Comments on: "Gnarly Computation" in Fresno

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 06 May 2006 01:24:06 +0000

Was just catching up on some past entries and told my 8 year old of Steve’s breakfast of ‘Fruitless Loops’, without missing a beat she replied “he must of had Cheerios”, then continued working with her Powerpuff Girls math program.

By: Tara

Tara — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 16:16:22 +0000

Rudy,
As most often, you’ve framed the dialectic for the synthesis: promulgating vs. creating. Nice, it crafts room to dance.
What’s more, your Freestylist allegory of 25 April says all. Glissandos in Marc’s words (”No need to break down the metaphors — an Adventurist knows what the ocean really is”) beget new collisions of possibilities.
Still in the Gnarl,
Tara

By: Rudy

Rudy — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:34:52 +0000

Tara asks why I’m a little burnt on promulgating the view of reality as gnarly computation.
Well, maybe I was just feeling burnt that day, giving a math talk is kind of an overwhelmingly nostalgic experience — stepping into a past life.
Certainly the gnarl view still stongly informs the way I view the world.
But, as I say, people have a lot of trouble understanding the notion quickly — that’s why I put it all into a fat book.
As a writer, I’m more comfortable in writing and publishing thoughts and moving on.
There’s also the aspect of not liking to do the same thing over and over.

By: Steve H

Steve H — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:58:33 +0000

What a coincidence - I had Fruitless Loops for breakfast!
It isn’t so much that ‘reality is made of gnarly computations’ as it is, ‘well, so what?’ Invent a little black box that lets you talk to trees and waterfalls and you’d see much more interest. (I’ve always been impressed with the factoid of Brownian motion, everything on the molecular level jittering and jostling, and wondered why someone hasn’t put it to work. The Brownmobile - no wheels, it just moves. The Prez would either see it as the answer to the energy crisis or burn it as a witch.)
Also, I have, as a student wrote once, ‘mixty motions’ about constant music. Impossible to tell the dancer from the dance, or the song from the days it was popular - days when we were young and our friends were all living and the worst problem was how to Dick Nixon before he could Dick us. (Is that a common obscenity?)
Continue to draw inspiration from the world’s gnarls. Whether you explain it or not is optional!

By: Tara

Tara — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 20:12:34 +0000

Dear Rudy,
You shared the following:
“And at this point, I’ve somewhat lost interest in promulgating the Wolframite belief that reality is made of gnarly computations. I still think it’s true, but I’m tired of pointing it out. ”
May I ask, why you’re feeling this?
I ask this, because –short of breezies manifestation — your thought echoes what I’ve been feeling lately. For me, the Gnarl still represents fertile art ground, but I tire of having to explain it. I seem to end up doing more explaining than art.
I thank you for your candor,
Tara

By: lenz

lenz — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 22:34:49 +0000

Your blog entries are always refreshing, even when you’re freeling a bit downtuned like today’s.
I have just ben ending “Lifebox”, and keep on thinking about your possible world views; the three seta on page 388. You always imagine C to be a subset of T and P; but if C is an ongoing computation of some sort, it might as well have (some? a number?) of hidden variables that are used to run the computation itself, and they may well be outside of T and C, like hash tables in the mind of God. They might be completely insulated and in some sense unthinkable/unphysical, like the hypervisor is from a VM point of view. Your CAs may be holding private internal state variables, but what if that state is somewhere else?
Apart for that - and for the fact that footnotes belong to the bottom of each page, not at the end of the book where it is too distressing to find them each time - thanks for the novel sense of wonder that the book brought with itself. I ended it while sitting on the banks of a lake in northern italy, in the sun, and everything was so gnarly and perfect all of the time.

By: gamma

gamma — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 21:23:46 +0000

Tami got back safely from Blackpool yesterday - my pal Martin brought me a DVD of ‘STONED’ & a book about ARTHUR BROWN who worked with Jimmy Carl Black (the indian of the group) painting houses in the western lands. still make me smile the slime out Rudee