Out Of Control: The New Biology Of Machines, Social Systems, And The Economic World by Kelly Kevin

Author:Kelly, Kevin [Kelly, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

THE MOST POWERFUL COMPUTER made in 1993, the Connection Machine 5 (CM5), can effortlessly generate Borges’s Library of books. But the CM5 can also generate equally vast and mysterious Borgian Libraries of complex things other than books.

Karl Sims, who works for Thinking Machines, the maker of the CM5, has made a Borgian Library of art and pictures. Sims first wrote special software for the Connection Machine and then constructed a universe (which others call a Library) of all possible pictures. The same machinery that can generate a possible book can generate a possible picture. In the former case the output are letters printed in linear sequence; in the latter, a rectangle of pixels displayed on a screen. Sims hunts for patterns of pixels instead of patterns of letters.

I visit Sims in his dark office cubicle at Thinking Machines’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, offices. Two extra-large, bright monitors sit on Sims’s desk. His largest monitor is divided into a matrix of 20 small projected rectangles, 4 down and 5 across. Each rectangle is a window that at the moment shows a realistically marbled doughnut. Each of the 20 pictures is slightly varied in patterns.

Sims uses his mouse to click on the lower right corner rectangle. In a blink all 20 rectangles are refreshed with newly marbled doughnuts, each new image a slight variation of the formerly selected corner pattern. By clicking on a sequence of images, Sims can walk through a Borgian Library of visual patterns using the Method. Instead of bodily running ahead seven yards (in many directions) to reach a stored pattern, Sims’s software calculates what the pattern would logically be seven yards away (since it turns out the Borgian Library is extremely ordered). He then paints the newfound pattern on the screen. The Connection Machine does this in milliseconds, simultaneously figuring the new patterns in 20 different directions away from the last selection.

There is no limit to what picture could possibly appear from the Library. In true Borgian fashion, this total universe contains all shades of rose, all stripes; it contains the Mona Lisa, and all Mona Lisa parodies; every swirl, the blueprints of the Pentagon, all of Van Gogh’s sketches, every frame from Gone With the Wind, all speckled scallop shells. These are desires, though; on whimsical rambles through this Library, Sims harvests chiefly windows filled with amorphous blotches, streaks, and psychedelic swirls of color.

The Method—as evolution—can be conceived of not as traveling but as breeding. Sims describes the twenty new images as twenty children of an original parent. The twenty pictures vary just as offspring do. Then he selects the “best” offspring, which in turn immediately sires twenty new variations. He’ll pick the best of that lot, and that best will sire twenty more variations. He can begin with a simple sphere and by cumulative selection end with a cathedral.

Watching the forms appear, multiply in variation, get selected, ramify in form, winnow again, and begin to drift over generations to ever more complicated shapes, neither mind nor gut can escape the impression that Sims is really breeding images.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.