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Category Archives: emergent

Embrace Complexity: Master Miyamoto tells us to

Posted on January 9, 2011 by kipbot

The New Yorker of December 20 has a profile of Shigero Miyamoto, the creator of the Mario Brothers and Zelda universes and a key player in the creation of the Wii (and Wii Sport and, if I had to guess from the crazy fun play, Wii Resort).

The profile talks about how surprised people were at what a success the early Mario games were and, in trying to figure out the unlikely magic, talks about a theme near and dear to me: emergence:

Again, the object was the rescue of a maiden, who has been kidnapped by Bowser, or King Koopa, an evil turtle. Mario, now a plumber, and joined by a lanky brother named Luigi, bounced through the Mushroom Kingdom, dodging or bopping enemies in the form of turtles, beetles, and squid, while seeking out magic mushrooms, coins, and hidden stars. When you set down these elements in ink, they sound ridiculous, but there is something in this scenario that is utterly and peerlessly captivating. There were eight worlds, with four levels each, which meant that you had to pass through thirty-two stages to get to the princess. You travelled through these worlds left to right, on what’s called a side-scrolling screen. It wasn’t the first side-scroll game, but it was the most charming and complex. What’s more, the complexity was subtle. Yokoi, Miyamoto’s mentor, and the inventor of the Game Boy device, had urged him to simplify his approach. The game had just fifteen or twenty dynamics in it—how the mushrooms work, how the blocks react when you hit them—yet they combined in such a way to produce a seemingly limitless array of experiences and moves, and to provide opportunities for an alternative, idiosyncratic style of play, which brings to mind nothing so much as chess. Will Wright cited the theory of emergence—the idea that complex systems arise out of the interaction of several simple things. “The hardware wasn’t much better than Atari’s,” he said. “The polish and the depth of the games were. Super Mario was so approachable, so simple, so addictive, and yet so deep.”

Emergent systems, complex systems from simple things, brings to mind “nothing so much as chess.” Embrace complexity, avoid complications.

Tim Ferriss internet-sourcing his next book

Posted on October 31, 2010 by kipbot

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Tim Ferris had an amazing idea when he was finalizing his breakout book, The Four Hour Workweek. He and his agent couldn’t decide on a title for the book — actually they couldn’t pick among the final four candidates. Ferriss did a very clever thing: he advertised for the as yet unpublished book under each of the four titles with AdSense and used the traffic results to help form his final decision as to which would sell the most books.

Now, with his next book, he’s taking it several steps further. First, he outsourced the design of the book cover to 99 Designs, a site that lets you post a commission and a brief for the kind of work you want done and then designers submit their ideas. If you pick a design, you pay the commission, if you hate the work, you get the money back.

Now that Ferriss has his designs (46 designers responded to his $300 commission and brief), he’s asking users, namely blog and twitter followers to rate and comment.

All sort of interesting in his sourcing ideas.

Designing an HTML tag . . . is actually fascinating

Posted on August 27, 2010 by kipbot

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I’m getting up to speed on the upcoming tech wave by reading the finally published “HTML5 Up and Running”, by Mark Pilgrim. That sentence just feels sad (though necessary), but the first chapter of the book is really, really interesting. In a section titled “A Long Digression into how Standards Are Made”, Pilgrim walks us through a three week email thread that covers the origin and (pretty much) final resolution of the IMG tag.

The thread begins on February 25, 1993, with Marc Andreesen writing:

I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:

Required argument is SRC=”url”.

This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at the point of the tag’s occurrence.

An example is:

<IMG SRC=”file://foobar.com/foo/bar/blargh.xbm“>

(There is no closing tag; this is just a standalone tag.)

This tag can be embedded in an anchor like anything else; when that happens, it becomes an icon that’s sensitive to activation just like a regular text anchor.

Browsers should be afforded flexibility as to which image formats they support. Xbm and Xpm are good ones to support, for example. If a browser cannot interpret a given format, it can do whatever it wants instead (X Mosaic will pop up a default bitmap as a placeholder).

This is required functionality for X Mosaic; we have this working, and we’ll at least be using it internally. I’m certainly open to
suggestions as to how this should be handled within HTML; if you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know. I know this is hazy wrt image format, but I don’t see an alternative than to just say “let the browser do what it can” and wait for the perfect solution to come along (MIME, someday, maybe).

Let me know what you think………

Cheers,
Marc

–
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu

For the next three weeks, a number of programmer types, including Tim Berners-Lee, discuss a whole range of ideas for how this much-needed tag should be developed. It’s worth a read or two, since it highlights several open source, design, and software dynamics. Even in the note above you see a bunch of things:

The presence of shared, common language. One of the hardest things about organizations where teams are important is building a common vocabulary. Actually, it’s less about the vocabulary and more about building a precise understanding of what the words in the vocabulary mean. In my job, even the word ‘app’ can have too precise a meaning (iPhone or iPad app) or too loose (anything on the web that isn’t pure messaging or might contain a button). The thread started with the note above is remarkable for its precise, simple language and writing styles which conform to the expectations of other while personalities and passions still come through.

The idea is presented with a clear rationale, an awareness of its shortcomings, and a genuine openness to improvement and realization that something may have been missed. The thread goes on to propose some very different approaches to how to mark up images, and Andreesen ultimately sticks to his initial proposal but leaves things open to a better evolution saying “we’re not prepared to support [a different approach] at this point” and that specifics will be in place “for the time being.”

The conversation has a mix of ideal principles and the need to ship and finds a balance. More important, the decision-maker(s) are aware of the balance and compromise. Intel has an internal mantra that people need to “disagree, but commit” to the imperfect, different, or inferior solution that wins the day. Too often, that “commit”ment can turn into group-think that forgets that the decision needs to be revisited, involved necessary compromises, or creates serious problems elsewhere. Everyone on this thread is aware and keeps track of the issues that are left open or created while other issues are closed.

The thread operated comfortably and, again, in a self-aware fashion, at many altitudes. Tim Berners-Lee talked about user confusion while supporting the theoretical superiority of INCLUDE (a tighter, more pure, but more time consuming approach), another person suggests “maybe we should think about a general-purpose procedural graphics language” (let’s acknowledge that markup languages are not up to this and rethink the whole thing), while others tweak the proposed structure of the tag.

There is very little preciousness — about ideas, implementations, territory, intellectual/engineering integrity — to be found. I’ve worked with engineers, and written code myself, for almost a dozen years, and was surprised to the point of shocked to see how matter of fact, and yet rigorous, a group of programmers could be, especially on a medium (email) that was at the time new and where etiquette was still evolving.

The book is worth a read and this chapter is really illuminating.
You can view the Andreesen post and click through the thread here.

Finally, computation popularized

Posted on May 18, 2010 by kipbot

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For several years, Steven Johnson’s Emergence, E O Wilson’s Journey of the Ants, and Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science have bounced around in my head, inextricably/apophenically connected to ideas of creativity, invention, and generative systems. Wolfram’s book, which I could follow through the first three pages of each chapter before the specific science and maths lost me, came and went – people were open to its revelations, found none, then, it seemed, he sank into crankdom. But, in his TED talk, he seems to be pulling it together – computation science (as opposed to computer science or computing) is a source of ideas, beauty, computing power. Best line:

in a sense we can use the computational universe as a way of getting mass customized creativity … to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly … and find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer or incremental evolutionary process could ever come up with.

Creativity, Chabon, and Hard & Soft Edges

Posted on December 29, 2009 by kipbot

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Just finished reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays about being a father, son, husband, former child, and writer. I read the book almost immediately and instantly, underlining lots of passages and phrases (wasn’t available in Kindle). Interestingly, it looks like guys on goodreads.com dug it less than women (might be more accurate to say several man trashed it while women gave it consistently high marks).

Beyond the observations about specifically male things, Chabon spends a great deal of time writing about how we flex our imaginations, and how we play and create as children and adults. He hits a lot of the same themes, through very different angles, as Gever Tully of the Tinkering School does in his various talks. While Tully talks about how we overprotect children and have lost the early male ritual of receiving a pocket knife, Chabon talks about the pointlessness of teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. When he rode a bike, he would disappear from his house for the entire day, exploring the neighborhood, visiting friends and just riding. Today, he feels like that has been supplanted through a fear of abductions and that kids have much less uncharted play time.

That theme of uncharted comes up throughout these essays, especially in “The Splendor of Crap”, an essay where he talks about the importance of junk culture in imagination, childhood and even adult play. I just love this passage about the old TV show The Planet of the Apes:

“There’s no doubt that the Planet of the Apes TV show was crap. Yes, the makeup was decent for its time, and the shows tried, in the dutiful manner of early seventies post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars, TV SF to address weighty issues … But it remained a knockoff of a knockoff, the sequels to sequels, worked up by veteran TV hacks to fill up the spaces between Parkay margarine ads. What’s more, it was crap that flopped, canceled after only three months.

But it had, crucially to my theory of what makes great mass art, the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders. In its very incompleteness, born of lack of budget, the loose picaresque structure, even its cancellation . . . it hinted at things beyond its own borders. There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show.”

Along these lines, he is actually rather critical of Pixar films (the first voice I’ve come across doesn’t worship every aspect of Pixar and its work). Chabon describes today’s animated movies:

The new studio-made CGI products are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete. There is no room in them for children. And so they never form the basis for my own kids’ games.

In a different essay, he makes a point that actually snapped my head out of the book. His biggest gripe about Pixar is the way they make Sid the villain in Toy Story. When Sid puts dresses on the cowboys and mixes parts and breaks the toys to see how they work, Chabon asks, isn’t he doing exactly what kids are supposed to do with toys? I had unquestioningly bought into the movie’s narrative, but after that comment, the good kid reminds me of a nerdy toy collector, keeping things MIB (mint in box), and suddenly I realize that leaving aside the ham-fisted presentation of Sid’s sadism, I actually relate much more to the dirt and grime and dark of Sid’s place than our hero kid’s room.

Not new, necessarily, to fans of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture or Steven Johnson’s Emergence, but a nice twist.

Curiosity + Triviality == Discovery

Posted on June 14, 2009 by kipbot

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Reading and thoroughly digging Steven Johnson’s Invention of Air and seeing an overlap with discussions about planning and innovation (clunky intro, but accurate).

Early in Johnson’s book, he tells the story of how we discovered the Gulf Stream. It was a convergence of vaguely, not immediately apparently, connected things. In the 1760s there were several things being observed by people engaged in undirected, scientific observation. Joseph Priestley was using the new Fahrenheit thermometer to measure ocean water temperatures at different depths and locations. He had no idea if it would add up to something, but was simply curious and observant. Benjamin Franklin had notices that there were “gulph weeds” present along certain lines of sight in the ocean, lines which had little connection to landmass or shorelines. Sailors were informally logging certain places where sailing was smoother and faster. There was also a fascination with and fear of waterspouts.

All of these things were unconnected or loosely connected, until a question about the postal system emerged: why does it take longer for letters to travel from Europe to America than it does for letters to travel in the opposite direction?

Johnson’s characterization of this intellectual convergence, says something about innovation and discovery:

[British authorities curious about this question] were lucky in another respect: the postmaster in question happened to be Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin would ultimately turn that postal mystery into one of the great scientific breakthroughs of his career: a turning point in our visualization of the macro patterns formed by ocean currents. Franklin was well-prepared for the task. As a twenty-year old, traveling back from his first voyage to London in 1726, he had recorded notes in his journal about the strange prevalence of “gulph weed” in the waters of the North Atlantic. In a letter written twenty years later, he had remarked on the slower passage westward across the Atlantic, though at the time he supposed it was attributable to the rotation of the earth.

There’s additional layers to this very compelling story (I just love Johnson’s books), but the key things of interest to me are the components of discovery and invention:

semi-directed curiosity — many of the observations that led to the discovery of the Gulf Stream, and its mechanics (which is where Priestley’s temperature measurements come in), were driven by a desire to know and measure, even in advance of a hypothesis to prove. Intelligent men were pursuing what made them curious, with the belief that that knowledge would eventually add up to something bigger.

connections of unlike things — Franklin held many phenomena and data points in his head, connecting them to each other in different ways. He was facile at it, he was rigorous in his testing of theories, but he was always making those connections. “When the British Treasury came to him with the complaint about the unreliable mail delivery schedules, Franklin was quick to suspect that the “gulph stream” [which he had been thinking about several years earlier] was the culprit.”

openness to truth in small places — “the strange prevalence of ‘gulph weed’” is the kind of detail smaller minds than Franklin’s might dismiss as trivial. On occasion of course they might be right, but Franklin had enough bandwidth and processor power to take on the apparently trivial and test it. Because he was open to truth in small places, he was able to connect small truths (which also included temperature patterns in the ocean) into a big one.

A theme that cuts across all of these is looseness of process connected to open-ness to the new. This is an occasional theme in innovation literature which talks about generosity of spirit, lateral inspiration and thinking, and the ability to quickly move in and out of modes of discourse, multiple configurations of ideas and data points.

(Image taken from http://www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org/)

Cool emergence video

Posted on June 9, 2009 by kipbot

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Very simple system: steadily controlled pouring of syrup, a moving belt, and slight adjustments to the speed of the belt. Yields different patterns and shapes, highlights the interaction of the syrup that landed and the response of the syrup feeding it.

Procedurally Generated City

Posted on May 17, 2009 by kipbot

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50 hours, a couple rules, an understanding of emergent systems, and a delicate design touch:

How deep baseball goes deep

Posted on May 16, 2009 by kipbot

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I’ve had some (middle-aged?) inflection point in my interest in baseball. I have started to crave watching it, and now go straight to the sports page (or click my kindle straight to sports) and read every Mets and Yankees article. A friend got me jazzed about baseball, by describing the intricacies of the game, and an article today about Mets center-fielder Carlos Beltran, had a great example of the intricacy of the game:

“I would love to steal a lot more bases but the thing is, I just hate getting thrown out,” he said, adding: “It’s a bad feeling as a player. I know you cannot be afraid about stealing bases, but I go by percentages. Every time I steal a base, I want to make sure that I at least have a 90 percent chance I’m going to make it.”

Against the Braves on Tuesday night, Beltran liked his odds. He noticed that the pitcher, Mike Gonzalez, would look at him only when he held the ball with a fastball grip. When Gonzalez used a slider grip, he focused on the hitter. So when Gonzalez prepared to throw an 0-1 slider to Fernando Tatis, Beltran broke for third. He slid just beneath the tag and scored the tying run on Luis Castillo’s sacrifice fly.

All the things to think about — who’s pitching, what’s the grip, where’s the infield positioned, who’s batting, how much of a lead have I built, left handed/right handed batter. Mega-cool.

Simple Fun: Nintendo Acela Awesomeness

Posted on October 3, 2008 by kipbot

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Riding to and from Washington on the Acela yesterday, we were only able to find seats in the quiet car. At 5:45 in the morning, I reminded my colleagues to bring their DSes so we could play some head-to-head games (which, sadly, I hadn’t done on the DS before).

For those who haven’t been in a quiet car on Amtrak, it’s a trip. Manna from heaven for people who need to concentrate, want to sleep, or hate the loud cell phone conversations. The self-policing, however, can be over-zealous. Two co-passengers yesterday sat behind a woman who was sitting next to a man who apparently was a loud PC-typist. In reportedly pissy tones, she grilled the percussionist-emailist about how long he planned to type, with heavy sighs, and pointed intonation. It’s a tough crowd.

But three of us are punchy with morning coffee and adrenaline and lack of sleep (It was a 7 AM train, with boarding at 6:30) and need to play Mario Kart, a competitive racing game with all the cute characters from Nintendo. In addition to racing, you pick up power-ups which can give you speed boosts, but which can also be offensive things to lob at your opponents (turtles that you trip, octopus that sprays ink on your windshield so you can’t see, and the classic banana peel). So, while we’re playing, we’re desperately trying to be quiet — whispering trash talk, creating Nintendo-appropriate equivalents of flipping the bird, celebrating wins, taunting when you’ve done something clever — it was awesome.

Better yet, though, on the way back, we played Mario Party, a game where you roll dice and move around collecting points and things, but also where the squares allow you to play mini-games (like whack a mole, connect the dots, tangoes). One of the games required you to blow into the microphone in order to knock down a wall. Hard, fast breaths were advised. I was sitting at a table with three strangers, determined to win, and blowing into the mic as discreetly (and quickly and powerfully) as I could. It was crazy awesome funny. (The scotch from my flask helped, but it was fun under any circumstances.)

Nintendo are geniuses.