TITLE OF PAPER: _name_of_the_paper_here_ URL OF PRESENTATION: _URL_of_powerpoint_presentation_ PRESENTED BY: _names_of_the_participants_ REPRESENTING: _name_of_the_company_they_represent_ CONFERENCE: _name_of_your_conference_here_ DATE: _date_of_your_conference_here_ LOCATION: _venue_and_room_in_venue_ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- REAL-TIME NOTES / ANNOTATIONS OF THE PAPER: {If you've contributed, add your name, e-mail & URL at the bottom} Human beings were designed to be hunter gatherers We are not designed to deal with complexity We are designed to ignore complexity. [cf. Richard Dawkins's spiel about how we are built to deal with a certain scale of reality and compelexity: 'middleworld'] The productions of the human brain cannot be understood by the human brain any more. It is inevitable that any complex systems will have loopholes. But moreover the loopholes can and will be exploited. Children (for example) are a strong loophole detection system. The sounds that your cat produce have been shaped by evolution to make humans feel guity. EVOLUTION IS PROFOUNDLY GOOD AT ADAPTING AND EXPLOITING THESE LOOPHOLES. Other examples of complex systems with loopholes (gaming the system?): Tax Law Software Frequent flier programmes There are so many inefficiences in the way that they price their flights - you can get 20,000 miles for $200 You can buy gift-cards and get miles for the gift cards to buy a money order you can put on your bank account. Health care, Medicare 1996 Telecommunications act Data is taxed less than voice, therefore people have been moving to Voice over IP and the like NBA rules Elections Full of loop-holes Redistricting Power Grid, water distribution networks bernard pivot : "target audience" - show 1130pm on fridays, cultural show, had poor ratings - made a movie about a serial killer who went after members of audience measurement panels - had very high ratings (!) because - of course - the panel members - ie. people who have the boxes or fill in the forms watched the show in disproportionately large numbers. It was about them, after all. WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT depends on which side that you're on [cf. The Invisibles] HINTS FROM NATURE (there are a number of creatures that have found loopholes in systems) Parasites Viruses Co-evolutionary arms races The main concept here is using rapid evolution to discover loopholes in extremely complex systems - either to exploit or fix those loopholes [cf. geoff cohen's talk at etech 2002] The red queen effect (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REDQUEEN.html) [what is the red queen effect? See references below - TEC] example: - tax code is constantly evolving to remove loopholes (and create new ones) - software patches - NBA changes its rules - google changes it's pagerank algorithm (the googledance) EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION The idea is that you can use the way that evolution works to design solutions to a problem in a way that can be truly creative. 1) You describe individuals in a population by a genetic string of bits (ie. 1101011000) 2) Use then test those individuals against the problem that you have (fitness function here - how well do they find and exploit the loopholes). 3) You then breed those algorithms and genetic algorithms in order to try and find individuals that are better and better at solving the problems you set them towards. DESIGNING AN OSCILLATOR USING EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION They discovered an intriguing arragment of transistors that produced an oscillating output. But he circit was not an oscillator. They have evolved a radio receiver that was picking up a signal from a nearby computer. THE VOLVED CIRCUIT HAD FOUND A LOOPHOLE IN THE EXPERIEMENTAL ARRANGEMENT. (http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/primordial.jsp) THREE EXAMPLES: Evolving challenges to a warship control system Fluid control system. A specific engineer can only test a small fraction of all possible configurations. But if you give enough generative power to a computer evolutionary grammar, then you can [lost the end of this one, sorry - TEC] "nature has no imagination" - only response to its environs, Can we identify small investments that will dramatically improve robustness? uncorelated vs corelated ruptures triple ruptures - undstranding what the correlation patterns and consequences to the system mean, and what the right repsonse might be The same approach was used to sink an unmanned submarine. They tried to find pathological configurations for the navigational controller. "It's safe - because it's been engineered" - It's the opposite - it's precisely NOT safe BECAUSE it's been engineered rather than evolved. EVOLVING HACKER SCRIPTS Script kiddies download scripts and use them without necessarily understanding them. - build a grammar to generate scripts from the top down: from the goals of the hacker - test the scripts on simulated (fast) or real system - fitness is absence of evidence in log files - select and recombine (commands, sequence, timing) The result - simple scripts that are difficult to detect EVOLVING GOOGLE BOMBS [He's going to get approached by spammers and given enormous amounts of money in order to do this thing for people. He should just retire now. Evil.] [how do we evolve our HUMAN (augemented) responses to constructing meaning in order to compete... google is one of our primary meaningmakers... it can be attacked by 'out of control' systems] - "miserable failure" = george w. bush example - exact page rank algorithm/mechanism is unknown, can a google bomb hack be evolved? - recombinant fitness: select fitness, create new generation, breed from the best: fitness evolves over generations - uses a model of google to measure fitness not real google - "fitness function" - graphic: linknets / graphs of 'googlebombs': toplogical solutions that did the job... CONCLUSION: "next time you fly, you're safe" because it's been engineered ;-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- REFERENCES: {as documents / sites are referenced add them below} ¥ richard dawkins on how we evolved do deal with a certain scale of complexity: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A1023256 ¥ red queen effect: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REDQUEEN.html ¥ Red Queen Effect - McKinsey article - http://gemini.tntech.edu/~mwmcrae/esre95.html ¥ the googledance: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/27/221829/873 ¥ http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/primordial.jsp ¥ Circuit Evolution - http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992732 ¥ Grammatical Man: - this is problematic - if you post it will you remove the e-mail addresses of people, so we don't get spammed. This is really really really importnat. <== Tom or Matt? [TFS: Ok. Should the understanding be that the email addresses be totally removed? Some people want attribution, so it's kind of tricky.] How about we put urls as well as emails then the links can remain. It works for me... Does that work for you? Well you should put your URL in the contributors bit anyway... True. Partly I was trying to avoid spending the time mailing everyone with email bounceback by making it clear that they could get the files from my blog. (not that it's that big of a deal) E-mail bounceback is supposed to be a cut and paste job. Get the addresses once because they've already been formatted appropriately (ie. comma separated addresses). But people are avoiding putting their addresses in clearly because they might get spammed. [TFS: I think that we should assume that all of this is public, but perhaps we should leave room for information which will be removed pre-post] [TFS: Or we could use a REMOVE flag next to information which we want removed before posting] [PS: i'm obfuscating min b/c the last subethaedit person said they were posting it on the web. i am happy leaving it plain.] [TFS: I'LL BE POSTING THIS ONLINE HERE http://trevor.typepad.com/blog/2004/02/oreilly_emergin.html ] [TFS: SO THESE EMAILS WILL BE REMOVED BEFORE POSTING. BUT ADD YOUR URL TO CONTRIBUTORS IF YOU WANT ATTRIBUTION] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTRIBUTORS: {add your name, e-mail address and URL below} Tom Coates, http://www.plasticbag.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- E-MAIL BOUNCEBACK: {add your e-mail address separated by commas} ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ON / KEY TO THIS TEMPLATE: A headline (like a field in a database) will be CAPITALISED - This differentiates from the text that follows A variable that you can change will be surrounded by _underscores_ - Spaces in variables are also replaced with under_scores - This allows people to select the whole variable with a simple double-click A tool-tip is lower case and surrounded by {curly brackets} - These supply helpful contextual information. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright shared between all the participants unless otherwise stated.