Finished reading Daniel  Suarez’s The Daemon, in between getting grants and writing papers and such, this semester.  This is maybe the best book I have read about technology, and its threats (as well as promises) in our immediate future, in the past year or two (and that is saying much when compared the likes of Charlie Stross, Neil Stephenson and Vernor Vinge).

Some might say this is cyberpunk reborn.  Others might raise an eyebrow at some of the parallels to, for example, the Matrix trilogy and cyberpunk (the writing predates the Matrix trilogy AFAIK).  This IS neo-cybperpunk, it has all the elements (underclass and high-technology), but it is better!  Imagine William Gibson in his prime (Neuromancar), but a writer who is a real programmer and hacker, and knows plausible threats (and possibilities) that might emerge from the technology as it is currently implemented in our world.  This is Suarez, and this is the brilliance of his book.  As with the best of SF, it takes current trends and extrapolates them, to image a  plausible (and chilling) near-future scenario. I’m not saying that the distribute AI Daemon he imagines is easy, or even likely to become reality.  But so much in this work is spot on and insightful, in terms of the impacts of technology on our society and culture, and the struggles between nation-states, corporations and individuals  (see Life Inc. ).

I loved this book, and can’t wait for the promised sequal coming in 2010 (hopefully that will be early rather than later in the year).

Just finished Stephenson’s Anathem this week.  Initial impressions: I definitely liked it a lot, though it may not end up being my favourite Stephenson (still probably Cryptonomicon followed by the Baroque trilogy).  It is a fun easter-egg hunt of the major philosophical and intellectual milestones  of western civilization.

1. What other modern  writer (SF or otherwise) can you think of who could turn such a description into an engaging work of fiction?
2. I probably didn’t recognize half as many references as I would like to believe I would have (or want to admit not to spotting).

I’m sure the prime audience for Stephenson is heavily skewed to computer & tech geeks, all of who probably saw the Turing test, Penrose tiles and Godel “parallels”  (among many others) as well.  I won’t give away any spoilers, because the twist/reveal comes about 3/4 of the way into the book that finally puts this weird game into some kind of understandable perspective.  Oh and as an academic, I found the concept of the cross between a University and a Monastary in the Concents quite fascinating.

Capsule review: Will definitely be a must read for any Stephenson fan, and probably any fan of SF will  greatly enjoy if they (as usual for Stephenson) have a large appetite for chunky, complex novels.  Those  not usually interested in the genre, should probably read Cryptonomicon  first to determine your taste for Stephenson before plowing into Anathem.

In this blog I have talked quite a bit about two of my current favorite SF authors, Charlie Stross and Vernor Vinge, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned Neil Stephenson. Possibly because he’s been a bit quiet lately. Of course, when you churn out books that are 1000+ pages in length (including all 3 books of his Baroque trilogy), I suppose we can’t expect new works from him yearly. (Heck you will probably have to wait a whole lifetime before I produce 1000+ published pages).

Anyway, if you haven’t read any Stephenson yet, get ye to a bookstore (your geek status is officially suspended till you complete this requirement). And his next novel, Anathem, coming out this September, looks not to disappoint.

Sort of a followup to a previous post of mine about Vinge winning the Hugo for his Rainbows End. Dr. Vinge has made the whole of the book available as a free online download here. Share and enjoy!

The 2007 Hugo Award Winners were announced awhile ago and I saw that Vinge had won another Hugo for his excellent novel Rainbows End. I love Vinge and read everything he puts out, as soon as it comes out. He is one of the few I will pick up in hardback, which I did with Rainbows End.

One thought after rereading. We are currently in the middle of our Fall 2007 AI Course. Vinge is a Computer Scientist by training, and it shows in his work. The ideas just leap off of every page of this novel. I especially love his concepts of Analyst Pools. These are really a bit of a fleshed out version of a borganism (a term invented by Stross, I believe). I can almost see how a system like this might be created in today’s world of Social Networking Systems and Wisdom of Crowds organization. To bring it back to our AI class, imagine a big A* or min-max search specification being conducted in real-time. But instead of machine generated and evaluated heuristic functions, imagine analysts instead providing human-level-intelligent type heuristic estimation of states, possibly mitigated by a Prediction Market to allow many competing heuristic estimates of states to be combined. I could imagine, if you could build the software support system to manage 10s or 100s of thousands of analysts all working collectively on such a machine/human guided search, you would have something very like what Vinge envisions in Rainbows End. I’ll just say that I know of research initiatives at NSF and elsewhere that are envisioning and working towards the possibilities of such real-time social borganism as this.

Hmm.. Looks like the Eschaton is imminent (and immanent) (An Optical Solution for the Traveling Salesman Problem)!

Anyway I was just reading a Charlie Stross short story with this same theme (e.g. researcher finds polynomial time solution to the NP-hard TSP problem, all hell breaks loose).

Apparently its a proposal that relies on the wave collapse / quantum properties of photons to build the mechanism (thus a kind of quantum computer). Photons take all possible paths in the mechanism, and observation collapses wave function in such a way to reveal shortest path.

Oops, looks like scaling up solution is still impossible, however, as power needs to scale exponentially to overcome signal-to-noise ratio, which, if I understand the article, makes use above 30 or so cities impractical. Oh well, guess we need to wait a few more years…

noosphere

Main Entry: noo·sphere
Pronunciation: ‘nO-&-”sfir
Function: noun
Etymology: International Scientific Vocabulary noo- mind (from Greek noos, nous) + sphere sphere
: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution

And welcome to my newly born Meta-Cortex. I am finally taking the plunge and starting a wee blog of my own. Most all of my professional content will (eventually) be moved over and available on the static pages of this address. But, in a bit of a change for me, I do plan to offer quite a bit more personal content than I have been used to previously on my own web pages.

Where to begin. I’ll leave lengthy details to my About pages, for those really interested. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University here at the Commerce campus. I suspect, like many other blogs, that most of my personal content will tend towards, and generally be related under the broad category of Techno Geekry. I thought I might, just to kick things off and in no particular order, start with a standard old boring favorites list:

• Favorite Book
  • Toughie. Like all academics I can imagine if I were that guy in the Twilight Zone episode, the last guy alive contemplating a life time of solitude in which to catch up on his reading, I too might be deliriously happy (not to mention my eyesight is 20/20 so no worries there). Should I mention Viktor Hugo’s “Les Misérables“, maybe pick Kelso’s “Dynamics Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior“, or perhaps along a similar professional line Hofstadter’s incomporable “Godel, Escher, Bach“? I think perhaps I’ll just settle on something simplier, but probably my all time favorite: “The Tao of Pooh” by Hoff
• Favorite Development System / Computing Platform
  • Let see, I grew up hacking 6502 assembly and Basic on an Apple II computer. (I’ve recently been playing around with virtualization on my Fedora Core 7 laptop, I wonder if there are any 6502/Apple II emulators available?) I am pretty much a hard core Unix/Linux developer, Emacs editor, make system , subversion versioning kinda guy. I must admit, though, I sometimes truly pine for my days as a NextStep developer. Nothing yet has quite matched that feel of simplicity and power, especially the GUI development tools, sigh…
• Favorite Fiction Book
  • I couldn’t really choose just one book, especially since I am a big fiction reader, mostly Science Fiction by nature. I grew up reading the classics, Heinelein, Sturgeon, Niven, Clark. Currently I am quite fascinated with so called post-humanist or singularity SF. Especially check out Vinge’s “True Names” for a great, and still possibly the best example of the genera. Stross is currently blazing away on my fiction radar. Get his “Accelerando” for what I consider his best so far.
• Favorite Movie
  • Wizard of Oz, no wait… Godfather, no wait… Monty Python and the Holy Grail, no wait…
• Favorite Editor
  • Emacs
• Favorite Scientist
  • Alan Turing
• Favorite Color
  • Blue, no yellow. aughhhh (c.f. favorite movie)