This is a photo of a painting I commissioned from Blair Bradshaw last year. It shows the final crushing move of the
Immortal Game, circled in red. I chose Blair because I have a print of one of his other pieces and had been to his studio so was familiar with his style. I thought he would do a great job of the immortal game, which I had been thinking about getting painted for some time. The piece is 5ft square and is comprised of 64 small square mini-canvases. Blair and I spoke at length about how to visually show the history of the game. I think he did a great job and am very pleased with what I got.
When Stephen Hawking said "The only thing nature abhors more than a vacuum is a naked singularity". He was talking specifically about the laws of physics in relation to black holes. But his observation could equally apply to the body of human knowledge and the existence of unprecedented phenomena. The only thing that drives our desire for knowledge more than a complete absence of information is the presence of a single, undeniable but unprecedented piece of evidence. Such tantalizing evidence demands explanation.
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The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod is an outstanding book. First published in 1984 it has increased in significance with the evolution of the Internet. In the book Axelrod examines how cooperation can emerge and stabilize in multi-participant environments. The book is fascinating as an analysis of the evolution of cooperation, but is of particular interest to anyone seeking to establish effective; social software systems, peer-to-peer networks, or multi-player gaming environments. Axelrod builds his thesis on the analysis of a gaming tournament he organized. He invited multiple people from many different fields; economics, computer science, evolutionary biology, etc, to submit computer programs employing well defined strategies to play a series of games of Prisoner's Dilemma. Each program played several hundred games against every other program. The results were surprising and enlightening.
more >>RMS (Risk Management Solutions) is a small US company that specializes in catastrophe models for the insurance industry. These models cover natural perils such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and other windstorms. In 2002 RMS produced a report entitled Accessing Workers Comp Risk from Earthquakes. What if the 1906 Great San Francisco Earthquake occurred today. The point of this report was to draw the attention of catastrophe risk managers in the insurance industry to the potentially high costs of workers compensation in large catastrophes. It also makes fairly sobering reading for people who work in San Francisco.
RMS assumed the replay of the Great Quake would occur at peak office occupancy hours; mid-afternoon, mid-week. The Diagram below shows the relative ground shaking used to calculate potential losses
The following table shows the potential losses in workers compensation from a repeat of the 1906 earthquake compared to equivalent losses from the World Trade Center Attack.
| Total Losses | 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Repeat | World Trade Center Attack | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expected | 90% Confidence | ||
| Workers Compensation Injuries | 37,000 | 78,000 | Unknown |
| Workers Compensation Deaths | 3,000 | 5,000 | 2,700 |
| Workers Compensation Insured Loss | $3.4 billion | $7.1 billion | $2.5 - $5.0 billion |
Distribution of the Internet around the world. (Top) Worldwide router density map obtained using NetGeo tool to identify the geographical location of 228,265 routers mapped out by the extensive router level mapping effort of Govindan and Tangmunarunkit. (Bottom) Population density map based on the CIESIN's population data. Both maps are shown using a box resolution of 1 degree by 1 degree. The bar next to each map gives the range of values encoded by the color code, indicating that the highest population density within this resolution is of the order 10**7 people/box, while the highest router density is of the order of 10**4 routers/box. Note that while in economically developed nations there are visibly strong correlations between population and router density, in the rest of the world Internet access is sparse, limited to urban areas characterized by population density peaks.
This graph and the explanation above are taken from Modeling the Internet's Large-Scale Topology by Soon-Hyung Yook, Hawoong Jeong, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Department of Physics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.
more >>As I was researching the invention of the computer I found a few sites that while only tangentially related to the subject at hand were definitely worthy of note.
more >>Cooperation in Balinese Rice Farming by J. Stephen Lansing and John H. Miller
This great article explains in clear terms how Balinese rice farmers acting in self interest and following a few simple rules have caused the emergency of a large scale system that tends to maximize rice yields given the prevailing constraints.
It seems to me that P2P computing networks are in some ways analogus to the rice famers networks of fields and irrigation channels. Yet they have so far failed to produce any large scale emergent features, unless you count the destruction of the music industry as an emergent feature! The current crop of P2P systems seem to lack the simple rules that lead to emergent properties. I suspect it will not be too long before we see P2P systems that feature these simple rules and produce large scale emergent features.
This diagram shows a food web, The nodes are species and the lines show predator-prey relationships between the species. Species at higher trophic levels eat those lower down in the web. This particular food web is for Little Rock Lake in Wisconsin and was produced by Neo D. Martinez of San Francisco State University, Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies.
For some problems the challenge is not to identify the solution. The real challenge is working out how to put the solution in place. Anyone who has setup a theodolite will understand what I mean. The solution is simple to describe. Position a precision optical measuring device so that it is; perfectly level, at a reasonable height for operation and directly above a predefined mark. Sounds easy, but given a tripod and a theodolite most untrained surveyors will take hours and usually give up in frustration. The problem is that there are too many degrees of freedom in the system. Everything is interdependent. Make one small adjustment here and it knocks things way out of whack there!
more >>In the Beginning there was one....
This is the first map of The Internet. It shows the first node on the ARPANET at the University California Los Angeles (UCLA) on the 2nd September 1969. The diagram is taken from Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and beyond by Peter H. Salus and was drawn by Alex McKinzie who worked for BBN. Any Travelog needs maps. For a good catalog of Internet cartography checkout The Atlas of Cyberspaces
In July 1851 two mathematics teachers, Prof. Adolf Anderssen (1818 -1879) from Breslau, and Lionel Kieseritzky (1806-1853) from what is now Estonia, played a game of chess at Simpsons on the Strand, a London chess Salon. The game was so startling in its brlliance that in 1855 it was named The Immortal Game by the Austrian player Ernst Falkbeer. The chess Canon contains very few named games. This game is considered by some to be the greatest ever played. It has been been studied and replayed for over 150 years.
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