Lately I've been asked to name a paper that could serve as an introduction to type systems and program proofs. I mentioned Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing by Philip Wadler (he gave a similar paper at ILC03 in New York). To my delight Wadler's paper was mentioned at Lambda the Ultimate in a list of Natural Deduction Reading for Beginners .

BTW lispmeister.com has been offline for a couple of days due to a denial of service attack. Seems like that's the kind of risk you have to take, if you do botnet research.

Just found this new site about the Cybersyn project. Stafford Beer was a giant of cybernetics. They have the intention to fund the construction of an interactive audio-visual documentary film, based on the cybernetics experience made in Chile by Stafford Beer called Cybersyn. They created a 3D visualization of the opsroom used in the Cybersyn project.

I just finished reading A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin. What a wonderful book! She writes about the private life, love, desperation and achievements of these two giants of the mind, Turing and Gödel:

The human mind can also be reduced to a machine. This idea drives all the others as he runs on grass, past trees, over bridges, through cattle. States of mind can be replaced by states of the machine. Human thought can be broken down into simple rules, instructions a machine can follow. Thought can be mechanized. The connection isn't perfectly clear, but it is there, the catalyst of a great crystal. It is not just that thought can be mechanized. It is mechanized. The brain is a machine. A biological machine. The idea cools him from head to toe, a wave of understanding washing clean his confusion, his muddled notions, and his breath. Shock feels like this: There is no sky or earth. No time, no meaning. It's a throb—a hard silence, a pulse. It is colorless, tasteless, senseless. A white-hot explosion[…]

At the age of twenty-three and for the rest of his life he embraces, without reservation, a mathematics that exists independently of us—although we, by contrast, do not live independently of it. We are biological machines. Nothing more. We have no souls, no spirit. But we are bound to mathematics and mathematics is flawless. This has to be true.

Another book by Janna Levin I can recommend is How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space. It's about about the nature of our universe as we understand it today. A collection of letters Janna Levin wrote to her mother explaining her work.

Ben Goertzel, author of The Hidden Pattern and Artificial General Intelligence (both books highly recommended), talks about the Singularity, artificial intelligence, how to be human after transcending and a lot of other wild topics. [via boingboing]

Links:

• Interview at Neofiles
• Ben Goertzel
• Novamente

David McClaim released the source code for his Lisp-based signal, image-processing and modeling workbench SigLab. The talk he gave at ECLM06 was spectacular. He explained why he uses Lisp (multiple layers of abstraction using macros), why you need a text based system description and not a graphical (GUI) description and his demo of real-time processing was just mind-blowing.

Links:

• SigLab Release announcement
• SigLab download

Ralph E. Griswold, designer/developer of the Snobol and Icon programming languages, died on October 4, 2006. Ehud Lamm writes in his obituary:

Griswold's life work was in the area of non-numerical computing.[*] Griswold was the primary designer of series of string-manipulation languages (Icon was preceded by SL5 which was preceded by SNOBOL4). For many years strings were perhaps the most important and the most widely misunderstood data type in programming languages (perhaps now being displaced by XML trees). Griswold, though a university researcher for many years, should be considered firstly as a programming language innovator and inventor, and not an academic researcher in the usual sense of the word. Griswold, like the late Kenneth Iverson, invented and championed programming language constructs, and his contributions were among those that led the way to programming as currently understood. He was truly one of the founding figures of the field of programming language design.

As others have noted, computer science has always been a discipline where the founders were still around. This is changing.

Obituaries:

• University of Arizona
• Peter H. Salus
• Ehud Lamm

[via Lambda the Ultimate]

If it can be done, it will be done. Computer Programmer Clinton Curtis testifies that Tom Feeney (Speaker of the Houe of Florida at the time, currently US Representative representing MY district ) tried to pay him to rig election vote counts. Via jwz [link]

I've mentioned Susan Blackmore's book The Meme Machine before. She gave a lucid and entertaining talk about memes at Poptech 2005.

Links:

• Susan Blackmore's homepage
• Susan Blackmore's talk about Memes at Poptech 2005

Of the many (pulp fiction) books I read during my teens, none made such a lasting impression on me as The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. His description of a wired planet and computer worms inspired early experiments at Xerox Parc. Here's a quote from the book:

He sent a retaliatory worm chasing Fluckner's. That should take care of the immediate problem in three to thirty minutes, depending on whether or not he beat the inevitable Monday morning circuit overload. According to recent report, there were so many worms and counterworms loose in the data-net now, the machines had been instructed to give them low priority unless they related to a medical emergency.

The only successful commercial use of worms for distributed computation I'm aware of, is the illegal use of botnets to send spam. Frederick B. Cohen showed some interesting use cases for mobile code, though he seems to have abandoned research in this area after finishing his PhD thesis.

Recent developments:

• MOSREF and Mosquito Lisp: Mosquito is a secure remote execution framework available for download via the LGPL that combines high-grade cryptography and a small efficient virtual machine on both ends to ensure that intellectual property is protected. It also presents a dynamic environment on a target host that can be reprogrammed on the fly over a secure communications channel to fit the current situation.

References:

• A Short Course on Computer Viruses by Frederick B. Cohen: First concise theoretical work on viruses and mobile code.
• The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses by Mark Ludwig: First publication of working disassembled virus code.
• The Giant Black Book of Computer Viruses by Mark Ludwig.
• The Worm Programs: Classic analysis of the Morris Worm by Eugene H. Spafford.
• The "Worm" programs - early experience with a distributed computation: Early experiments at Xerox Parc.
• You Got the Power: Howard Rheingold's article about the first attempts to commercialize distributed computation.
• How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time: Impressive analysis of the Code Red I worm.

So, I've been thinking (did you ever notice, that geeks start their sentences with "So,..." (actually I stole that from the amazing book "The New New Thing")), why is it, that things suddenly start happening?

Like, I've been divorced for over a year now (yes, a prenuptial agreement is a good idea), tried hard to find investors for my new startup (without any success), almost went broke, met a wickedly smart girl who new about Gödel, Frege and Peirce, found out she had a beautiful mind, got a day job with a company that runs a foreign exchange trading platform (yes it pays well, as it should, if you're maintaining the build of a 800 kloc Java monster), got really depressed, drank and smoked way too much.

Suddenly – things start to sync again.

There's this publishing empire, interested in acquiring my startup, my great-uncle, who I last met at the age of eleven, dies and I inherit a portfolio of patents, I meet this amazing women, beautiful and wickedly smart (wasn't it Timothy Leary who said "Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac"?) and hey, life couldn't be better.

Finally today, after a long day at work, I met a friend at the bar and his blond flight attendant date tried to talk me out of my Lisp t-shirt. – I confess, I was tempted for a split second.

I'm just wondering, what the fuck is going on? Or like Robert Anton Wilson used to say: "If you think you know what's going on, you're probably full of shit!".

I first met Stefan Richter at ECLM 2006 and we connected instantly. No need for a secret handshake. He prepared a special report about the Singularity Summit at Stanford University.

After visiting ECLM 2006 in Hamburg and having a nice talk with Markus at the Gastwerk hotel bar about AI, Lisp, Singularity and the Universe, I found the following announcement on the net:

"On June 13th the Singularity Institute (http://www.singinst.org) will organize a Singularity Summit at Stanford University, California.

Speakers include: Ray Kurzweil, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Nick Bostrom, Sebastian Thrun, Cory Doctorow, K. Eric Drexler, Max More, Christine Peterson, John Smart and Eliezer Yudkowsky."

This very interesting line-up of speakers must have caused a temporary brain damage in my head, because I decided to sign-up and fly to San Francisco over the weekend, arriving on friday and leaving on sunday. I was even able to convince a fellow hacker to join the trip. After signing up and mentioning, that we come over from Germany just to participate in this event, we even received some kind of special treatment with a personal mail confirmation from Tyler Emerson.

Friday we visited a friend at Google who also joined us on the Summit and had good food and coffee at the Googleplex, .

Saturday started early: We arrived a 0730 at the Memorial Auditorium and found a big, long queue of Summit-Visitors: There were more then 2000 registrations for this free-of-charge event! Okay, we are in San Francisco...

Ray Kurzweil's talk was more or less a summary of the first 200 pages of his new book "The singularity is near", but still very motivating.

I was very curious about Douglas R. Hofstadter. His talk invited the other speakers and the academic world to enter a discourse on the topic of singularity. He said, that he is "less sceptic now", but would be very surprised, if we reach Singularity in less then 100-200 years. He also pointed out, that Kurzweil is sometimes mixing science with science fiction and said: "How secure can I be of the sanity of this person?" (This was about the moment, when we took the picture ;-) ).

The other speakers didn't pick up on that. Everybody else had more or less his own agenda and topics. No discourse. But interesting. For more fotos, videos, audio and transcripts, you can visit the singinst.org Site (http://sss.stanford.edu/coverage/press/). Very nice are the self-made cartoons, that Hofstadter used in his presentation.

One of the best presentations came from science fiction writer, boingboing-blogger and EFF member Cory Doctorow, who talked about the evils of Digital Rights (or more precise: "Restrictions") Management (DRM). Maybe this has not so much todo with Singularity in the first place, but DRM is a danger to the freedom of information and culture, so it affects the matter we are writing programs for. EFF just published the nice animated film "The Corruptibles" about the real goals of DRM technology: http://www.eff.org/corrupt/

Think about it.

So let's hope, that in 2045 the first version of Seed-AI will not be sued from the media industry and put into custody because of copyright infringements, because she was consuming all books, music and films to better understand the human culture."

Richard Greenblatt commented on my improvised video of the Powerpoint slides of his presentation at ILC'02 and suggested to publish the video recording of his talk. I'm to busy at the moment to convert it from WMV into a decent format, but if someone converts it to Quicktime I'd be happy to host it. Thanks to Richard Greenblatt for making the video available!

Video of Richard Greenblatt's presentation at ILC'02 [70MB]

The seminal Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler is finally available online! I can still remember the exhilarating feeling I had when I read the chapter about Thinking Machines.

In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools. Advanced AI systems could maneuver people out of existence, or they could help us build a new and better world. Aggressors could use them for conquest, or foresighted defenders could use them to stabilize peace. They could even help us control AI itself. The hand that rocks the AI cradle may well rule the world.

Only cooling problems might limit such machines to slower average speeds. Imagine a conservative design, a millionfold faster than a brain and dissipating a millionfold more heat. The system consists of an assembler-built block of sapphire the size of a coffee mug, honeycombed with circuit-lined cooling channels. A high-pressure water pipe of equal diameter is bolted to its top, forcing cooling water through the channels to a similar drainpipe leaving the bottom. Hefty power cables and bundles of optical-fiber data channels trail from its sides. 

The cables supply fifteen megawatts of electric power. The drainpipe carries the resulting heat away in a three-ton-per-minute flow of boiling-hot water. The optical fiber bundles carry as much data as a million television channels. They bear communications with other AI systems, with engineering simulators, and with assembler systems that build designs for final testing. Every ten seconds, the system gobbles almost two kilowatt-days of electric energy (now worth about a dollar). Every ten seconds, the system completes as much design work as a human engineer working eight hours a day for a year (now worth tens of thousands of dollars). In an hour, it completes the work of centuries. For all its activity, the system works in a silence broken only by the rush of cooling water. 



This addresses the question of the sheer speed of thought, but what of its complexity? AI development seems unlikely to pause at the complexity of a single human mind. As John McCarthy of Stanford's AI lab points out, if we can place the equivalent of one human mind in a metal skull, we can place the equivalent of ten thousand cooperating minds in a building. (And a large modern power plant could supply power enough for each to think at least ten thousand times as fast as a person.) To the idea of fast engineering intelligences, add the idea of fast engineering teams.




[via BoingBoing]

I'm on my way back from the European Common Lisp Meeting in Hamburg. Edi Weitz and Arthur Lemmens put together an incredible conference. Everything was well organized, the location at the Gastwerk hotel was a beautiful setting, the food was delicious and the speakers gave some amazing talks. I've recorded all talks on DAT and will make them available for download as soon as the speakers have reviewed the recordings of their talks. I've put a couple of images up at Flickr.com.

1. 9:30 Jans Aasman: AllegroGraph

• The semantic web
• Intelligent search depends on meta data
• Why we need a triple database
• XML is actually not relevant, but reasoning is
• Missing constraints for IDF documents and contained definitions: OWL
• An IDF reasoner can reason about IDF documents
• The intelligence community was first do demand reasoning tools
• Other customers: telecom companies, biotech
• ISP (configuration mgt): 2 billion triples
• Telecom datamining over VOIP CDRs: Is there a circle of friends? -> almost impossible to do with relational databases!
• Movie database: Kevin Baken number, relationship mining
• First Franz product using Lisp inside a black box with a http and Java interface (no interface for other Lisps?)
• Reification:
  • put a trust metric as meta data on the graph
  • meta data about triples
• burst rate 14000 triples per second (saving and indexing)
• treat AllegroGraph as a Prolog database
• for governments it's important to say things about triples (trust metric)
• you can use this meta information inside of queries
Questions:
• How do you add new/correcting information to the triple
• fuzzy queries? Yes, every triple comes with a trust value and you can use a reasoning engine to do queries.

2. 11:12 James Anderson: Time series analysis for financial markets

• First get prediction with internal market data working
• You cannot beat the market with internal data only
• mix in external data (news headlines)
• timestamp the data on the feeds in multiple time dimensions so you can go back in time an analyze again
• 250MB per day input feed (one minute resolution) = 5 megapixel snapshot of the market
• evaluating several million ticks per day
• solve problems with differences in timing/timestamping between different servers
• develop the aibility to go back in time an clean up data (in case of interruption in the feed)
• Now predicting "market sentiment" not "nearest neighbour"
• used for ESF trading (future of Dow Jones), traded in Chicago 24h/day
• you need to do synchronous analysis to get rid of the discrepancies btw. servers
• impedance: code complexity issues even with Lisp
• Create a DSL with special operators to deal with the problems
• do data introspection at a higher level
• create a "generic function graph"
• give the analysts a language to express the way they think about the problem set
• visualize data in 3D using an abstraction layer that is device independant
• our target marktet is day-traders

3. 12:00 Arthur Lemmens: Rucksack

• persistence library for CL, because no one else was doing it
• deal with serializing shared objects
• write your own serializer to speed up serialization (orders of magnitude faster)
• use the MOP to check when a slot is referenced/accessed
• use a proxy for referenced objects that have not yet been accessed (memory forwarding pointer)
• cache: put loaded objects into a hash table, put changed objects into a separate hash table
• manual memory managment is a sin and it isn't even a pleasant one
• there should not be a delete instance in Rucksack= no dangling pointers!
• build a disk based garbage collector for the store
• copying collector for structured data
• mark and sweep collector more efficient for big blobs
• use a commit file to recover from crashes
• simple query language
• support schema evolution: class definitions are immutable, keep a list of versions of class definitions
• all schemas are kept in the schema table and the table is kept on disk
• about 2MM effort implementing it

7. 14:30 Jim Newton, Thomas F. Burdick, Peter Herth, Björn Lindberg (Cadence): Electronic Design Automation

Jim Newton:

• 5 billion per year industry
• 25% market share by Cadence
• physical design kit at the core
• Lisp library "Skill"
• Can't keep Cadence IP and customer IP in same repository for revision control (because of IP law)
• develop a "Meta-Version Control" to separate the code
• PCMan database is an implementation of this

Björn Lindberg: Database Design

• client server model of the PCman system (pronounced Pacman)
• create a CLOS wrapper for the database scheme

Thomas F. Burdick: Server

• assume that the clients are hostile
• only the server knows about the database
• clients only know about objects
• we have a first class transaction method
• first committer wins and all other clients are forced to update to the latest version of an object

Peter Herth: Database Editor

• use Ltk to connect Lisp to Tk GUI
• use the Ltk remote extension to start the Gui remotely
• Generic Browsers

Questions:

• How do you pick the modules to be used for a release? A release engineer decides which modules go into a release.
• Show the macro expansion of the database stuff...

3. 15:28 Martin Cracauer (ITA): QPX - Low fare search engine

• the airline industry separates the prices from travel information
• the booking problem is complicated by the number of prices created by the airline companies
• there's a combinatoric explosion of possible intiniaries
• Boston-Hamburg -> search 2.5 mio prices
• 10^28 solutions is not unusual!
• "In a way we have the worlds most sophisticated compression program for this data"
• "We need the raw speed from Lisp..."
• unecessary initialization of data structures is a problem with dynamic languages (and Lisp)
• we need bitfields
• 5 GigaBytes of maximally compressed flight data
• efficient datastructures are key
• we need to mmap anyway (because of the size of the data structure)
• share the data between instances of the search processes (one instance per processor)
• we need to read the 32bit of a C-struct directly from Lisp without a function call in between
• manual control of inlining is a very important feature for us (for 32 bit integer operations)
• one of the big benefits of Lisp to us is, that you can compile with different presets for speed and safety
• regression tests use the range check in safe compiled test versions to catch overflows
• we always leave array bounds checking on (because it is very hard to debug problems with array overruns) even when compiled in fast mode

Questions:

• Why still use Lisp? Because we have very complicated algorithms in the actual search engine. We use macros (several million lines of code after macro expansion)
• how do you deal with negotiated fares? We use dedicated machines for customers with negotiated fares.
• How do you deal with availability checks?

4. 16:34 Klaus Harbo (Mu): cl-muproc

• Algorithmic trading platforms
• arbitrage in online sports betting markets
• MP is here to stay
• implement the important aspects of Erlang in Lisp
• muprocs exchange mumsg messages
• everything goes on in a single Lisp instance
• clients block on reads until they get a timeout
• we can generate all the message passing and the client only has to call a function
• supervisor for server processes enforce the policy (like automatic restarting services)
• 2500 lines of code
• BSD licensed

6.David McClain (Refined Audiometric Laboratory): Signal Processing SigLab

• Lisp-based numerical signal processing
• connect blocks using virtual wires
• we can send functional closures down the wire
• run simulations of signal processing
• model systems in Lisp
• Why Lisp?
• Exceedingly powerful macrology!
• most elegant OOP: CLOS
• dynamically typed
• ad-hoc design of new networks
• performance
• using Lisp augmentation (C-array substrate) to speed up processing
• hand coded high performance vectorized math routines
• aspect oriented programming extensions
• I've reverse engineered the BBE-Processing filter (~40 lines of code)
• discovered the EarSpring Equation which describes normal human hearing
• might make it available for people who are interested

NSIT Lounge released a inspiring interview with Richard P. Feynman on Google Video. Feynman talks about his childhood, his first encounter with calculus reading "Calculus for the Practical Man" at age thirteen, how they build the Bomb in Los Alamos, how they threw a party while Hiroshima was burning, how a seemingly simple problem of rotating bodies led to to quantum electrodynamics. Here's Feynman commenting on the Nobel prize he received:

I don't like honours. I appreciate it for the work that I did and for people who appreciate it and I notice when other phycicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else.I don't see that it makes any point, that someone in the Swedish academy decides that this work is nobel enough to receive a prize. I've already got the price! The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation of the people who use it. Those are the real things! The honours are unreal to me. I don't believe in honours.

Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz suggested a ECLM-themed t-shirt to celebrate the European Common Lisp Meeting 2006. The text on the front side reads:

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

and the back reads

European Common Lisp Meeting 2006 Hamburg, April 29/30

The front text of the white t-shirt is user customizable, if you'd rather wear a different slogan. For now I've only made them available in the European t-shirt shop. If you're in the US and would like to order a ECLM t-shirt, please let me know and I'll put them up in the US-shop too.

The TV production hosted by Richard Dawkins titled The Root of all Evil is a "one man against human stupidity" kind of show. Hearing people say the things they say in conversation with Dawkins is scary and hilarious at the same time. It's like the last 350 years of scientific progress never happened. I'm paraphrasing W.S. Burroughs here: "Religion is a virus of the mind". Looks like human civilization is in dire need of some heavy duty anti-viral software.

Torrent links to the show:

• mininova : Root of All Evil - Richard Dawkins pt1
• mininova : Root of all evil pt2

(via BoingBoing)