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Artificial Life Creation T-0 and Launching [video]
- jacquesm 4y agoMore, non-video background on this project and the person behind it: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/ https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/
- djxfade 4y agoI have no clue what this is. Anyone care to explain?
- aussieshibe 4y agoI've spent the last half hour skimming through some of these videos and I'm only sure of three things: - This guy is either mad, a genius, or both. - I am not smart enough to figure out which it is. - I need a swarm of monitors on my wall.
- colordrops 4y agoLooks like an art installation of the game of life, I think
- djokkataja 4y agoVideo is by David Ackley (https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/#rh-is https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/#rh-is): > I do research, development, and advocacy of robust-first and best-effort computing on indefinitely scalable computer architectures. As of August 2018 I am an emeritus professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. My academic degrees are from Tufts and Carnegie Mellon. Prior work has involved neural networks and machine learning, evolutionary algorithms and artificial life, and biological approaches to security, architecture, and models of computation. Probably most notable around HN for his Movable Feast Machine, which has been posted here a few times: https://movablefeastmachine.org https://movablefeastmachine.org The goal of that is an indefinitely scalable computer architecture which is very, very robust.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ivoras 4y agoHmmm, looks like one of those game-of-life-implemented-in-game-of-life things, set up in a way which simulates actual living cells on the 2nd level, including cell division.
- tromp 4y agoThe T2 Tile Project homepage is at https://t2tile.com/ https://t2tile.com/ "The T2 Tile project is an attempt to build the world's first indefinitely scalable computational stack. First, we suspend the idea that we must be bound to an architecture based on correct and efficient deterministic hardware and software. Instead, much like the physical world around us, we look to robustness as a foundational requirement, building living systems as vessels for digital computation that is firstly robust, then as correct as possible, and finally, as efficient as necessary." Unfortunately, it seems to be devoid of textual documentation, instead comprising a long series of videos.
- ablatt89 4y agoHow exactly is the T2 architecture "indefinitely" scalable? You're adding various computers next to each other, fine. You might also claim that you have some generic cellular automata that in the future would somehow correlate with a dynamically scales according to some computation. This doesn't provide generic compute for arbitrary problems and your limits are still based on the cellular automata running on classical computers. You can claim all you want about dynamically scaling computation that's implemented fundamentally via some cellular automata controller, it doesn't make it true.
- livcomp 4y agoIt's indefinitely scalable exactly in the sense that a machine on this architecture can be made bigger as long as you can keep providing power, cooling, real estate, and tiles. There is no head node, no unique tile addresses, no global communications, no global clocking, and no pretense of deterministic execution. In that sense it's quite different than traditional cellular automata. Figuring out how to do useful work in this architecture is the research challenge.
- gtsnexp 4y agoWhat aspect(s) in the premise of this interesting/exotic system suggests that useful work may be done by/with it?
- svnt 4y agoShifting contexts this much tends to shift existing intractable problems into new classes of tractable (and still intractable) problems. Answering this will require a lot of people with differing domain expertise discovering it and trying it out. This is a potential (I’m inclined to say inevitable) revolution, once all the pieces are in place.
- livcomp 4y agoYay thanks this!
- thagsimmons 4y agoI'm very interested in this area, but I've never been able to get a handle on what's going on in this particular project. There's no coherent explanation of the technical aspects, no documentation, hours and hours of rambling videos, the repository linked from the site is an unstructured grab-bag that revealed nothing enlightening after 15 minutes of rooting around in it. There's also a lot of far-fetched, hubristic ideas and mumbo-jumbo that doesn't pass the sniff test for me. I get whiffs of Terry Davis-style outsider art. On the other hand, he seems to have an academic pedigree and has presented at serious conferences, so it might be that there's something interesting here that I'm missing. I just can't tell - if anyone else is more enlightened, I'd be interested to hear about it.
- livcomp 4y agoThe MFM and ULAM repositories are reasonably legit, providing the simulation engine and the compiler respectively. FWIW, there are Ubuntu packages at ppa:ackley/mfm. I apologize if you found the T2Demos repository, yeah, that's a permanent WIP mess.
- livcomp 4y agoI can understand the outsider art take.. I'm exploring a style of computing that undercuts so many deeply-embedded design assumptions (e.g., CPU, RAM, deterministic execution) that it's a big lift even for people who really want to get it. It's a bit outdated, but FWIW https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article/22/4/431/2851/The-ulam-Programming-Language-for-Artificial-Life https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article/22/4/431/2851/The-ulam-P... is reasonably coherent and approachable, I think..
- svnt 4y agoThis is brilliant, and needed. Do you see opportunity in quantum computing given the more direct access to indeterminate state?
- livcomp 4y agoI'm a quantum skeptic when it comes to delivering supraclassical power in full systems at scale, and I expect biochemical computing machines will be likely useful sooner. But yeah, if quantum can one day deliver 'nearly locally deterministic' cycles in volume, I want to have an architecture that can use them.
- gtsnexp 4y agoI can't find their project Wiki (mentioned in one of his introductory videos). Anyone?
- livcomp 4y agoHi folks. Thanks to akkartik for posting this and thanks to everybody who took a look. I do apologize that documentation is so scarce and scattered. To go a bit deeper, for hacker types I recommend https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/9802 https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/9802 as a fast and readable high level Q&A.
- nigamanth 4y agoI'm sorry but I'm just not sure I understand the purpose of this.
- livcomp 4y agoCan you ask a specific question, say, based on the Q&A?
- throwaway17_17 4y agoI found the Q&A pretty readable and does provide a decent basic overview of the broad strokes. Are there any deeper 'dives' on best-effort computing that you would recommend? I don't have any outstanding objections to the general ideas proposed, but as you have pointed out, the paradigm as a whole goes against almost all of the presently accepted practices. I also noted some superficial similarity to Chuck Moore's colorForth work and the 'multi-core' chip he was working with/on.
- synctext 4y ago> I don't have any outstanding objections to the general ideas proposed, but as you have pointed out, the paradigm as a whole goes against almost all of the presently accepted practices. Indeed, as a professor in fault tolerance, distributed system, and parallel programming I can confirm that almost nobody work on this. This work is quite fascinating and complete with operational hardware/software combo. Never seen that before! My university has done work like: "Cellular automata based S-boxes", nothing as ambitious as a post-Neumann paradigm. Hopefully this work leads to a breakthrough on the ease of asynchronous software development. Academia never seriously looks at this due to the difficulty of coding for exotic parallel async architectures. Numerous people dedicated their lives to making coding easy. Centuries of human efforts and we now have Javascript, 1+ million people know how to code in that. Efficient coding using VHDL? Async FPGA stuff? 2D grid tiles? Not many.
- andrewla 4y agoFrom what I can see, there are two (three?) things being interwoven here in a way that I find quite perplexing. First, there is a "T2 Architecture" which appears to be an attempt to build a new computer architecture from scratch, including (I think) dedicated hardware that can be meshed together. Second, there is some sort of cellular automaton (I think?) that operates on a grid, and a pattern has been produced which results in that pattern reproducing. Thirdly (?), there is the rule-based grid system on which #2 is being built. I gather that these are supposed to be related somehow, but I'm not sure exactly how -- is this something where there is a simple substrate with simple rules (built on or perhaps the purpose of the T2 architecture?) with a layer of reproducing programs ("organisms") on top of it, with the goal of allowing (eventually) the ecosystem defined by a population of those "organisms" to perform computations on behalf of a user? It does not appear to be Conway's Game of Life, or at least nobody is saying that. I think a reproducing pattern would be a pretty significant accomplishment in itself. If this is some other rule-based grid system, then it seems like it's worth studying that on its own, independent of the underlying machine architecture? I wish some of these videos would just come out and say it, because for the life of me I can't tell if they (the architecture and the system and the "organism") are related or just two things happening at the same time.
- gtsnexp 4y agoExcellent point! It would be great if the author could clarify the distinction (or not) between hardware architecture and the emerging life thing going on. I am sure its there somewhere but would be great to see it in the intro video without having to navigate over hours of footage to find out.
- camel-cdr 4y agoAs I understood it: The T2 tiles are "normal" microcomputers, that run a special software stack implementing the cellular automata. The tiles communicate over the connections, and essentially just act like a bigger automata grid. But the interesting part is that there is no global synchronization, and this architecture could be scaled indefinitely wide, by just adding more tiles. The impressive/hard part is creating the asynchronous automata, where each cell can only see a fixed amount of neighbors, and creating something from that. Edit: I think this video explained the general idea quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=helScS3coAE
- jacquesm 4y agoA couple of hours of rabbit hole burrowing later, this has to be the most interesting thing on Hackernews in a very long time.
- humbugtheman 4y agoI've been following Dave's progress since the very start, so it's odd to see it here at HN! The project is incredible. He's building a whole new computational stack, from bottom-to-top. It's robust-first, indefinitely-scalable, and a huge inspiration to me. I wouldn't be working in tech right now if it wasn't for the T2 Tile project!
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoGame of life rely on computers as an environment to devellop, which might not be there in 1 century. A real world 'thing' (whose very nature is still up to debate) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobot