Hello?

Ah, yes, South Carolina, come in. Please, have a seat. Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice. I realize you’re very busy, and I promise I won’t keep you for long, but there are a few things I think we ought to discuss regarding what you’ve been up to in the past few years. To be honest, I’m a little bit concerned about the direction you’ve been heading.

Before you ask, yes, I have seen the Joe Wilson outburst; in fact, it’s what brought you to my attention. Yes, I’m aware that he apologized, but I think you know as well as I do that he wasn’t being sincere. After all, he did refuse to take back his initial accusation of lying (even though Obama was not, in fact, lying), and has turned his new-found notoriety into over $1 million in campaign contributions. Yes, his future opponent, Rob Miller, raised the same amount, but his donations came from the grass-roots efforts of progressive groups; Wilson straight-out asked people to send him money, even saying:

“The liberal supporters of a government takeover of health care are using my very vocal opposition as an excuse to muzzle the American people who have been outspoken against their risky plan.”

despite the American people resoundingly supporting the public option. Not mention that in 2003, he voted for the reimbursement of hospitals treating illegal immigrants, so he was apparently for it before he was against it. This leads me to believe that Throwing around baseless accusations of liberal takeovers, and then politically benefiting from them, is behaviour that I’d like to think you don’t encourage.

No, I’m afraid I don’t believe this is an isolated incident. Rep. Wilson is only the latest in a line of people who you have elevated to the national stage, only for them to be exposed as, well, not the sort of person most people would want to be associated with.

Mark Sanford – After voting for Bill Clinton’s impeachment due to the Lewinski scandal and declaring his behaviour “reprehensible”, and after consistently voting against gay civil unions as a “defender of marriage,” he proceeded to have an affair using public funds, and refuses to resign over it (and now may ironically be impeached). He has admitted to “crossing the line with a handful of other women.” He found a way to argue for increasing the powers of the governor while decreasing the role of government, which is a bit suspicious at best. He formally rejected the bailout money for his state, despite his entire constituency wanting it, and agreed to take it mostly to prevent anyone else from getting it. He voted against preserving sites linked with the Underground Railroad.

Lee Atwater – Raised in Aiken and educated in Newberry, and one of the most ruthless Republican campaigners ever. Planting fake news reporters in press conferences, smear campaigns, push polling by biased pollsters, spreading false rumours about political opponents (most notably Michael Dukakis in 1988). But you probably know him best for the Southern Strategy and his belief that cutting social programs used primarily by poor and/or black communities is “doing away with the racial problem” because hey, at least it isn’t as bad as saying nigger.

Strom Thurmond – Where do I start? How about when he set the Senate record for the longest filibuster ever, in an attempt to derail the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He joined a third party ticket because of the federal government’s attempts to (gasp!) stop segregation. He proclaimed that it would take a literal army to force Southerners to admit “the nigra race.” He came out publicly against the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools. He was an old cranky racist asshole, and like all the crankiest racist-est assholes, he had an illegitimate black child the entire time.

Jim DeMint – Let’s see here… wants to ban all forms of abortion, wanted to strip funding from Berkeley because they protested a Marine Corps recruiting center (and give the money to the marines instead), added an amendment to ensure that stimulus bill money wouldn’t be used for bicycle or wilderness trails, wrote a book on how to stop America’s “slide into socialism”, stated that gay people and single mothers with live-in boyfriends shouldn’t be teachers, supports prayers in school, and ranked as the most conservative senator there is. I think you get the idea.

Caitlin Upton – Better known as Miss South Carolina 2007. Clearly your state prizes education, although I’ll discuss that in a moment.

Those guys from Borat who got in trouble for saying slavery was a good idea – That’s right, they were frat boys from USC.

Hootie and the Blowfish – OK, you didn’t elect them, but I am so blaming you for them.

Of course, that’s just the people. We still have to discuss your other inadequacies:

• The lowest birth rates and lowest rates of HPV vaccination, and highest rates of teen pregnancy, premature births and infant mortality. And 17.4% of your residents didn’t have health insurance last year. Surely your elected officials can do something about -
  

  The reason you’re not going to have a government-run health care pass the Senate, is because it would be devastating for this country. – Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC)

  If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him. – Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)

• The lowest child welfare spending in the country.
• One in three high school students still doesn’t graduate.
• No state-wide smoking ban, but you can’t buy alcohol on Sundays.
• A terrible state flag.

Frankly, it’s almost a miracle you’ve survived as long as you have.

I know change never comes quickly or easily, but I’m starting to think you haven’t even been trying. It’s no good hiding behind tradition this time; tradition is just a word for something you’ve been doing for so long that you forgot why you started. Eventually, it does get in the way of progress, and I feel that’s what’s happened to you. The rest of America is moving forward into a new era, and you stick to this “good ol’ boy, government is bad, gays are bad, blacks are bad, education is bad, diversity is bad” mentality, you are going to be left behind.

Don’t worry, I have a plan. Because we value freedom and choice, here in the “entire rest of the world,” we’d like to give each of your citizens the chance to relocate to somewhere that suits them better. For those of you who are lower or middle-class, non-white, female, non-Christian, gay or bisexual, or simply who vote Democratic, there are a wide range of other states that would be glad to take your tax dollars and provide you with services for them. For the rest of you, the clock is ticking on moving to Texas before they secede. I know it will be hard, but you’ll be rewarded with the “real America” you always wanted; an entire country of rich white dumb straight Christian Republican men, responsible for your own health, education, road system, social security, transportation, monetary system, the whole nine yards. Hey now, don’t give me that look; you wanted the government out of your life, you don’t get to just keep the bits you like and refuse to pay for the rest.

Now, I’m very busy, and I’m sure you can show yourself out. If you see Florida outside, tell him I’d like to speak to him too.

politics

Between my serious Internet activities of looking up hilarious new image macros and updating my Twitter feed, I noticed that some politician in the US talked to other politicians to tell them that people dying is a bad thing. Since I agree that people dying is indeed a bad thing, and didn’t know it would be necessary to convince people of that, I decided to read what he said. He talked a lot about, under their current system, some companies in the US make millions of dollars by letting people die, and that is really fucked up, and he wants to make sure that doesn’t happen anymore. But then he talked about how he was going to make sure, and it all fell apart. It seemed like he didn’t want to take any actual risks in fixing things; he just wanted to patch the holes in the current system until it wasn’t as bad, and reward the same companies he was complaining about, and do it all over several years, by which point a lot more people will have died from the same broken system. And his own supporters totally fell for it.

Of course, I’m talking about President Obama’s speech to Congress last night (Sept. 9th if you’re reading from the future). If it sounds like I’m being overly hard on him, well, I think he deserves it. I’ve been following the health care debate all summer, partly because I feel this is the real test of whether the Obama administration is good at anything other than giving speeches, and partly out of the same sick fascination that makes people slow down to look at car crashes. Obama said “During [the past several months], we have seen Washington at its best and its worst.” I don’t know where he’s getting the “best” from, but this is definitely the most bipartisan, hostile, reactionary and insane I’ve ever seen American politics behave. And I remember the Clinton affair!

I think what people are slowly realizing about Obama and the Democrats is that just being good at giving speeches and motivating people isn’t enough. Part of being a good leader is knowing when to compromise, when to back down, and when to take a stand and say “We’re doing this, and people on the opposition may not like it, but our citizens do and they’re the ones who we’re supposed to be doing this for.” Imagine yourself leading a group of people lost in the woods and you come to a fork in the path. One path leads to a bright sunny clearing and you can hear cars and civilization just past it, and the other leads to a dank and smelly swamp full of spikes and poisonous things. Half of your group wants to go one way and half wants to go the other. What do you do?

You could put it to a vote and take whichever path has more support, however slim. You could suggest that everyone goes which ever way they want. Or you could man up and say “We’re going towards the clearing, because that swamp is dangerous and anyone wanting to walk into it cannot be trusted to make good decisions for the rest of us.” But there are a few things I bet you wouldn’t do; you wouldn’t try to blaze a new trail directly in between the two existing trails. You wouldn’t sit at the fork in the road for months debating whether the swamp is really that bad. You wouldn’t trust the opinions of people who have been paid by the snakes and spikes to lead people down that path. And you definitely wouldn’t say “OK, let’s take the clearing path, but only after spending a lot of money and time turning the clearing into a swamp.”

The Democrats raised health care reform as an issue, and decided that instead of laying down a clear set of minimum requirements that any bill would have to include before it counted as “reform,” they kept it vague and allowed the House and Senate to fill in their own details. And predictably, the Republicans seized on that ambiguity and came out swinging with ridiculous lies, slander, and threats of death panels, government-sponsored abortions, rationing care, Medicare cuts, and socialism. When you read some of the charges levied against the proposed health care bills, it’s difficult to understand how any reasonable person could take them seriously. It would be easy to dismiss this as “Well, Americans aren’t reasonable hurr hurr”, but there’s more to it than that. People wanted a simple, clear-cut, explanation of what was wrong with the current system and why the new system would be better, and the Democrats didn’t give them one, so the Republicans did, and by the time Democrats woke up and said “Wow, people are totally believing all these lies, we should set the record straight”, it was far too late.

Obama’s speech last night was excellent; it was to the point, passionate, exposed the problems in the system and gave an understandable list of ways to solve them. If he’d given that speech in June, when the debate was just heating up, there would have been no debate at all. But he gave it in response to a solid month of right-wing drum-beating about how he will abort your children and pull the plugs on your grandmothers, and there is a very real possibility that a lot of people simply won’t believe him (including the very congressmen he was speaking to). And what do you do then? When you give a calm, rational explanation of the facts surrounding health care, and your opponent’s only retort is “he’s lying,” how do you establish that you aren’t? If people won’t listen to the facts, what will they listen to?

The health care debate is only barely about health care; everyone knows it needs fixing, and the only real debate is how many fixes each congressman can get away with supporting without losing the millions of dollars of funding provided by insurance and pharmaceutical companies. But I think this debate will answer a lot of questions about the entire American political system. Can the Democrats run an effective government when the Republicans have perfected their ability to stand in the way of progress for political gain? Do the American people really support Obama as much as they said when they voted for him, or was his victory a result of finally becoming jaded with the right wing? And the big one (in my mind), what will it take for the Democrats to stop capitulating to the right? If there is as much support for a public option as the Democrats claim, and they enjoy a majority in both the House and Senate, why do they feel the need to work with and gain the support of Republicans who have explicitly said that they will not support the bill no matter what it contains?

There are legitimate complaints to make about the proposals Obama put forward. The insurance exchange that he wants to set up to lower prices will take four years, which is a long time for a project of that to fester in Washington without being subverted. The consumer protections for insurance companies only apply if they choose to offer services in the marketplace. The co-op plan touted by Sen. Max Baucus may have been co-written by an ex-insurance industry VP. It may take years to identify and cut out all the bloat from Medicare, and until then the money to begin setting up this system is going to have to come from somewhere. Taxing insurance companies for their high-cost plans will only cause them to increase the prices of all their plans. And most worryingly, mandating that everyone must have insurance is effectively rewarding the insurance companies that have caused this entire mess, by giving them 46 million new customers. But very few Republicans are focusing on those; instead of playing the hand they’ve been dealt, they went and got a deck that hasn’t been used since the Cold War, when anything resembling socialism was the greatest perceived threat to American values. Never mind that every other industrialized country has adopted aspects of both socialism and capitalism to great benefit; giving towards a common goal for the benefit of all is apparently anti-American.

And if your head isn’t spinning yet, consider this: the constitution of Iraq provides single-payer health care for the Iraqi people.  That’s right, America invaded another country, established universal health care as a right, then denies that same right to its own citizens. And the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan is far beyond what health care in America would cost. And in supreme irony, many of the senators and congressmen who voted for the war are voting against health care reform.

Now, full disclosure; as a Canadian, I have single-payer health care through my government and I am very happy with it, and I’ve never been in a situation where I literally could not afford to go to the doctor. So I cannot wrap my head around the fact that so many Americans are so dead-set against it. I can only attribute it to the people running their country remembering the time when the Russians were the bad guys, which should mean it will get better as they make way for the younger generation to take over. I’ve been told that back when Tommy Douglas brought UHC to Canada, the conservatives made all the same arguments about cost and reduced care, and yes, even accused him of being a secret socialist. But he stuck to his guns and pushed for it, and now no politician would ever dream of repealing it, (although Harper’s been dancing on that knife-edge for a while now in the form of two-tier care). Our system isn’t perfect, but it’s miles beyond what America has, and even beyond what they’re planning.

I have friends in America, some of whom are not insured, and the idea of the most affluent country in the world failing to support them when they need it most because they’d rather spend the money on the military and corporate bailouts sends a chill down my spine. I want everyone in America to have health care, I really do. But speeches and warnings aren’t going to accomplish that, actions are, and so far their actions (or lack of them) are speaking volumes. Hundreds of people in America die every day because they cannot afford life-saving treatments, and any person who is against health care is saying that they would rather let their own citizens die than see one extra dollar added to their tax. I can’t understand that, and I really hope I won’t have to for long.

america, politics

When I moved back to Toronto, I had no interest in getting a car, and the transit system here is prohibitively expensive for someone trying to save money. So I knew that high on my list of priorities would be an apartment and a job close enough to each other that I would be able to bike between them. Thankfully I did, and after the first month of getting settled in I took to Craigslist to find some proper transportation. I figured buying a used bike and making it roadworthy would still be less expensive than buying a new bike; as it turns out, I was about as wrong as possible, and spent far too much on parts and service than I wanted to. But it has two wheels, a seat and brakes, and it gets me back and forth to work in half the time the streetcar takes, so I still think it’s money well spent. It may not start paying for itself until next summer, though.

I consider myself a cyclist; I may not have the spandex shorts or fancy repair kits or silly tiny hats, but it’s my preferred mode of transportation and I consider it vastly superior to other modes of urban transportation. Driving in downtown Toronto scares the crap out of me, but cycling has never been that bad, even though I’m right on the road with way more cars than I ever had to deal with in England. And there’s a certain comraderie and pride I feel, seeing a mass of cyclists go through an intersection and knowing that every one of those bikes is one less car on the streets.

So when I heard about the tragic death of a bike courier in my city on Monday night, I immediately jumped on the moral high ground. “How dare those brutes in cars drive around as if they own the road with reckless abandon for cyclists? This article says he was dragged for like two blocks! He probably didn’t even notice he hit the guy!” It felt good to have another way to rage against cars, but it quickly subsided as more and more information was revealed. The driver of the car turned out to be a former attorney-general of Ontario, which brought in all kinds of attention, mainly surmising what would happen to his career. But in the middle of all the reports, a few odd details jumped out at me; namely, the fact that eyewitnesses reported an “altercation” between the driver and cyclist at an intersection, and that the reason the cyclist was dragged is because he was hanging onto the side mirror.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. What could have happened to anger the cyclist so badly that he held onto the front of the car as it sped away? And how could the driver have just gone for it, knowing he was dragging someone behind him? Now, the final piece of the puzzle has been revealed; the cyclist was drunk, so much so that he probably shouldn’t have been allowed to drive a car. Suddenly the situation seems a lot clearer; drunk guy on bike gets bumped by car, gets mad, picks a fight with a car driver, car speeds off, drunk guy hangs on until he’s knocked off. And according to one theory, the swerving that slammed the cyclist into the mailboxes and trees on the side of the road may have been a result of construction closing the right lanes of the road and the cyclist holding on by the steering wheel. The driver isn’t talking to the press, and with good reason, so right now it’s all based on surveillance tapes and witnesses. It’s all a bit too early to tell.

Toronto has a strange relationship with its cyclists. The biking community is large, bike racks line all of the major streets, and there are a huge number of paths for nature riding all over the city. But the downtown core has a mere handful of actual bicycle lanes, forcing us into the way-too-small space between the curb and the vehicles tearing past us. Many drivers seem to have difficulty grasping the notion that sometimes bicycles have the right of way (particularly when we’re going straight and the car beside us is turning right). Pedestrians gleefully step off the curb directly into the path of cyclists, and then yell at us for not stopping, because apparently making sure no cars are coming is all they can handle. You can wear a helmet, use hand signals, ring your bell, and do anything you want to make yourself feel safe, but at the end of the day, you’re on a tiny metal frame surrounded by things that are faster and stronger than you, and that may or may not even be aware of you. It’s nerve-wracking to say the least, and the more you bike, the greater the odds that you’ll be hit. When you bike every day, it’s almost inevitable.

I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of cyclists try to have it both ways, thinking that taking the environmental and social high ground excludes them from those troublesome “traffic laws.” I’ve seen cyclists go through stop signs and cross walks, going down one-way streets the wrong way, and the worst one, hopping onto the sidewalk when the street isn’t accommodating enough. I can’t excuse their behaviour, other than saying that those people are bad cyclists, in the same way someone coming to a rolling stop at a stop sign is a bad driver. We all do it because we believe it’s safe to do so, but that’s where the big distinction between cars and bikes lies; how safe it is to be bad at it.

If I hit a pedestrian or cyclist on my bike, we’ll both go sprawling and get up with scrapes and cuts and a lot of swear words that I would deserve. Even if I hit a parked car, I’d merely splat against it like Wile E. Coyote and bruise my ego worse than my body. But if a car hits me, I’m dead. Period. I know that, and I bike the way I do in order to minimize the chances of that happening. All that goes out the window if car drivers only pay attention to each other. If you point a gun at me, it would be foolish for me not to get out of the way, but it would be insane for you to start firing without knowing what you might hit. If you’re behind the wheel of a car, it’s your responsibility to make sure that car doesn’t hurt anyone, not just the people inside it.

People take their cars personally. Back in May, there was a proposal to close the two-way middle lane on Jarvis St. and open up proper bike lanes. Sounds simple and probably a good idea, but it became a gigantic issue for political reasons that I still don’t understand, and combined with the (gasp!) expansion of plans for public transit and pedestrian paths, newspapers proclaimed a “war on cars” as if fewer cars on the streets is somehow a Bad Thing. Cities all over the world are starting to re-think how people navigate their cities, and accommodating them; look at what New York is doing, and then think about how ridiculous it is for Toronto to say it can’t spare five kilometers of one lane on one street for bikes.

(Meanwhile, the council quietly rejected a proposal to add bike lanes to Bloor St., one of the busiest and most vital streets in the city that has to handle way more bikes and cars than Jarvis ever will.)

Part of me hopes that an isolated incident of a drunken cyclist doesn’t become a political issue that the cycling community holds up as an example of how dangerous the streets are. This tragedy wasn’t caused by a lack of bike lanes on Bloor; it was caused by alcohol, ego, and a competition for road space that goes way beyond what vehicle you drive. But Toronto badly needs to do something for the increasing number of cyclists, and if this is what motivates change, then I suppose I can’t complain.

cycling, toronto

Among the many pictures of robots, news articles, random scraps and doodles posted on the walls of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems laboratory at the University of Sussex, there is a comic strip that has been printed off from the archives of PhD Comics. The strip overall is pretty underwhelming, as there really isn’t that much comedy to be had in post-graduate work, and recognition of similarities between your life and a situation presented in the media doesn’t make for laughs on its own. But one particular strip, I do laugh at, because it is utterly faithful to a conversation I’ve had dozens of time:

When you live and work with other students, asking what a person studies becomes the default icebreaker, as being in school is the one thing you’re guaranteed to have in common. But even among other post-grads, the more technical I got with my topic the less able I was to really communicate it. Depending on who I was talking to, I studied any of (from least to most specific) computer science, informatics, artificial intelligence, artificial life, or Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, the actual program I was enrolled in. And when summer came around, the question we got asked the most became the hardest one to answer:

“So what are you writing your dissertation on?”

Ugh. I understand why people want to know; many of my friends had serious difficulty deciding on a topic they wanted to spend four months studying, and misery loves company. But that doesn’t make it any less awkward. How do I effectively communicate what I study, and what I wrote my dissertation on, to an audience that hasn’t studied it, and may be asking over drinks in a pub where it would be silly to go as in depth as my interests allow? How do you elevator pitch a research project?

Like this.

Artificial Life

First, a bit of background. Artificial life is a field of research dealing with the simulation of life, natural processes and evolution through computer models and robotics. The hope is that by studying controlled models that emulate natural systems, we can understand more about how life and evolution work, and can hopefully find inspiration for better research into engineering. It’s still a very new field of research, with most of the work being done at various institutions in the UK and Europe over the past 20 years.

The catch, of course, is that using simulations to study natural systems is a very vague description, and the work involved in it can take any number of forms. Studying the optics and neural systems of insects to model how they navigate over large distances with such simple brains? Yup. Using evolution-inspired algorithms to “breed” microchip layouts instead of designing them by hand? Sure. Designing simple robots that have to work together to accomplish a task the same way many animals work and live? Of course. Air-traffic control inspired by the migration patterns of birds? Hell yes! In our small class of fifteen people over one year, we had people working in sensory substitution, cell modeling, neurology, robotics, swarm behaviour, evolved communication, and a bunch of topics I still don’t entirely understand. It’s such a big field, in fact, that the first thing I had to do was figure out what parts actually interested me.

My Focus: Simulating Evolution & Animal Behaviour

To decide on a dissertation topic, I looked at the dozens of journal articles I’d read through to try and remember which ones I struggled to even finish, and which ones I immediately started to analyze and dissect and critique. It turns out there was a very obvious theme; taking theories about how specific animal traits and behaviours evolved, and creating simulations that tested those theories. One of the dilemmas of putting forward hypotheses about the nature and scope of evolution is that, until recently, all we could do to confirm or reject them is study the historical and archaeological records.

Simulations provide a much more thorough and flexible method. You can start with a blank population of random agents in an environment that you control, decide how the agents are going to breed and multiply, and determine exactly what it means for one of your agents to be “successful” in your experimental world. Then just hit the Start button, and your agents are off to the races, evolving and adapting and breeding and dying for thousands of generations in a matter of days. It may take a few tries to get right, but you’re rewarded with a complete and detailed record of every single step the evolutionary process took to get to your final, hopefully working population.

Suppose I want to know why so many animals have evolved overly exaggerated body parts and other traits, even when those traits make the animal less able to survive in its natural habitat. Peacock tails are a good example. They’re so big that they impede movement both on the ground and the air, and they’re too colourful to blend in with any kind of natural surroundings. Yet the male birds evolved them, so they must offer some kind of benefit. But what?

Magnus Enquist and Anthony Arak asked exactly that, and ran an experiment to find out. They created two populations of agents; males, with a body shape and size, and females, with a simple optic system for seeing the body of the males. The females were trained and evolved based on their ability to detect males of their own species vs. males of a different body type, and the males evolved based on how easily detectable they were. It turns out that those simple conditions were enough to lead to evolved bodies with highly exaggerated features, even if those features decreased the animal’s survivability. It doesn’t answer all of the questions about how exaggerated signals influence mate choice, but it does highlight how a simple simulation can shed light on a very complex topic.

My Dissertation: Sexual vs. Natural Selection

One thing I did notice, in all of my readings, was an assumption that influenced entire paradigm of evolutionary algorithms; animals that were able to survive were always assumed to be more likely to bear offspring. But as soon as you say that out loud, you realize it isn’t true at all. Charles Darwin himself theorized that, in addition to natural selection, there was a sexual selection process taking place at the same time. While natural selection focused on the competition between members of different species for the resources needed to survive, sexual selection focused on the competition between members of the same species (usually the males) for the resources needed to reproduce; namely, the females.

There are a lot of issues that factor into whether or not a given animal is able to find a mate, bear children, and ensure that those children survive long enough to have children of their own, and not all of those issues are related to survivability. There is always a balance to be struck. If an animal’s camouflage is good it will be able to escape from predators, but if it is too good, even members of its own species won’t be able to see it, and it will die of old age before having any offspring. Good for the self, but not so good for the species. I wanted to find out where that balance was.

I ended up using a robotics platform to simulate my environment and populations, mostly because I’d worked with it during my courses and it lended itself particularly well to my experiment. The idea was to have males and females try to find each other in a simple environment; the females would evolve to send out signals that showed the male where they were, and the males would attempt to move to that spot as fast as possible. But every move that a male or female made cost energy, and the less energy a robot had, the less able it was to survive. By letting my populations evolve several times under slightly different conditions, I was hoping to find out which ones led to the robots forgoing reproduction in favour of ensuring their own survival, and which ones made them throw caution to the wind and find each other no matter the cost to themselves.

So did it work?

Kind of. They evolved alright, but due to a bit of oversight in my original model, both the males and females quickly developed an optimal strategy; sit there and do nothing. Even when the importance of reproduction was high and movement was free, nothing I could do made them evolve to any kind of interesting behaviour. But I still think there’s something there, and I got enough data about how they evolved to determine exactly what the problem was, so I plan to go back and fix it one day. If anything, my experiment highlights how important finding that balance is in real life. I did manage to get a lot of cool graphs out of it, though.

That’s probably too long for an elevator pitch, but it’s a hell of a lot shorter than my dissertation, and includes a lot more background info as well. For those of you who I told “I study robots,” I’m sorry for slightly misleading you, but now you know why I didn’t want to get into the details of what I actually studied in the middle of a party. And for the rest of you, if you ever want to see me turn into a big nerd (no, I mean way WAY bigger than I already am), just ask me about this stuff in person. I dare you.

artificial life, school