About the Name

The blog name I chose, Proliferation of Niches, is from the Herbert Simon quote I have had at the top my web site for years:

"If there is such a trend toward variety, then evolution is not to be understood as a series of tournaments for the occupation of a fixed set of environmental niches, each tournament won by the organism that is fittest for that niche. Instead evolution brings about a proliferation of niches... Vannevar Bush wrote of science as an "endless frontier." It can be endless, as can be the process of design and the evolution of human society, because there is no limit on diversity in the world." (The Sciences of the Artificial, p. 165)

I considered Endless Frontier, but that is too well known as the title of the Vannevar Bush report (and sounds too much like Star Trek :-)

After choosing the blog name I found the phrase is currently being used in discussions in and about the blogosphere:

"With an expanded network, individuals are able to reach out to a potentially larger and more varied pool of culture and information. While debates on globalization in the heyday of mass media suggested that interconnection would lead to the homogenization of culture, in the Internet era, the opposite appears to be more the case. What we are seeing now is a proliferation of niches. We see this in subcultures such as English-language fandoms of Japanese animation, a case described in the culture chapter. Now teens in the US can gain access to niche Japan-origin media that they would never have been able to get their hands on even a decade ago. In the blogosphere, this tendency has been criticized as creating an “echo chamber,” where bloggers and audiences are connecting with greater frequency and fidelity with people who share their opinions, relying less on the standards of neutrality espoused by the mainstream press. " http://www.itofisher.com/mito/ito.netpublics.pdf

It is also popular with the "Long Tail" economic crowd:

"Pietro assumes that a proliferation of niche markets will lead to a proliferation of niche suppliers, and hence the dilution of the authority of the big suppliers. I don't see any reason to believe that this is the case. Indeed, one of Chris Anderson's own preferred examples is based on Amazon sales rank - and there's nothing very diffuse about Amazon, or the authority wielded by Amazon. Much of the buzz around the 'Long Tail' seems to derive, ultimately, from this confusion of the two meanings of 'niche'." http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2005/09/who-took-money.html

While I originally chose the quote for my web site for the biological, technical, and social evolution aspects, I expect the blogosphere and long tail meanings will tie in here. My site started long before blogs. Unless you count CHAOS MANOR in the back of Byte Magazine (which I used to read every month at the public library), now calling itself The Original Blog.

Mail Bag

My web site gets a surprising amount of interesting email (beyond the usual headhunter spam and spam spam). This may be due to certain search engines regarding me as the world's foremost authority on four dimensional cellular automata, among other topics :-)

One email was from an author working on updating a book I had cited. I gave him and his assistant pointers on the latest I knew about emergent collective intelligence.

Another email was someone looking for a part name and source for a CPU chip socket in a photo from my robot project -- not for a robot or a CPU, so I have no idea how he found the page. I was able to help him.

The most amusing email was a 1337 haxor claiming to have broken the copy protection on one of my Palm games, so he could "fix" it (our backgammon didn't cheat, honest!). I replied with this link; he replied with this one. Touche.

Another person found my board game list, and was looking for a copy of the Avalon Hill Titan board game to play ($150 on e-bay!). Sorry, not selling & no leads.

I was also asked whether I have tried a SAN with more than one Coraid EtherDrive. I have not.

The latest email suggested improvements to Multi-Core Ant Colony Optimization for TSP in Erlang. At the time I had tried native compilation in Erlang, but didn't see any speedup and didn't mention it in the article. On Sun SPARC the correspondent was able to get significant speedup (2x +) on my application with native compilation after he separately native compiled the dict module. Turns out the native compiler only operates on a specific module, and you must native compile the system modules yourself. Otherwise the native speedup is lost in the translation between native and bytecode interpreted in calls between modules. I tried native compiling dict on my AMD system, and didn't get any improvement. I Also (re)discovered that native compilation is not yet compatible with SMP (multi-core) operation. The correspondent also got significant improvements by altering some of my data structure choices. I expect that all three ant algorithm implementations (Erlang, Haskell, and Standard ML (twice)) could be improved be re-visiting my data structure choices.

DNA as String Rewrite System

I'm currently reading Eric Baum's What is Thought. It presents an interesting comparison between the operation of DNA and Post production systems. These systems provide a set of regular expressions paired with corresponding substitutions. An example is the rewrite rule:

x B A B y -> x C B y

where x and y are variables.

When provided the string

A B A B C B C

the result of the substitution is

A C B C B C. (example from Baum)

These types of operations happen both at the levels of intron removal and protein synthesis. The more common (and easier to visualize) comparison is of DNA to a Turing Machine. Here the DNA (actually RNA) strand is the tape and the Ribosome is the read/write head.

Looking back, both comparisons were explored in Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid and Metamagical Themas

UPDATE: In a later chapter Baum points out the Turing equalence (proven by Minsky, discussed by Wolfram and others) between Turing machines and Post production systems.

Fooled by Randomness

In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Daniel Dennett cites Julian Jaynes "brilliant but quirky and unreliable book" The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as noting "that the very idea of randomness or chance is of quite recent origin" (Dennet, p. 133):

"Sortilege or the casting of lots differs from omens in that it is active and designed to provoke the gods' answers to specific questions in novel situations. It consisted of throwing marked sticks, stones, bones, or beans upon the ground, or picking one out of a group held in a bowl, or tossing such markers in the lap of a tunic until one fell out. Sometimes it was to answer yes or no, at other time to choose one out of a group of men, plots, or alternatives. But this simplicity -- even triviality to us -- should not blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as well as appreciating its remarkable historical significance. We are so used to the huge variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette wheels, etc., all of the vestiges of the ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically. It is a help here to realize that there was no concept of chance whatever until very recent times. Therefore, the discovery (how odd to think of it as a discovery!) of deciding an issue by throwing sticks or beans on the ground was an extremely momentous one for the future of mankind. For, because there was no chance, the result had to be caused by the gods whose intentions were being divined." (Jaynes, p. 339-240)

Software Transactional Memory

I saw an interesting tech talk recently by someone from Intel on their work on Software Transactional Memory. A question from the audience pointed out an interesting problem with exceptions (also discussed under "Implementation issues" in the Wikipedia article). In STM threads perform optimistic reads, and are retried at commit time if conflicts are detected. Because the reads are "dirty" inconsistent states may be seen, and null pointer or division by zero exceptions may be thrown. The application programmer must recognize this possibility and distinguish between transient (should be retried) and fatal errors. STM trades off the complexity of locking with the complexity of understanding the effects of inconsistent reads. Opposite to the suggestion in Wikipedia, perhaps the system could check for conflicts at the point of exception, and automatically retry if one is found. Of course STM still doesn't work for non-restartable operations, such as I/O. I find the ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable) status of STM transactions debatable (and advocates don't claim to satisfy all of them).

First Post

This blog will probably be a collection of ideas for possible future articles on my web site.