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John Rieffel
DEMO Lab, Brandeis University
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It must be manifest that if this were true, the population
of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest that in
the next edition of your poem you have it read -
'Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.'...
The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I
believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.
I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage in a letter to Tennyson about his poem "Emily",
which ends with the lines: "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one
is born"
(Thanks to "The Code Book", by Simon Singh)
"The Biological Isn't Logical"
Design tends to follow the leading technical products of
its period; in an age of aviation, even pencil-sharpeners
are streamlined. Given this longstanding trend, the
coming bio-genetic technical revolution should produce a
biomorphic epoch in 21st century design. But the living
world was not designed by a teleological, rationalist,
reductionist process. The living world grew irrationally
through non-systematic, genetic exploration of niche
possibilities, pruned back by natural selection and
occasional massive disasters. So if you're building
distributed networks, learn from crabgrass.
From The Viridian Design Principles 1.0
Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.
Francis Crick (via Dan Dennet)
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I am a PhD. Student in Jordan Pollack's DEMO Lab. My
research interests include (but aren't limited to)
Co-Evolutionary Learning, Evolution of Robot Morphologies
and Brains, Ontogeny and Embryology as Paradigms for
Automated Design and Assembly, and Artificial
Chemistries.
Most recently, I have been working on issues of buildability in
Evolutionary Design -
that is, how to ensure that evolved designs can be
assembled in the real world.
I have also recently been thinking about what I like to call the "Horatio Principle" (After the quotation from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philsophy"). It is the notion that the real world contains more interesting solutions than those that can be derived via simulation. In a sense it can be considered a corollary of Jakobi's "Reality Gap".
Ultimately, I'd like my
work to lead to a machine which can automatically
design and build functioning robots.
Recent Work:
Publications
My Courses:
Spring 2002, Spring 2003, Spring 2004, Spring 2005: Head Teaching Assistant for CoSi 21B Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
My CV (pdf)
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