Sasha's JournalSunday, December 5, 20049:17PM - Ho Hum...Sunday, November 7, 20046:47PM - BioBricks Jamboree...Earlier this year my supervisor returned from a conference oozing with enthusiasm. Shortly thereafter our lab joined forces with a BU lab on a fun project. This weekend all participating labs gathered for the BioBricks Jamboree to present results. Nathan Walsh, the team leader from HMS, couldn't make the Jamboree but he volunteered to kick off the first meeting of ALife Boston by giving a talk on Counting up to one with DNA. If you are interested, feel free to join us at NECSI, 24 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, 2pm, Monday, November 22nd. Sunday, September 12, 200410:20AM - Live from ALife IX...I am listening to an interesting talk about a computational model of DNA computing-- at the ALife IX conference-- this morning. My talk An Evolutionary Approach Generates Human Competitive Corewar programs seems to have gone OK. I was the first speaker at the Artificial Chemistry workshop. In a few minutes I'll be having lunch with my old adviser--Gilles Brassard-- who is flying to boston just to hear my tutorial this afternoon. If you are interested, please, sign up to my low traffic mailing list. Thursday, March 18, 20041:58AM - Memory lane...Not long after I started undergrad at UofT, before the days of the world-wide-web, a program I had written in high-school was mentioned in a newsletter I found on the Internet. I've been slowly moving old references, such as this, out of Perhaps the most effective trick is used by the vampire program Net. It looks quickly through memory and only throws bombs when it finds a potential victim. This stealth can be devastating to nearly any program, and so far I have not been able to write a program that can consistently find it before being found. 1 ( Read more... ) There is something uncanny about this trip down memory lane. I remember enjoying a moment of "vicarious" pride at Net's mention and babbling about Quantum Mechanics (eg. in my QM class) and wondering how I should go about making a "Quantum" version of Corewar for a living. More than ten years later I've put up an Internet server-- Science.Fiction.Org-- running my Quantum Coreworld. And in the coming days, weeks (and months) I'll post more about it here.
I have to confess that all this is, somehow, terrifying. When you get a shot at child-hood dreams as an adult it's only your own fault if you mess up. 1. Lindensmith, C. 1992. Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck. The Core War Newsletter 5(4):5-8. GZIPed Postscript.
Monday, January 12, 200411:28PM - In the Quantum Coreworld Programs Engage in a Battle of QubitsThe first release of my Quantum Artificial Life simulator—the Quantum Coreworld—can be found here. Please visit! The subject is a word-play on the articles: "In the game called Core War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits" by A.K. Dewdney LJ:REF_SCIAM:554 and "The Coreworld: Emergence and Evolution of Cooperative Structures in a Computational Chemistry" by S. Rasmussen et al LJ:REF_ALIFE:749. A challenge: test94qop.red (see link above) is a trivial example of using quantum operations to hide a secret. Programs that cannot use quantum operations see a random string. I have a few ideas about how to use this effectively but if you know Redcode or enjoy assembly programming you might want to try it yourself. Successful—and not so successful—attempts will be posted on this page. Details to be worked out. Happy New Year!
Monday, November 17, 20033:51PM - Ideas I find interesting...A finite volume of space-time can be (exactly) described by a finite amount of information (proportional to the surface area of that volume).
The fundamental unit of information is the quantum-bit or qubit.
Biological machines are (always) nanomachines.
Nanomachines are (sometimes) biological machines.
Saturday, May 31, 20032:52AM - I have a backup right? right?!?!Someday very soon I hope to have full backups of my journal(s). If you do a search from my journal on "corewar" it should have a number of hits on my Friday, May 16, 20034:28PM - Your future needs you!post from
I left this comment at Lawrence Lessig's blog:
3:31PM - The Future of Human NatureRecently Martin Steffen passed around a link to "a Symposium on the Promises and Challenges of the Revolutions in Genomics and Computer Science". See LJ:REF_TALKS:3239. Our supervisor, George Church, spoke at the symposium. His PPT slides are here. I didn't have a chance to attend the symposium but George mentioned that another speaker, Marvin Minsky, came and left very abruptly. I've attended a few classes of 6.868 led by Marvin; in the last class of the semester he mentioned that his comments at the "Future of Human Nature" symposium sparked some controversy: Slashdot, Wired etc. Marvin's actual thoughts from the symposium are in a Usenet thread here.
Evolving the simple into the more complex is receiving attention in high-prestige scientific journals and not just the computer science community. See LJ:REF_NATURE:1245. What happens if that simple starting point is quantum mechanical? I'm working on that now... Wednesday, May 14, 20035:51PM - Two years at Harvard...I flew into Boston, from Montreal, to find a place to live and attend the annual biophysics clambake roughly two years ago. Martha Bulyk, Pete Estep and Fritz Roth showed me how to eat lobster (former Church lab graduate students). As usual I babbled about Quantum Mechanics and Biology. And, not unexpectedly, I'm still babbling. It's hard to believe this will be my third year here in September. ( Clambake invite ) Friday, April 11, 200310:28PM - Some ideas for an LJ "Social Contract" (and for Blogs in general)...Dave Winer ( What do you think? Saturday, March 29, 200311:23PM - Blogs and copyrights...I'm beginning to introduce this web-log (blog) to colleagues at Harvard. There is plenty of interest! The most common problem I've had is that LiveJournal is slow; MIT/Harvard professors and students are understandably skeptical of a system mostly used by teenagers talking about their hair. One of my old colleagues at the University of Montreal, Sébastien Paquet, has been promoting blogs for quite a while. I made a LiveJournal RSS feed for his blog at Monday, February 10, 200310:52PM - Daniel Dennett speaks at HMS 1pm Wed. (Feb. 12)I'll definitely attend this seminar. Dinner with the speaker, later that evening, should be interesting too. Doug. Selinger writes: Daniel Dennett will be coming to give a seminar on "Human and Evolutionary Engineering: Some Similarities and Differences." The seminar will be given this Wednesday (Feb 12th) at 1:00 PM in the Armenise Amphitheater in Building D. ( Read more... )I hope to see you at the seminar on Wednesday. Monday, February 3, 20033:49PM - Lecture: The 2003 William Belden Noble LecturesI'll probably attend this lecture tomorrow (Wed Feb 4th). In any case, I'll get dinner at Border Cafe. Interested people can meet at 6:15pm. RSVP if you want me to reserve a spot for you. Map with Border Cafe marked is here. Friday, January 31, 200310:40PM - Biology lab techniques class needs more people.These days lots of us have an engineering/math/physics background. BCMP-210 should be of interest to people (like me) that theorize about biology but need more experience in the lab. Class is Mon/Wed 2pm-4pm and Fri 2:30pm-4:30pm at Harvard medical school (There are shuttles from MIT and Harvard square.) See: LJ:REF:COURSES:652. Instructors have emphasized that it's OK to use the course to further ones own rotation/thesis research. If you are interested you should contact Prof. Stan Tabor directly at: tabor @ hms.harvard.edu Please pass this message to anyone interested... PS I think this might be a perfect opportunity for trying this in a class project. Monday, January 20, 200310:35PM - Happy Birthday to me!I'm catching a plane in a few hours. Talk on Wed. I didn't plan a party this year but thanks to everyone that made this another memorable birthday. Current music: Lucy Kaplansky - Promise Me Friday, December 27, 20028:47PM - Open Source, Closed Documentation?Interesting thread on Slashdot. See LJ:REF:SLASHDOT:357. Saturday, December 21, 20027:11PM - CSBi 2003 Annual Conference "From Bioinformatics to Biofabrication"Two day conference January 9th and 10th. PDF. Open registration before Dec. 30th. Blurb: In its 2003 Conference, CSBi looks inward at systems and computational biology research currently underway at MIT and at collaborating institutions. Research talks will cover a wide variety of science and engineering topics from bioinformatics to the fabrication of biology-based nano-machines. Research talks will be supplemented by five invited "Perspectives" talks that present historical, technical and scientific overviews of research relevant to systems biology. Monday, December 16, 200210:54AM - LCSAI holiday party @ New England AquariumDefinitely not to be missed-- party announcement... ( Read more... ) Wednesday, December 4, 200211:57PM - IntroductionThis is a very-rough introduction to a "Reader on Mind, Soul and Reality". I distributed a copy of the reader to a few people—you know who you are—but I've put off the project for now. The entry no longer reflects my views—I'm a PHD student because I want to learn—but I leave it here for posterity. ( Read more... ) |
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