All models are wrong, some are just less wrong than others.
For chemotaxis, while they can't observe the underlying processes directly, they result in phenomena that are observable, which can be compared with the same phenomena predicted by simulations and models (the same is true of all scientific fields).
Bret Victor's DynamicLand seems to be a direct descendent of many of these ideas. RealTalk's reactive DB combines Linda tuplespace ideas with LISP 71 pattern matching and reactive semantics. Each Realtalk object is self contained and can't be 'messed with' externally. It's all introspective and reconfigurable, etc
Do you know anywhere where one can look into dynamicland more deeply? I've been interested in playing around with it for a while (hopefully I can get my hands on a projector lol) but have never found any details. Omar Rizwan's website had a cool post on geokit but that was all I managed to find.
I found out about this a few months ago through Cristobal's blog: https://cristobal.space/. Somehow didn't notice how the post mentions Omar's involvement at the top lol. Thanks anyway tho.
you'll probably have to talk to the dynamicland folks; i'm not sure what their current strategy is for getting it out into the world, but it doesn't seem to be the obvious 'upload the software to gitlab and hope for the best' approach
yes, agreed. you may or may not be aware that bret was a principal investigator at yc harc, along with vi hart, dan ingalls, john maloney, yoshiki ohshima (who posted this video), and alex warth, at least three of whom were at vpri. yc harc was sorta kinda headed by alan kay https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/harc
Yep, was definitely aware. It just seems like of all the projects at HARC, this is the only one that branched out from Alan's earlier ideas. The set of papers on https://worrydream.com/refs/ gives a good idea of some of the inspirations behind DL.
Agreed about the Quora interface. I have a Jupyter notebook that scrapes all of Alan's answers and comments into a json database - he's answered a lot of questions!
Sadly the work from the STEPS project seems to have disappeared, especially the Frank software he used in some talks. That looks like it would have been very interesting to play with.
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It's also a limitation of human-human communication, and why nation's have ambassadors (who presumably have a shared context from which to start from when dealing with a foreign nation).
It's a bit unfortunate that people can't look past the projections and the dot frames/QR codes. Those are just a means to an end, which is trying to simulate a world where all objects have the ability to compute and can be easily reprogrammed on the fly.
Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap they can be embedded in everything. Folk (and DynamicLand which inspired it) seems to be a peek into what living in that world could be like.
It's a bit unfortunate that people can't look past the projections and the dot frames/QR codes. Those are just a means to an end, which is trying to simulate a world where all objects have the ability to compute and can be easily reprogrammed on the fly.
Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap the can be embedded in everything. DynamicLand seems to be a peek into what living in that that world could be like.
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