Nick Gall's Weblog

Saturday, August 09, 2003

Rapid Diffusion is the Key to Success. An expensive resource (exres) that is essential to only a few will be displaced by an inexpensive resource (inres) that is essential (or very useful) to many, even if the inres lacks some of the features of the exres. Examples: Internet, Web, Ethernet, IA-32, Linux. The inres will diffuse more broadly and rapidly, and the larger market will drive down costs of production. The unique features of the exres will then be ported to the inres, when the cost of the exres exceeds the cost of the port plus the cost of the inres. Visually this looks like a stovepipe in the first frame and in the second frame, a wide base with a shorter stovepipe (both which reach the same height as the first frame). How to represent the lower cost of the second frame? Since market size and cost are highly correlated, use the horizontal axis for both. 7:05:51 AM

Friday, August 08, 2003

Think orgasmically. Saw this post entitled Think orgasmically on Scripting News and it reminded me of an epiphany I had during a series of insights:   Epiphanies are functionally similar to orgasms in that both are emotional "rewards" for "connecting."   In the case of orgasm, the connection is sexual. While in the case of epiphany, the connection is conceptual. That is, my epiphanies occur when I connect concepts. Heidegger would note that both forms of connection share the same Latin root: copula—to link. <grin>   Of course, not every conceptual connection triggers an epiphany. Dave Winer says he has them when he has an idea that mixes well with the world. My epiphanies are triggered when I make a broad set of connections between concepts that had seemed unconnected and such connections lead to a whole series of insights.   Why do both ways of connecting (sexual and conceptual) trigger an emotional feeling of pleasure and satisfaction? I believe it is because both forms of connecting are essential to evolution, i.e., genetic and memetic.   BTW, I disagree with Dave's apparent suggestion that mostly women understand this relationship between sexual and conceptual connection. Google epiphany orgasm and you'll find many men observing the connection between them. When I did so, I found at least one man who has apparently thought about this extensively: Neil Greenberg, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His web site has interesting pages on epiphany as a state of consciousness triggered by connecting. Here's one other man who's made the connection.   My four greatest epiphanies (roughly spaced by decades) were triggered by the following (in order): ·         The realization of finality of death and my embrace of atheism ·         Derrida ·         Rorty ·         The realization of the fundamental importance of conceptual connection in the evolution of complexity   I hesitated to post this because it sounds so wacko, but given how many others have commented on the phenomenon, I felt I had to add my perspective on the issue. 1:56:01 PM

Complexity is Relative. I have been trying (like lots of others) to better understand complexity. And it struck me that we often speak of a given object as being both simple and complex. For example: My TV is simple to operate, but really complex to set up. This application is simple to install, but complex to upgrade. To investigate this insight further, I did what I always do: Google. I googled "complexity is relative". One of the first results was this amazing paper entitled: Entropy as a fixed point. Apparently it was just published in February 2003. Given my previous post suggesting that complexity evolves to maximize entropy, I was amazed to see this connection to entropy in the title of the paper! I was even more amazed when I read the abstract: We study complexity and information and introduce the idea that while complexity is relative to a given class of processes, information is process independent: Information is complexity relative to the class of all conceivable processes. In essence, the idea is that information is an extension of the concept algorithmic complexity from a class of desirable and concrete processes, such as those represented by binary decision trees, to a class more general that can only in pragmatic terms be regarded as existing in the conception. It is then precisely the fact that information is defined relative to such a large class of processes that it becomes an effective tool for analyzing phenomena in a wide range of disciplines. We test these ideas on the complexity of classical states. A domain is used to specify the class of processes, and both qualitative and quantitative notions of complexity for classical states emerge. The resulting theory is used to give new proofs of fundamental results from classical information theory, to give a new characterization of entropy in quantum mechanics, to establish a rigorous connection between entanglement transformation and computation, and to derive lower bounds on algorithmic complexity. All of this is a consequence of the setting which gives rise to the fixed point theorem: The least fixed point of the copying operator above complexity is information. While I don't understand the formal discussion (yet), I am encouraged to see someone dealing formally with my intuition that complexity is relative to the process involved with (an) information (structure). This also reinforces my intuition that process and information are a duality. 7:27:36 AM

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Process is unchanging change? 'process' is change that is held to continue unchanged from a given point of view. This is a line tossed off by Salthe in the work cited in my previous post. It seems very profound to me. It seems to solve the endurantism/perdurantism dichotomy by suggesting how a process is like an object/structure in that it is unchanged over time from a given point of view. And an object is like a process in that it changes over time. Thus, process vs. information (i.e., structure) are simply two equally valid views of the same phenomenon, just as wave vs. particle are two equally valid views of energy. Somehow Quine's metaphor of Neurath's boat seems apropos here as well, though I haven't thought this through. 5:54:20 PM

Evolution as Entropy. In searching for information on the "evolution of complexity," I came across a paper entitled The Natural Philosophy of Ecology: Developmental Systems Ecology (Infodynamics) by Stanley N. Salthe. It confirms my own recent insight into the "purpose" of evolution. Evolution of complex systems such as humanity or life itself is not an exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics; it is a consequence of it. Complex systems evolved to maximize the production of entropy! As I put it in my rough notes back in October 2002: One species is more successful than another in the biological reproduction sense to the degree it can successfully transform energy into copies of itself. This is restated more generally (and more accurately in terms of entropy production rather than energy transformation) by Salthe: Dissipative structures, and any systems that expand or grow, can be viewed as maximizing their entropy production, subject to constraints (which increase with age). The expansion of material systems can in general be viewed as a way to maximize entropy production, as the growth itself requires entropy production, and also delivers access to new energy gradients. Accordingly, the dis-equilibrium that was the "big bang" is returning to equilibrium as quickly as possible through the evolution of matter from energy, astronomical bodies from matter, organic chemistry from planets, biological life from organic chemistry, and intelligence from biological life. Or as Salthe puts it: Behind these considerations lies the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. According to Frautschi (1982), Landsberg (1984) and Layzer (1976), the expansion of the universe has been so fast that the system went out of global equilibrium rapidly, and has been trying to return to equilibrium ever since. As the system cooled, physical particles emerged, which then gave rise to matter, and this in turn gave rise to mass, which continually aggregated as collisions brought about by a random search for equilibrium evoked gravitation. In this scenario the system has been getting further and further away from an equilibrium distribution of energy and particles, thereby increasing the drive toward equilibration at the same time, thus making the Second Law of Thermodynamics an ever more powerful attractor in the material world as the universe expands. Given the brute fact of masses of matter stuck in agglomerations nowhere near equilibrium, what can a system do to facilitate the approach to equilibrium? Following Schneider and Kay (1994), on the model of the Bénard instability, the massive frictional world finds a way to increase entropy production by way of convections facilitated by organized configurations abutting energy gradients, which they can use in an orderly manner (see also Swenson, 1997). This is the general explanation for abiotic dissipative structures like hurricanes and eddies; increasing the steepness of energy gradients spontaneously triggers the organization of material systems that will dissipate these same gradients as rapidly as possible. From this point of view, living systems are just a continuation of this project of reducing energy gradients. The evolution of animals is especially easily interpreted in this way: detrivores acquired movement to burrow into gradients; then they acquired mouths and claws to hurry the disintegration; then predators, as well as herbivores, evolve to hurry the production of detritus; then some of these became homeothermic so that gradients might continue to be dissipated even in the absence of activity; then some of these invested in large nervous systems, which consume large amounts of energy continuously. This scenario provides the basic 'meaning' of ecological systems, whose successional phenomenology shows a tendency to maximize energy flows (Lotka, 1922 / Odum and Pinkerton, 1955) by way of configurations and processes at many scalar levels. The punch line -- form results from, and further mediates, convective energy flows, which more effectively degrade energy gradients than would slow frictional conduction, like diffusion. If I can paraphrase the punch line, and I don't think I have this exactly right yet: Information (i.e., forms, configurations, structures, organizations) production increases in order to increase entropy production. Or perhaps: Information flow increases in order to increase entropy flow. I cannot begin to describe how important this insight is. I am amazed I have never come across this view before. 4:30:25 PM

Monday, August 04, 2003

Architectural Description Language = Module (Inter)Connection Language? In my previous posting, I noted that "one can view the design as embedded not only in the circuit board, but also in the connectors embedded in the chips themselves." It is difficult to express this distinction between the concrete circuit board with specific chips embedded on it and an electronics kit containing a breadboard with a box of chips. Certainly the circuit board is a concrete, fully realized, architecture, whereas the "kit" is some form of abstract architecture. The kit cannot be used to design or build anything; it can only be used to realize a range of possible designs. The set of possibilities is determined to a large degree by the modular interfaces of the electronic components.   It turns out that others have noticed the connection between an architecture and connection or interconnection. Just try "module (mil OR mcl) adl language (connection OR interconnection)" as a Google search term. It appears that some of the literature considers a MIL (module interconnection language) to be simply an older term for ADL (Architectural Description Language). In any case, it seems clear that connections, interfaces, interconnections, interoperability, are all core concerns of architecture. I'll go further and claim that composition is the essence of architecture, and thus the design of interfaces among the composed components (be they objects or processes) is the essence of architecture.   Thus, the essence of the LEGO architecture is the stud-and-tube coupling system, which was patented in 1958. In fact, LEGO was originally (1955) described as the "LEGO System of Play." Not an individual toy, but a system for making toys. The original name for a LEGO brick was "Automatic Binding Brick." (Note the use of the term "binding" outside the realm of computer languages.) What do I mean by the essence of architecture? I mean something along the lines of the definition of architecture given in IEEE Std 1471 Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems:   Architecture: The fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and to the environment and the principles guiding its design and evolution.   Of course, this begs the question, what is the fundamental organization of a system? This is where the term architecture gets overloaded. If I buy a LEGO kit for a Star Wars object, say the Millennium Falcon (MF), when it is finished, it has an architecture. Thus, what should we call the (1) kit, (2) the blueprint for building the MF, (3) the set of all possible LEGO Bricks, (4) the coupling system? LEGO calls (3) the "System of Play". I lean towards calling it the LEGO Modular Architectural Framework (MAF). I'd then call (4) the LEGO (Brick) Module Architecture (MA). That leaves (2), which I'd call the LEGO MF Architectural Blueprint.   Let's apply this to the electronics kit. The kit would still be the kit. The schematic for the kit would be the Architectural Blueprint. The result of using a blueprint would be an actual electronic application, say a radio, that has an Architecture. The bread board and all the chips I can use with it is the MAF. The chip and breadboard connectors would be the MA. Note how each of these architectures can evolve. I can evolve the radio without changing the MAF or the MA, say add a noise filter chip from the kit. I can evolve the MAF w/o changing the MA, say adding new types of components or changing the function of existing components. Or I can change the MA, which that new components may not work with old components. 4:05:16 PM