2011 as 2011 is from 1961.

As for us? We have to remind ourselves that no high school student knows what a telephone dial is, or has ever seen a slide rule or a black-and-white TV. And neither have their parents.

Requirements

One of the slides in the lecture I'm giving tomorrow.


The course is COMP8100 Requirements Elicitation and Analysis Techniques.

Note there's a lot more stakeholders than just the users and those who pay for it: those who are supposed to build it have to be involved in the requirements analysis too. Not much point stating requirements for something that can't be defined properly, or built within time and budget, or which can't be tested. Or which is so brittle that entirely foreseeable future requirements can't be met.

All you can do is state the aims, then enough detail about how those aims are to be met in a testable fashion that everyone can agree on is feasible and useful. Compromises usually have to be made, so there's a matter of prioritising the requirements too.

Rocket Science... yes, it is, sometimes.

The internet has (kind of) run out of space - CNN

As mentioned in a previous post...

The internet has (kind of) run out of space - CNN

On Thursday, the internet as we know it ran out of space.

The nonprofit group that assigns addresses to service providers announced that, on Thursday morning, it allocated the last free internet addresses available from the current pool used for most of the internet's history.

"This is an historic day in the history of the internet, and one we have been anticipating for quite some time," said Raul Echeberria, chairman of the Number Resource Organization.

But fear not. The group has seen this coming for more than a decade and is ready with a new pool of addresses that it expects to last, well, forever.

Don't worry, nothing can go wro
SEGFAULT KERNEL PANIC f0 0f c7 c8 dd d9

418 Error I'm a teapot

Genetic Algorithms in Action

See BoxCar2D

Genetic Algorithm Car Evolution Using Box2D Physics (v1.2)

 
Version 1.2 is up!! Press "R" to reset and "P" to pause. Use the UP/DOWN buttons to vote for cars.


HINT: Try upping the mutation rate, and increasing max number of wheels...

Construction with Quadrotor Teams

Yes, only a proof of principle. A lab demonstration, with pre-packaged pre-fabricated parts, designed to be trivially easy to put together.

Nonetheless... the shape of things to come. Quadrotors or Hexrotors have certain fundamentals dictated by the science of fluid flow and aerodynamics. While power storage technology will get better, computation ability will improve, and there's a little room for materials science to make things lighter and stronger... I don't see much change to the basic concept from here.

A glimpse of the future, with swarms of co-operating robotic insects building useful things, often in hostile environments. Just not when the wind's too variable, or too strong. Indoors is best. Factories may soon resemble beehives.

BS Bingo

Example Bingo card, for use in meetings especially regarding project management.

Best of Breed	Big Picture	Retention	Prioritized	Up to speed
Conversion	Project	Mindset	Cost	Policy[ies]
Turnkey	Search Engine Optimization	BULLSHIT BINGO (free square)	Challenge[s]	Brain Storm / Mind Shower
Win-win	Reactivation	Band-aid	Level Set	Issues
Basically	Go Public	High-Level	Non-Traditional Management	Opportunity

To make your own set of cards, just visit Bullshit Bingo [Random!]. Print them out, and there you go.

NOW they tell me

I've made very few personal posts lately. Time for another one.

From The Economist:

Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time

On the evening before All Saints’ Day in 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year.

In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

Er... 50-somethings.

And collaboration with supervisors hasn't exactly been close, as the ones I've been able to find aren't specialists in my area of research.

My work involves both theoretical research and experimentation. There's not usually a lot of the latter in Computer Science, it tends heavily towards the theoretical. But then, it looks as if my PhD will be in Computational Chemistry rather than Computer Science as such. If I get it. Busy writing up now, trying with increasing desperation to find some theoretical justification for our extraordinary (and extraordinarily useful) results. It appears that the evidence tends to support some rather heretical (well, unpopular) ideas, but until we extend the work to other problem domains, I'm not even sure we can say that with any confidence.

Certainly the results weren't what I expected. But checked and re-checked, the results are sound. I really thought the method I came up with had to be good. Just not that good.

And in order to keep the wolf from the door, I'll be teaching two subjects in 2011, one at master's level, the other undergraduate. I love teaching, it's something I've always had a passion for. First Can off the rank, COMP8100 Requirements Elicitation and Analysis Techniques. Or "before we start making a system... what the heck is it supposed to do?" Too many systems have been built exactly according to specifications... but have been useless, as the real requirements and contractually stated requirements bore little resemblance to one another.

Digression: I found out long afterwards what my nickname was at ADFA (the Australian Defence Force Academy), when I taught there. They give all the lecturers and tutors appelations, some printable, others not.

They called me (though never to my face, more's the pity) "Mum". I rather like that. And yes, I was presenting as male at the time... and actually thought I was doing a good job of it. But it seems that while my appearance said one thing, my personality said another. They didn't know I was Intersexed, or Transsexual, or whatever. Just that... I was Mum.

At least at the ANU (Australian National University) I won't be looking at the casualty lists, and remembering those killed in action or giving disaster relief as the 18 yr old kids they were, not the professional military officers they became.

Excelsior. And with luck I might just have a life after my PhD regularly teaching part-time in Academe, maybe while formalising my research into the science of sex and gender. I'd like that, in the next stage of my life.

Antikythera Mechanism - In Lego

Via Fastcodesign.com

The Antikythera Mechanism in Lego from Small Mammal on Vimeo.

More on the original in a previous post - Computer Greeks.

Intel Software NetworkTV - Teach Parallel At SC10

Video

It's 100MB long, so I won't embed it.

Gosh I need to lose weight.... WAHHH. On the other hand, I am 52. What a Proboscis though! Doubt if there's a plastic surgeon courageous enough to tackle a schnozz like that one. Especially since it was broken in 3 places as a child. And a facelift to get rid of the middle-aged jowls.... and liposuction, and a tummy-tuck, and...

I know, "Vanity, thy name is Woman". But it's true. Meh, it's me, unadorned, no makeup. Not much of an advertisement for young girls to get into InfoTech though.

Wikileaked

From TechRadar of March 19th:

The Australian communications regulator has issued a stark warning that websites who link out to 'banned' hyperlinks are liable to fines of up to Aus $11,000 a day.

The news comes after web forum Whirlpool was threatened with the fine for posting a hyperlink to a blacklisted anti-abortion website.

One of the newest additions to Australia's 'blacklisted hyperlinks' list is Wikileaks; the website that publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive info on everything from corporations, religion and governments.

So while I can say that the address of wikileaks is http://wikileaks.org/, I can't link to it on an Australian server.

I can link to an anonymous proxy, such as KPROXY, and tell you to cut and paste "http://wikileaks.org/" in.

I can even give an embedded proxy:


I can even use the link http://tinyurl.com/3x32wwr which curiously enough takes you to... the Wikileaks Cable data. But that's OK, because that URL isn't on the banned list.

Since the Blogger server is in the USA, I would be OK... except that my site is being mirrored by the Australian National Library. Maybe they'd have responsibility, maybe not.

Senator Conroy is a deeply ignorant man, and his possession of the IT portfolio in the Australian cabinet is a joke. As I think I've just demonstrated.

E-Voting - How NOT to do it

In the systems I've been involved with:

• Software - Open Source - not just the Electoral Commission has access to it, it's published on the web for anyone to verify. Operating system and compiler are also open-source.
• Spot-Checking - Conducted by the Electoral Commission, who may invite 3rd parties such as Universities to check.
• Background Checking - all those involved held security clearances at various levels.
• Equipment Certification - Commercial Off-The-Shelf Hardware is used - and certified by the Electoral Commission
• Dispute Resolution - handled by using alternate paper ballots, with Electoral Commission quarantining hardware for 3rd party inspection. In theory. as far as I know, there's been no disputes.

An electronic voting system that is not as secure as a poker machine is almost as easy to subvert as a paper ballot box.