Things ain't what they were...

A friend was telling me the other day, that he was wasting all his time watching Dragonballs. DRAGONBALLS!! Of all things! And it got me thinking of today's cartoons, and how they have become the mindless talking heads and the excessively 'cute n cuddly' creatures. Look at POKEMON, I cant make any sense of it, but all the kids are obsessed with it. There is some kind of card game too. Oh, how I miss Topcat and Bugs Bunny. Those were real cool cartoons. I even like Dexter's Lab and Samurai Jack which are somewhat recent and Simpsons of course (I think it is for grownups). I guess I'm just getting old, but the friend I talked about is older than me :)

The Wisdom of Age

It’s been a nice week, with the new students coming and I being able to delude them into considering me as a wise senior. It is always nice to meet new people; with all their enthusiasm and exuberance. And succeed in getting them to look up to you (wish it would stay that way). I think this year I will extend all my help in making the new students feel right at home, especially the girls and there are quite a few this time.

Also, today I watched some random tamil movie which had Bhavana in it. It made me an instant fan of her. I guess it takes a tamil movie to make a mallu actress appealing. After the movie me and my friend went for a coffee and ended up talking about school, life, love, girls and almost everything under the sun till 1:00 am. 'Twas time well spent (especially when I have one month left for GRE).

Emergence

Why do birds fly in formations? Why do wolves hunt in packs? How does the queen ant direct the activities of the entire colony?

Are birds so very intelligent that they communicate among themselves, decide on a leader and then fly in a specific formation? It has been seen that an individual bird is not capable of planning such a complicated process. These phenomena are nowadays termed emergent behavior, where the individual units are simple, yet the overall system is extremely complex.

The most famous example of an artificially created emergent behavior is the Conway’s Game of Life. You can get an interactive introduction to it on this MIT website. Other examples include the stock market, where there is no single specific global leader or controller and yet the prices remain stable; the internet where any website can be created anywhere and yet they are all reachable from any point. Basically, it has been argued that every complex system can be explained using a simple set of rules.

Another related topic is the Cellular Automata, which is an arrangement of finite/infinite units and the behavior of each unit is decide only by its immediate neighbors. Thus the Game of Life is an example of a Cellular Automation. It has been found that using very simple rules, random numbers can be generated (a very difficult problem for deterministic computer systems) which passes all standard tests for randomness.

These surprising results have prompted people to question whether nature is truly as complex as imagined or whether it is made up of simpler rules which we are unable to find. In his book, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin tries to explain the physical world using these emergent properties. And Stephen Wolfram in his controversial book, A New Kind of Science, studies Cellular Automata and suggests that existing methods of mathematics and the sciences are inadequate to explain certain properties.

For a good introduction to Emergent Behavior and Cellular Automata you can look them up on Wikipedia