Imagination Amplifier

This is a reproduction of an article that appears in Compute's Gazzette, Issue 59.  I'm reproducing it here because I think it's particularly good and on archive.org appears in formats where it's unlikely to be found again. Alternative link to his November's COMPUTE! article.

Worlds Of Wonder - WOW!

In this month's mailbag I received a letter from Art Oswald of Goshen, Indiana. Art was responding to my article in the November COMPUTE! magazine about computers of the future. He wrote: "In the future, the phrase 'I wonder' will become obsolete. I won't have to wonder what would happen if, or wonder what something was like, or wonder how something might be. I would just ask my computer, and it would simulate by means of holographic projection anything my imagination could come up with."

Now, I ask you, Art, is this something to look forward to or something to dread?

I have a new science-fiction book coming out which deals with this subject — the effect of computers (and electronic media, in general) on the human imagination. The book is Robot Odyssey I: Escape from Robotropolis (Tor Books, April 1988). Listen to two teenage boys carrying on a conversation in the year 2014:

We think plenty using computers, but we don't imagine. We don't have to imagine what the fourth dimension is, or what will happen if we combine two chemicals, or what the dark side of the moon looks like. The computer is there a step ahead of our imagination with its fantastic graphics, cartoons, and music. We no longer imagine because the computer can do our imagining for us. 

"So why imagine?" Les said. "My pop says most people's imaginations are vague and fuzzy anyway. If the computer imagines stuff for them, it'll probably be a big improvement.

Les is right. If the computer "imagines" something, it is usually based on a database of facts, the vision of an artist, or a scientific model created by experts. How could our puny imaginations compete with images that are this inspired, detailed, and exact?

Frontiers Of Knowledge 

Science-fiction writers think a lot about new worlds of wonder. It is the human desire to "go boldly where no man has gone before" that is among our more noble impulses. It may even be the "engine" that drives us to innovate, invent, and take risks. Without this engine, we might sink into a kind of emotional and intellectual swamp. Life could become extremely boring. Every time we contemplated a decision, we would first ask our computer, "What if?" and see what the consequences might be. Knowing too much might even paralyze us and cool our risk-taking ardor.

Imagination Amplifiers

Art writes that the phrase I wonder may be rendered obsolete by computers, but I'm not certain that he's right. Instead, I think that we could use computers to stimulate our imagination and make us wonder about things even more.

Where does our imagination come from? I picture the imagination as a Lego^TM set of memory blocks stuffed into the toy chest of our mind. When we imagine something, we are quickly and intuitively building a tiny picture inside our heads out of those blocks. The blocks are made up of images, tastes, smells, touches, emotions, and so on — all sorts of things that we've experienced and then tucked away in a corner of our minds. The quality of what we imagine depends on three things: how often we imagine, the quantity and diversity of blocks that we have to choose from, and our ability to combine the blocks in original — and piercingly true — ways.

Most of us have "pop" imaginations created from images supplied to us by pop culture. We read popular books, see popular movies, watch the same sitcoms and commercials, and read the same news stories in our newspapers. It's no wonder that much of what we imagine is made up of prefab structures derived, second hand, from society's small group of master "imagineers." Electronic media has made it possible for these imagineers to distribute their imaginations in irresistible packages. If you have any doubt, ask an elementary school teacher. Her students come to school singing jingles from commercials and write "original" compositions which really are thinly disguised copies of toy ads, movies, and Saturday morning cartoons.

Where does the computer fit into this picture? It could be our biggest defense against the imagination monopoly which the dispensers of pop culture now have. If we can tell the computer "I wonder" or ask it "What if?" it will work with us to build compelling images of what we imagine. If the process is interactive, and we can imagine in rough drafts, then we can polish, ornament, and rework our images as easily as a child working with sand on a beach. Then maybe the images inside our heads will be from imagination experiments that we do with our computers and not stale, leftover images pulled from the refrigerator of pop culture.

Fred D'Ignazio, Contributing Editor

Turing in Life

Reading the Wikipedia entry on Conway's Game of Life answers the question of why it was developed "Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by renowned mathematician John von Neumann, who tried to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself and succeeded when he found a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid." It's interesting that von Neumann's idea of self replication actually predates the discovery of DNA by a few years.

So I asked Google the question and someone has implemented a Turing machine inside Coway's Game of Life; way back in 2000. A book called "Collision Based Computing" and a applet called LogiCell (which uses Conway's Game of Life to do simple calculations) is available here.

Chatting and Cheating Chooks

So I've known for a while after seeing "Cheating Chooks" that: "Chickens are underrated. In fact, they have a complex communication system which includes over 20 different signals, and the males at least are practiced in the art of deceit."

Late last year Chris Evan's reported that chooks have representational language, "This shows that the call triggers other chickens to look for specific information – in this case, whether or not they already know there is food about – and to respond appropriately, researchers claim. This is similar to how human language works, they say.

Such “representational” communication has been demonstrated in some primates before, but never in a bird."

The 7th dimension is infinity

Possible Worlds: The Fifth Dimension So it starts at 0 so I think the 5th dimension is labelled "4" on the presentation, the 6th dimension is actually all possible worlds. There are 11 dimensions but it says the 10th. Using Wikipedia's definition of dimension the 0 dimension is the first defined dimension.

Environment is Inherited

The Ghost in Your Genes "At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea – that genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents – the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw – can directly affect you, decades later, despite your never experiencing these things yourself. And that what you do in your lifetime could in turn affect your grandchildren.

The conventional view is that DNA carries all our heritable information and that nothing an individual does in their lifetime will be biologically passed to their children. To many scientists, epigenetics amounts to a heresy, calling into question the accepted view of the DNA sequence – a cornerstone on which modern biology sits."

"And Reik's work has gone further, showing that these switches themselves can be inherited. This means that a 'memory' of an event could be passed through generations. A simple environmental effect could switch genes on or off – and this change could be inherited."

So you're fat because your grandparents were in a famine. A recent article in Nature suggests that vitamins taken during pregancy have a permanent effect on subsequent offspring. It certainly should place more responsibility on future parents - doing drugs or whatever may affect your children even if you stopped before having them. Epigenetics on Wikipedia.