Ken’s Blog

At a dinner party this evening overheard someone talking with a man who researches ways to cure cancer. The cancer researcher was asked what causes cancer. He explained that the very same wild capacity for growth that enables children and embryos to grow by leaps and bounds can also end up going wrong. Random mutations sometimes trigger cells to act as though they are in a growth spurt, but in inappropriate ways that veer wildly out of control. The result is unpredictable and often fatal run-away tissue growth.

He went on to explain that this is largely a disease that strikes older people, because there is little genetic selection in our species for preventing such mistakes in people who are beyond child-bearing age. Mostly, our DNA just selects for individuals to survive long enough to propagate. After that — in evolutionary terms — you are living on borrowed time.

Deciding to crash the conversation, I suggested that maybe the long-term solution to solving cancer lies in a different direction. Rather than focusing only on curing cancer in individuals, I proposed that research also be done to extend the age at which we can make babies. That way whatever happens to older people will go into the gene pool. The tendency toward cancers in such older people will gradually be weeded out.

He agreed that in principle this should work. Of course we also realized that this won’t be of any use to anyone alive today, or even anyone alive in a hundred years. But over time, it will do the job.

Maybe, in some far off distant future, our descendants will thank us.

I just read that the government of the People’s Republic of China has essentially banned TV shows that feature time travel. I’m not making this up — here is the story.

I guess this is conclusive proof that time travel does not exist. Because if it did, some intrepid TV producers would certainly have traveled back through time and given themselves advice about how to avoid annoying the Chinese government.

On the other hand, maybe some rival TV producers who actually have time travel have managed to use it to go back through time and plant those seeds of suspicion about time-travel themed TV shows in the minds of government officials.

But then what happens when the people who make the time-travel TV shows get hold of that time machine, and figure out how to get the Chinese government to think that time-travel themed TV shows are the most patriotic thing imaginable.

Would we all end up getting caught in an endless time loop?

And more importantly, if we do, can we make a great Chinese TV show about it?

Sometime in the coming years, as I’ve written in my Eccescopy posts, each of us will simply take for granted an unobtrusively worn personal communication device. Just as we now use our SmartPhones for all sort of diverse things — browsing the web, capturing photos and video, finding our way around town, sending and receiving texts, even talking on the telephone! — we will use the cellphone’s wearable successor for an even more diverse variety of daily tasks.

Unlike the SmartPhone, this wearable interface will always be able to know where we are looking. New interface paradigms will emerge that build on our ability to make things happen simply by directing our gaze. But gaze detection is a two-way street. Not only will these devices obey our commands, but they will also accumulate a vast body of data about where people look when they are going about their daily lives.

I suspect that we will discover that we spend a disproportionate amount of time looking at other human faces. Further, I suspect that we will find that we spend much of that time looking into other people’s eyes. In a sense, our wearable technologies, and what they reveal about us, will open a window into the window of the soul.

The somewhat monstrous sensory humuculus below represents what a human body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception.

One could similarly imagine a visual humunculus — what the world itself would look like if everything were proportional to the amount of time we spend looking at it. Someday soon we will be able to gather enough data through our wearable interfaces to see what this humunculus looks like. I suspect that it will be dominated by a huge pair of eyes, with much of the rest consisting of a face, and all the rest of existence crowded into the edges.

I wonder whether we will find it monstrous or beautiful.

Recently I became interested in the idea of computer games as living creatures. The primary function of any species is to ensure its own continuing survival — otherwise the species simply dies off, and its genes will not propagate. What if we apply this same principle to the study of computer games that evolve to optimize for their own continued existence?

I looked around a bit and found that there has been very limited research in this area, but not really very much. And it doesn’t seem to have been studied as a formal problem. By “formal” I mean breaking the problem down into genotype and phenotype. A “genotype” is the genetic description of something — the list of instructions, as it were. For example, our DNA contains our genotype, and a cooking recipe is the genotype of that delicious dish your mom cooked last weekend. A “phenotype” is a description of the kind of thing you get when those instructions are carried out, like a human being or a yummy ratatouille.

Rather than design specific games, I’m thinking it would be interesting to create a computer program that can create lots of different games. When you tweak various parameters in this game generator, different games come out. I’m not saying that there is some magic way to create this program — you’d still need to carefully design the game generator, using all the skills that a good game designer must have. But when you were done you’d have not one game, but a universe of possible games.

Most of these games would be terrible, but certain combinations of parameters would produce magical results — truly marvelous games that are fun and exciting to play. But how do you find those particular games within the mass of possibilities?

This is where crowd-sourcing comes in. You put these games up on-line, and let anybody play them. Some of the games will be boring, and people won’t be drawn to them. But others will find an audience. The genotype of those more fun and playable games will gradually spread, as more people play them.

Meanwhile, you continually tweak the parameters behind the scenes, so that the game is slightly different for each player. Certain tweaks will make the game more fun and popular — people will continue to play it longer — and others will have the opposite effect.

Eventually, games might emerge that are fun and exciting for many people. Such games will not have been built by any individual, but rather evolved organically, through the collective mind-share of the community of players.

The species will have ensured its own survival.

It has been exactly fifty years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space. So much has changed since then, in ways that his contemporaries could never have anticipated. The very notion of “conquering space” has come to seem vaguely quaint, as human aspirations have moved on from the merely physical to the profoundly virtual.

We no longer think primarily of the physical universe when we think of exploration — John F. Kennedy’s bold vision of a “new frontier” has become yet another old frontier, as distant from us in its way as the California gold rush dreams of a century before.

Even the recent blockbuster space epic — “Avatar” — whose grand visual sense of space opera captured the imagination of a rapt world-wide audience, was not really about visiting outer space. On the surface it may have appeared to be about space ships and alien planets, but that was merely a ruse. “Avatar” was actually about inner space — the space within our minds, where the limits of biology meet the endless possibilities of cybernetically enhanced evolution.

In the end, the forces in that film which set out to conquer a planet were shown to be hopelessly out of touch with real power. The true conquest was the transcendence of the physical itself — the triumph of escaping one’s very body, to achieve a different state of being.

As our collective minds turn inevitably to the future possibilities of social networks, of augmented realities and computer-implants, of ubiquitous interfaces that allow us to enter ever more detailed worlds of fantasy, we realize we can never go back to the merely physical.

And so we find that the astonishing journey of one lone spaceman who ever so briefly escaped the bounds of earthly gravity itself, is floating away from us, gently yet inexorably, into the unreachable mist of history.

At an event today in which students are presenting wonderful projects they’ve worked on for months, I’m struck by the immense power of human energy. When we set our minds to it, and put in enough focus and work, there does not seem to be any limit to what we can accomplish.

This kind of “building over time” energy is a strange phenomenon because it highlights a fundamental split in our modes of thought. Most of the time we are more or less spontaneous, living in the moment, hanging out, having conversations with the people around us.

But we each have the potential to go into this other mode — a kind of superpower mode. One in which we can focus for several months and master a musical instrument, or write a play or novel, compose an opera, film a movie, or invent and build a new kind of machine that nobody has ever seen before.

When caught up the intensity of such creative experiences, we often don’t even realize that we have entered a heightened zone of being. And when we come back from them, it seems to marvelous indeed to realize that we were capable of such things.

I was having a conversation with a fellow educator today — a professor of computer science at another university — about the integration of computer games into the computer science curriculum. He was telling me that a number of fellow profs in his department are skeptical that computer games really belongs in a C.S. curriculum.

Yet the more we talked about it, the more we both realized that computer games are, in fact, the ultimate context for learning. Not only do they provide motivation and concrete direction for such diverse computer science topics as procedural animation, geometric modeling, photorealistic rendering, parallel and distributed processing, databases, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, client/server architectures, 3D audio synthesis, language understanding and scaleable simulation, but they provide so much more.

In areas outside of computer science, computer games provide a way in to the study of non-linear narrative, ludology, lighting design, camera movement and editing, set design, performance and body language, graphic design, interactive and non-linear musical composition, education and assessment, and a growing host of fascinating cultural, anthropological, philosophical, political and ethical studies that are emerging because of the development and growing importance of non-linear, interactive and social media.

In fact, one could argue that computer games are the closest thing we have to a universal core academic focus, in their ability to bring together diverse threads of intellectual inquiry.

Today on a visit to Microsoft, our hosts took us on a tour of Seattle. One highlight was a stop at the very first Starbucks store. Unlike the strangely plastic artificial homeyness of typical Starbucks venues — which all look a bit like what aliens might put together to simulate an air of coziness after having studied our species from a distance of ten light years — this store really does have a genuinely old fashioned feel to it.

It has the kind of worn down deep grained old wood counters that you can’t replicate in a chain store, and rows of shelves on the walls that aren’t trying to make any impression at all, which is exactly why they do. The real thing is so much more charming than the fake precisely because it isn’t trying to be charming.

After I had left the store, my Microsoft hosts asked me what I had thought of the place. Reaching for the appropriate analogy, I think I stumbled the right image. I told them that it was a bit like holding in one’s hands the very first release of MS-DOS. 🙂

Thinking recently about Shakespeare’s dark masterpiece Macbeth, it occurred to me that Lady Macbeth is given short shrift. She is clearly the most intriguing of all the characters, with Macbeth himself being little more than her puppet, when all is said and done. After she exits the stage he is pretty much lost, his inevitable downfall not the heroic one of a Lear or an Othello, but that of an essentially small man who is really not much of anything without the powerful woman who had fanned the winds of ambition into his sails.

Yet the lady herself never quite gets her due. Why not create a work from her perspective — a feminist reimagining of the Scottish play? In my version, Lady Macbeth would emerge triumphant — rather than be consigned to the madness that seems to be the lot of so many passionate women in our patriarchal world (witness Bertha Rochester, Ophelia, Sylvia Plath, so many others).

Needless to say, such a bold reimagining should to be in the form of a musical. The story provides so many rich possibilities for emotional expression through music and rhyme (example: “Had I been born son not daughter / I would now be Thane of Cawdor”).

So there you have it. “Lady Macbeth, the Musical”. Coming soon, to a theatre near you.

This evening I saw a talk by Scott Kim, puzzle maker extraordinaire. Like Vi Hart, he thinks mathematics in terms of its inherent beauty, the way a composer thinks of music, or a poet thinks of the written word.

Near the end of an extremely entertaining and enlightening talk, he said that in educating our kids, we should think not in terms of dressing it up to try to make it entertaining, but in terms of revealing its beauty. Just as we develop our love of music through a literature of musical works, he encouraged teaching math the way one would teach any other category of art: Through its literature — a literature of mathematics.

It occurred to me that this phrase would be a very useful one to bring into discussions within the University. Most of the University community does not even realize that there is a literature of mathematics. Perhaps it’s time to change that.