No computer has ever been designed that is aware of what it's doing, but it is possible to build a large distributed system of computers which is mabye able to...
Michael Gazzaniga about the problem of the self: "You make your own decisions.. But who is 'you'? 'You' is this person with this brain that has been ...
After infectuously cute giant Microbes in the form of plush toys .. http://www.giantmicrobes.com/health/ ..we now have the complete subatomic particle zoo ...
The Chinese room experiment from John Searle says that syntax is not the same as semantics: a a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly...
"Ant colonies operate without central control; there is no one in charge and no ant directs the behavior of others. Colonies perform many tasks including...
The problem with many virtual worlds: they seem to be dead and pointless, and people have nothing to do. Well-known exceptions are: World of Warcraft, where...
There are many bright minds who have left Microsoft in the last years. What do you do if you have earnt a fortune? You can finally relax, travel, and maybe...
Microsoft seems to be in a big crisis: a big, bouncy sales guy who despises developers is in charge, the company has lost its vision, and developers are...
Malcolm Gladwell recently had a nice article about Intellectual Ventures<https://media.scoopreprintsource.com/CondeNast/5260CN_IntellectualVentures_52209.pdf> ...
The buzzword bingo continues: HP is now doing research on dynamic cloud services, IBM is busy with cloud computing. I said it before - cloud computing is the...
Another buzzword: Activity-Based Computing :-) see http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~dimarzo/papers/IEEEPervasiveWIP.pdf Don't we have already enough x-computing...
"In computer science, we don't have great mysteries. We want to solve problems, but it's not like we have mysterious objects we don't understand. It's not like...
Hi, I do think we have great mysteries in computer science. On a pure mathematical level, for example, there's the question of P vs. NP. If it turns out that P...
Yeah, but even the question of P vs NP is invented and artificial. Computer scientists have a tendency to invent their own problems. These artificial and...
"..much of the most successful social software was invented by accident. Ward Cunningham invented the first wiki because he was tired of responding to user's...
Jochen, I don't quite understand what you mean by saying that P vs NP is "invented and artificial". Do you say that because it is a pure theoretical math...
Even though I know nothing about protein folding, I'd like to venture a comment. Is it really honest to say that nature "solves" protein folding at great...
Russ, You make a good point. I do believe that chemical interactions are a form of computation, but understand that this is arguable. The advantage of a...
Rodney Brooks says in his book "flesh and machines" that something essential in AI and ALife is still missing. He calls it "the Juice", and argues that it is...
Interesting nature paper: Using a long-term laboratory experiment, the authors conclude that, even under constant conditions, all species in a food web...
Complexity can decrease evolvability due to "pleiotropic" effects. Pleiotropy occurs when a single gene influences multiple phenotypic traits. Consequently, a...
A new Sciam article suggests that subtle refinements in brain architecture ("upgrades"), rather than large-scale alterations, make us smarter than other...
... From: Jochen Fromm <Jochen.Fromm@...> Subject: [CAS-Group] Upgrade for the Brain To: CAS-Group@yahoogroups.com Date: Sunday, August 17, 2008, 2:15 AM A...
"But whilst the thing we long for Is lacking, that seems good above all else; Thereafter, when we've touched it, something else We long for; ...Therefore, O...
Google is famous for its large-scale datacenters. How many servers does Microsoft actually have? A Microsoft video accidentally revealed the numbers, they have...
Hi Telmo, Sorry to take so long to get back to you. Many people say that virtually everything is a computation. For example, Seth Lloyd's *Programming the...
