{"id":4023,"date":"2024-07-20T14:19:15","date_gmt":"2024-07-20T18:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/?p=4023"},"modified":"2024-07-20T14:19:15","modified_gmt":"2024-07-20T18:19:15","slug":"aunt-hillary-and-the-anteater","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/2024\/07\/20\/aunt-hillary-and-the-anteater\/","title":{"rendered":"Aunt Hillary and the Anteater"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft  wp-image-4021\" src=\"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Aunt-Hillary-and-the-Anteater-Fig2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"166\" srcset=\"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Aunt-Hillary-and-the-Anteater-Fig2.jpg 500w, https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Aunt-Hillary-and-the-Anteater-Fig2-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/>In this moment when the collective actions of humans seem to be hurtling towards several cataclysms (burning up the planet, ending the American Experiment), I am reminded of a powerful image that invaded my psyche some 45 years ago.\u00a0 It was from Douglas Hofstadter\u2019s magnum opus, <em>G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach<\/em> (1979) and concerned his investigation of what became popularized as \u201cemergent behavior\u201d and \u201cself-organization.\u201d\u00a0 This was in the early days of chaos theory and Holland\u2019s emerging complexity theory.\u00a0 Conway\u2019s artificial life cellular automaton, the Game of Life, was the screen saver on countless computer terminals and burgeoning personal computers.\u00a0 It was also the time when neural nets were beginning to capture the imagination of machine learning researchers among the artificial intelligence community.<\/p>\n<p>Hofstadter\u2019s aim was to explore these ideas as they related to understanding the brain and he used the vehicle of an ant colony.<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Aunt-Hillary-and-the-Anteater-240717.pdf\">Aunt Hillary and the Anteater<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Also see the excerpt <a href=\"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Aunt-Hillary-Ant-Fugue-GEB-1979.pdf\">Ant Fugue<\/a> (2.5 MB) and the <em>Atlantic<\/em> article \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Aunt-Hillary-What-the-Microsoft-Outage-Reveals.pdf\">What the Microsoft Outage Reveals<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this moment when the collective actions of humans seem to be hurtling towards several cataclysms (burning up the planet, ending the American Experiment), I am reminded of a powerful image that invaded my psyche some 45 years ago.\u00a0 It was from Douglas Hofstadter\u2019s magnum opus, G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach (1979) and concerned his investigation of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[262,267],"class_list":["post-4023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-voices","tag-douglas-hofstadter","tag-emergent-behavior"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4023"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4024,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4023\/revisions\/4024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josmfs.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}