This looks like a fun application to while away the lonely minutes on your iPhone or iPod touch. Several of the great project ideas developed in the Interaction Design Studio (DECO1200) this year could have used something like the physics engine shown in this demo.
Maybe I'm just a big softie, but the thought that one day our robots will dance and sing warms my heart, and so this movie of warehouse automation robots dancing The Nutcracker makes me smile.
As part of the Curious Places project, we've been looking at the generation of "creative behaviour" as opposed to "creative design" and I think choreography could be a really fun direction for future research. Now... how do I phrase that in a way that will get me a research grant?
This news is a bit old, I guess, but I met one of the guys from The Sancho Plan whilst attending Ars Electronica earlier in the year, so I recently thought I'd check out their web site. Check out this performance with robots—it starts about half way through the video.
For more videos and information about The Sancho Plan check out their web site.
Although this new release is a couple of year's old now, I still think it's very cool. These tiny robots could one day completely change how we think about the world we live in. Once we've figured out how to build intelligent robots at this scale we're going to start seeing materials that act more like living tissue than traditional man-made objects.
In a world where "supersize" has entered the lexicon, there are some things getting smaller, like cell phones and laptops. Dartmouth researchers have contributed to the miniaturizing trend by creating the world's smallest untethered, controllable robot. Their extremely tiny machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M.Source: Dartmouth researchers build world's smallest mobile robot
If you've been wondering why there hasn't been any posts to this blog for a while it's (partly) because I've been very busy for the last couple of months collaborating with Petra developing Impossible Geographies 02: Urban Fabric that opens in the Tin Sheds Gallery, here in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, on Tuesday, 21 August. As I sit here in the gallery, looking at the tensioned sheets of silicone that we're going to be projecting onto, I'm very excited about the opening. I'm not too sure how to explain the installation, so I'll leave it to Petra:
Impossible Geographies explores the contact surface between the physical and virtual, creating perforations that allow one to leak into the other. 'Impossible' here refers to what is commonly not seen, and, what is commonly not mapped. 'Geography' relates to cultural spaces; territories that are always fluid ... temporary and migrational.You can find out more about the installation and the opening at the Impossible Geographies web site.
This week the big news from Apple was the announcement that they are going to start shipping the long-awaited iPhone later this year, and I don't think this would be much of a blog if I didn't comment on it.
First I have to say that I've been very excited about the prospect of Apple producing a mobile for quite some time now, partly because I just wanted to see what the talented user interface designers at Apple could come up with. The demonstration of the iPhone by Steve Job's in his keynote at MacWorld certainly didn't disappoint—but at the same time I'm not too disappointed that we won't be getting the iPhone in Australia until 2008.
The current lack of support for 3G in the initial product is something that people are commenting on, but I don't really think this is an issue, when Apple launch this product outside the States I'm sure they'll launch a 3G version. That the iPhone doesn't have a second camera on the front of the device for video calling, as is common on many 3G capable phones today, may be something else that they have to also deal with soon after they launch a 3G version of their phone—but I suspect it is something that they may leave until a later version.
My biggest concern is that there are several rumours flying around that the iPhone will be a completely closed platform and that Apple won't allow users to install 3rd party applications on the device. As Brian Lam notes as
It isn't OS X proper, as you'd expect. And like an iPod, it won't be an open system that people can develop for. Remember, this is both an iPod and a Phone.
I think this is probably an overstatement of the case based on some casual conversations with (potentially misinformed) Apple employees, but it is worrying nonetheless. I hope that if Apple feel they need to keep a tight reign on what software gets onto their new hardware, that the reality will be closer to the vision that Jason Snell and John Gruber offered when interviewed by Merlin Mann for 43 Folders: that Apple will control the channel through which software can be uploaded to the iPhone by making it part of the iTunes Store.
Of course, it's hard to keep a good geek down and I'd lay money on someone figuring out how to upload software to the iPhone within a year of it being released—without installing Linux.
Yesterday was the Sydney University Information Day: a day when students and their families come along to the University to ask questions before they make their final decision about their preferred degree courses. It's also an opportunity for academics like myself to meet potential students and find out what they expect from a degree like the Bachelors in Design Computing (BDesComp).
Unsurprisingly, one of the most common questions I get asked is "what is design computing"? Well Wikipedia (which is the first place our students look for the answer to anything it seems) says the following:
Design Computing refers to an area of Design Studies that deals with furthering the understanding and the practice of design activities through the application and development of novel concepts and techniques in computingQuoted from wikipedia
That's a reasonable description of our research here at the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition but it doesn't really help potential undergraduate students to understand what they will learn here.
The focus of the BDesComp is on exploring the creative potential of computational systems whether using them as design tools (as in the case of using Adobe Photoshop), as a creative medium where the end product of the design process is a computational system, and even as a means of modelling the creative design process as I do in my research. The BDesComp is designed to expose students to a wide range of creative technologies and as much as possible it is about challenging the ideas of how computers can be used in creative design practice.
One aspect of the degree programme that I am particular keen to promote is that we don't just teach people how to use computers we teach people how to program computers. Knowing how to program is a huge advantage to anyone that wants to make the most of the creative potential of computers. Software tools, no matter how powerful, as necessarily limited in what they can do. That's why many software tools, like Maya, include a scripting language to allow people who need to do something that the tool doesn't support as standard to extend the capabilities of the system. A designer that knows how to program can quickly pick up these scripting languages and, in doing so, radically expand their space of possibilities.
Yesterday, the Faculty of Architecture officially changed its name to the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. Although the new name is much longer than the old (it barely fits on a single line on my new business cards) the name is much more representative of what goes on here. I'll probably still have some difficulties explaining what someone with my background in computer science and artificial intelligence is doing in the faculty, but it may save on some of the confusion about how my research is related to architecture.
Wow! I can't believe it's 2007 already and that I haven't touched my blog for six months. I guess my New Year's resolutions better include looking after my blog a bit more in the future.
The Digital Clockwork Muse is a project to develop computational models of creative societies using curious agents to investigate the possible effects of novelty-seeking behaviour in social creative systems. Here's a quote from my 2002 paper "How to Study Artificial Creativity":
The Digital Clockwork Muse is an artificial creativity system developed to explore the role that an individual's search for novelty plays in socially situated creative systems. The Digital Clockwork Muse consists of multiple agents within a single field conducting searches for interesting and potentially creative [works].
The original implementation of The Digital Clockwork Muse used curious agents to evolve "genetic artworks". Genetic artworks are created using small programs that can be evolved, usually by having a person select their favourite from a small selection. You can evolve your own genetic artworks using my Evol applet; this is the same interactive genetic algorithm that the curious agents used but with a human-friendly point-and-click interface.
Initial experiments with The Digital Clockwork Muse demonstrate some interesting properties of artificial creative societies including the isolation of agents that do not innovate at an appropriate rate, and the spontaneous formation of "cliques" between agents that consider similar values of novelty to be interesting. For more information about these experiments have a look at Chapter 6 in my thesis.
One of the questions that guides my research is whether or not machines could ever be creative. Here's a quick quote from my thesis:
Can computers be creative? Objections to the notion that computers could ever be creative pre-date by over a century the invention of the first practical computers with which to investigate the question empirically. Famously, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, commented upon her translation of Menabrea's "Sketch of the Analytical Engine", declaring that: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform" (emphasis added by Boden, 1990). In Lady Lovelace's opinion, any creative products of the Analytical Engine would have to be credited not to the engine, but to the engineer.
Turing recognised the importance of creativity in any definition of intelligence when he attempted to answer Lovelace's objection in his seminal paper "Computer Machinery and Intelligence", the same paper in which he introduced his now famous test for machine intelligence (Turing, 1950). Turing suggested that objections to the possibility of computers being creative of the type put forward by Lady Lovelace were based on a common misunderstanding of the nature of reasoning in the mind, resulting in an over-statement of the powers of rational thought. In particular, Turing pointed out that a person knowing a set of facts and rules about the world does not mean that the person immediately knows all of the implications of applying the rules to the facts.
Welcome to my research blog. This is where I'll be keeping a log of my research into curious agents and creative systems. This isn't going to be one of those all-singing all-dancing blogs with every buzzword compliant feature enabled. I might set up one of those sites for my personal blog, if I do I'll be sure to post a link here somewhere.
First, I'm going to do a few quick tests of the blogging system to see how well it works and to help me debug my "flavour". Let's start with a block quote:
Can computers be creative? Objections to the notion that computers could ever be creative pre-date by over a century the invention of the first practical computers with which to investigate the question empirically.
Here's some preformatted text:
while (true) {
println("Hello World");
}
Here's an unordered list:
Here's an ordered list:
OK. That's enough testing for now. Hopefully I'll soon have something a little more interesting than lists of foods and animals.
