Ants Podcast

A couple of days ago multiagent.com introduced a new podcast on Ants and the Economy, and then briefly explains why "anyone who thinks that a system is robust simply because it is bio-inspired is mistaken".If you have around an hour and are interested in multiagent systems I'd recommend listen this podcast. Deborah M Gordon's explanations are clear and interesting, and Russ Roberts's comments make the podcast more interesting.

DARPA and RoboCup

"DARPA Selects SRI International to Lead Development of PLATO, a Machine Learning System that Could Launch a New Field of Research". What is PLATO? "The PLATO system will be designed to accept natural instruction, determine why it is being told this information, reason about the implication of the instruction in the context of what it already knows, and reflect upon it to further refine it when necessary. The highly modular PLATO system will be accessible to anyone interested in trying out new learning modules. Researchers and developers can choose to replace single components or the entire system". Apparently, RoboCup soccer will be one of the testbeds of PLATO, and I think this should be interesting to RoboCupers like me.

Emergence

Yesterday, multiagent.com had a post about a funny podcast on emergence. The podcast is around an hour, and has four parts. First, it starts with an introduction about fireflies. Then it talks about emergence in ant colonies, in my opinion is the best part of the podcast. And then, it discusses emergence in market price, market place, cities, and google rank system and etc., and in brief the difference between this kind of emergence and what we see in ant colonies - man has understanding of the whole system and can deliberately change it. And the last part talks about emergence in brain, the activity of teeny cells leads to consciousnesses and an interview with Cristof Koch. I would recommend if you have time, enjoy this nice podcast.

New blog

Finally, I moved from MS Live blog service, for three reasons. First, that big ugly advert. Second, heavy pages and poor editor - at least wasn't FireFox friendly. Third, for a while had a problem with my version of FF, so I had to use another browser, and that's why I didn't update it for a long time.