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Category Archives: algorithm

Some questions about Actor Recursion Theory (ART): An interview with me – (Part 1)

06-Apr-12

So what’s Actor Recursion Theory then? Actor Recursion Theory is a name I’ve given to a specific intervention outlined in my dissertation. It’s not fully developed yet, and as such links or presents my haphazard state of mind during a PhD thesis. It’s reflects an opinion, but I leave plenty of room for others. The [...]

SimCity’s Glassbox Engine: Unit Operations or ANT?

20-Mar-12

So the Sim City developers have just released a video showing off the simulation behaviour of the new reboot SimCity coming next year. It’s quite rare for any developer to show a demonstration like this at an early stage, irrespective of graphic ability, so they must be fairly proud of their engine. The Glassbox engine [...]

Noah Horwitz, Badiou, OOO and Constructive Computation

30-Dec-11

Replying to my last post on Chaitin, Noah Horwitz (who is working very closely with Badiou and Wolfram as am I) comments on the potential similarities and differences of our position. It’s an important conversation, so its worth elevating to its own post as it were. His original comment is here, but I’ve directly copied [...]

Who is Gregory Chaitin?

28-Dec-11

Tim’s post just reminded me to write something on Gregory Chaitin. I’ve been writing about this area a fair bit in my thesis, in light of his relationship to Wolfram’s research. Often enough, if you highlight differences between two thinkers in one specific field, you can transport or unpack those differences in a completely different field. [...]

A response to Jussi Parikka: or why materialism ‘encounter’ has lost its efficacy

23-Dec-11

Most of you have probably read Jussi Parikka’s latest piece on some Object Oriented Questions about OOO HERE; the comments are well worth a read if not for the usual can of worms OOO usually opens in the blogosphere. Paul Caplan replied HERE and Levi HERE, Graham’s also just replied with THESE TWO posts. But rather than repeat other responses, I thought [...]

Rule 30: More Hacking / OOO and all that…

09-Dec-11

There were some great responses to my post on hacking and OOO last week. Tim Richardson responded HERE and Nathan Gale just posted his response two days ago HERE. I’m doing this in the middle of a thesis session write-up, so I’ll have to be brief and numbingly inarticulate. So lets go through it a bit. [...]

Computational Aesthetics: Independence and execution

10-Nov-11

Thats the title of my ‘Swedish Twitter University” twitter talk next Wednesday 16th Nov. You can find the info HERE. I’ll do my level best to condense my entire thesis into 25 tweets. Can it be done? Find out on Wednesday (Hint: the answer will be undecidable).  

Reality in the name of God

26-Oct-11

…is the title of Noah Horwitz’s 2012 publication by Punctum Books. He sent a comment in, and I thought I should post it considering it links Badiou with Wolfram. How Horwitz can argue that a computational reality is made up of the Holy Name of God is beyond my level of intuition. Reality in the [...]

More Badiou Anti-Constructivist Bias

25-Oct-11

Here he is in Number and Numbers again, clearly having a laugh at Peano’s expense for not being Platonic enough. “He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the [...]

Hey Badiou, why no computation?

09-Oct-11

I’ve been reading a bit more Badiou of late. Not sure why – I guess I’m trying to discover more philosophical clout with regards to integrating the formalist equivalence of computation-mathematical theorems (Turing, Church) with ontology and computational aesthetics more generally. I’m not going in deep, just lightly skimming the surface of what’s been written, [...]