Electric Sheep on Ubuntu Linux 17.10
blog.openbloc.fr
blog.openbloc.fr
It took less time to read the papers than it took to stare at the screen all day tripping out and wondering, but I like to do both.
The Flame Algorithm
Flames are algorithmically generated images and animations. The software was originally written in 1992 and released as open source, aka free software. Over the years it has been greatly expanded, and is now widely used to create art and special effects. The shape and color of each image is specified by a long string of numbers - a genetic code of sorts.
The Fractal Flame Algorithm
Evolution and Collective Intelligence of the Electric Sheep
http://draves.org/aoae07/draves-aoae07.pdf
The Electric Sheep and their Dreams in High Fidelity
http://draves.org/npar06/npar06draves.pdf
infinite evolving crowdsourced artwork
https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep
Copyright Spotworks LLC GPL2 Licensed see https://github.com/scottdraves/electricsheep/blob/master/cli...
2015.05 moved from code.google.com repo 2011.01.30 based on revision 1546 on sf.net
The Electric Sheep is a cyborg mind. It harnesses the collective intelligence of 450,000 computers and people to create abstract art with mathematics and Darwinian evolution. The result is seamless, organic, and infinite. See also http://electricsheep.org and http://scottdraves.com .
The rendering engine is a separate project at https://github.com/scottdraves/flam3
I find it amusing that Electric Sheep must be compiled by the user for Ubuntu (the "user friendly" Linux) yet is one-click-easy to install on Windows and macOS, and is installed by default on Slackware.
A .deb is basically a tarball with some manifest information. You can build 'non-standard' packages in this way (also see FPM[1] - which will do this and more rpm etc). However if you ever want to upstream a package, there are guidelines that debian produce around this.
Right now I'm reading Atwood's Madd Adam triology - it's shaping up to be some of the best dystopien sf I've read in a long while.
And for something a bit different I stumbled across in a thrift shop: "Canal Dreams" by Ian Banks.
Oh, and Gibson's latest: "The Peripheral".
Second the recommendedation for Richard Morgan, especially "Thirteen / Black Man" and "Broken Angels" (I accidentally started with this, book two of a triology, but actually think it stands well.on its own. The lack of exposition in the first chapter turns it in to a bit of a mystery book (who is this main character anyway?)).
Finally, a must-read (preferably the sci-fi masterworks edition with a foreword by Gibson): Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination / Tiger, Tiger".
If you want another sci-fi detective noir, Altered Carbon fits the bill.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/33399?sort_order=rele...
(PS: does 33399 have some relevance to PKD? Paranoia seems relevant!)
The irony is that Philip K Dick was offered a whole lot of money to write another book entitled "Blade Runner" based on the screenplay of the movie, but he insisted on maintaining the integrity and title of his original book DADOES by re-issuing it with a reference to the (quite different) movie on the cover, instead of rewriting another book called "Blade Runner" based on the movie based on his own book. (Harrumph!) He would have made a lot more money by selling out that way, but he steadfastly refused to do it.
However, fortunately for us, after his death, his friend and fellow SF writer K. W. Jeter (who also wrote an excellent cyberpunk novel Dr. Adder which Dick loved) sold out on his behalf and wrote those three books based on the movie (which referenced famous lines like "Wake up. Time to die!").
They explore the question of what the fuck happened after they went flying off into the wilderness (that unused footage from The Shining), and whether Decker was a replicant. (Who would have guessed??!)
So even though they're not written by PKD, or directly based on his original all time great book, and not as authentic and mentally twisted as a real PKD book, they are still pretty excellent and twisted in their own right, and well worth reading. They're based on an excellent movie based on an epic book, and written by a friend and author PKD respected, who's written some other excellent books.
And while you're at it, check out Dr. Adder and K. W. Jeter's other books too! Especially Noire, for its hi-fi cables made out of the still-living spinal columns of copyright violators. (I suggest you buy a copy and don't pirate it!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2:_The_Edge_of_Hu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_3:_Replicant_Nigh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_4:_Eye_and_Talon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Adder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_(novel)
http://www.indiewire.com/2015/12/watch-u-s-theatrical-ending...
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jeter_k_w
Jeter's most significant sf may lie in the thematic trilogy comprising Dr Adder (1984) – his first novel (written 1972), long left unpublished because of its sometimes turgid violence – The Glass Hammer (1985) and Death Arms (1987); Alligator Alley (1989) as by Dr Adder with Mink Mole (see Ferret) is a distant outrider to the sequence. Philip K Dick had read Dr Adder in manuscript and for years advocated it; and it is clear why. Though the novel clearly prefigures the under-soil airlessness of the best urban Cyberpunk, it even more clearly serves as a bridge between the defiant reality-testing Paranoia of Dick's characters and the doomed realpolitiking of the surrendered souls who dwell in post-1984 urban sprawls (see Cities). In each of these convoluted tales, set in a devastated Somme-like Near-Future America, Jeter's characters seem to vacillate between the sf traditions of resistance and cyberpunk quietism. In worlds like these, the intermittent flashes of sf imagery or content are unlasting consolations.
[...]
Much of his later work has consisted of Sharecrop contributions to various proprietorial worlds, including Alien Nation, Star Trek, Star Wars [for titles see Checklist]; of some interest in this output are his Ties – they are also in a sense Sequels by Another Hand – to the film Blade Runner (1982), comprising Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995), Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996) and Blade Runner 4: Eye & Talon (2000), and making use of some original Philip K Dick material. The sense of ebbing enthusiasm generated by these various Ties is not markedly altered by Jeter's most recent singleton, Noir (1998), a Cyberpunk novel whose detective protagonist's main job is killing copyright violators so that their still-living spinal cords may be incorporated into hi-fi system cables; the irreality of this concept, and the bad-joke names that proliferate throughout, are somewhat stiffened up by the constant interactive presence of the already dead, a Philip K Dick effect, as filtered through Jeter's own intensely florid sensibility. [JC]
Also, the movie for Ready Player One is coming out and the book is alright, too. Though it's a little heavy on the hipster/nostalgic wankery, it's still a good story. Kept me reading. It's also an interesting take on overpopulation, class divides, and the future role of VR. Steven Spielberg is directing the movie, so I'm kind of looking forward to seeing it.[1][2] ---
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
http://www.turing.org.uk/book/
So did Tom Jenning's excellent review of the first edition of that book from 2001. After Tom wrote that review, Andrew Hodges later published an even more comprehensive second edition of that book, on which the movie "The Imitation Game" was loosely based.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_Game
Tom Jennings also created FidoNet, published Homocore, and built an electromechanical paper tape driven storytelling machine art installation that incorporated parts of the book and his review.
https://www.amazon.com/review/R2IDYFOKQX8C9T
“. . . Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-Victorian England; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a ‘pure’ mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
Aside from creating the most influential protocol for networking computer bulletin boards, Jennings built Wired magazine's first internet presence, wrote the portable BIOS that led to Phoenix Technologies BIOS, ran an early regional internet service provider, The Little Garden (later incorporated as TLGnet, Inc), and maintains an informal archive of Cold War science and technology.
http://machineproject.com/files/press/tomjennings_artus.php
Jennings's installation presents a conglomerated contraption of antique message devices, connected by cords and wires and plugs as in an assembly line, all intertwined like the participants in an orgy. A button placed before the piece invites the viewer to push it, and doing so the machines come alive. A typewriter with no typist loudly manufactures the story. On the page a disconnected segment of inky narrative describes a boyhood in which Turing spoke with his too-high voice much too often, plus another cryptic bit about his grave disappointment concerning his treatment by the British government and something about two men, random fragments randomly served by a database. Lights blink on another quaint little device and holes are punched in various rolls of tape that unspool onto the floor, adding to the already significant pile of coiled dotted paper. A final note is struck by an odd, tape-recorder-like noisemaker that seems to bespeak, unintelligibly, a further translation of the story generated by these melancholy machines.
http://machineproject.com/2003/events/tom-jennings-story-tel...
Story Teller, an installation by Tom Jennings, is an experimental narrative about British mathematician/code breaker Alan Turing told using obsolete media — perforated paper tape, teletype, phoneme-speech, glowing phosphors and ink-on-paper.
http://worldpowersystems.com/products/Story-Teller/
The logical mechanisms within Story Teller are in fact exactly "Turing Machines", and through no coincidence its symbols are stored on data-storage perforated tape of his era; with only 128 possible symbols on the tape (though any number of them, and in any order) Story Teller tells a story of Turing, in text, speech, and time. The components of the configuration used for the Turing story are the Model 3 Tape Reader, the Model 31 Vocalizer, the Gallery Controller, and a Teletype Corporation Model 28 teletype, suitably modified to work in the Story Teller system. Other configurations, such as for speech setup only, are possible.
Hodges mentioned in personal email we exchanged that there's some conspiracy theorist who was spreading unsubstantiated rumors that Turing didn't actually commit suicide. And then of course there's another whack job conspiracy theorist jackass's reprehensible homophobic essay "Abusing Alan Turing" which you can search for but I won't link to.
If you're getting your information from that guy (and I certainly hope by "source documents" you don't mean his blog), then I suggest you read some of the other things he's written to get an idea of what kind of a person you're getting your information from. (Hint: add "blacks", "low IQ", "violent" to your search query.)
If instead you like reading actual source documents and the testimony of people who knew Alan Turing first hand, the preface to The Collected Works of A.M. Turing: Morphogenesis (P. T. Saunders, Editor) was written by P. N. Furbank, his close friend and legal executor, and explicitly endorses Hodge's book in a good light:
"Indeed, with the aid of Andrew Hodges's excellent biography, A.M. Turing: the Enigma, even non-mathematicians like myself have some idea of how his idea of a "universal machine": arose - as a sort of byproduct of a paper answering Hilbert's "Entscheidungsproblem"." -P. N. Furbank
I typed in the preface to Morphogenesis, and scanned the drawing inside the front cover by Alan Turing's mother of her son watching the daisies grow:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670473
http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/Turing/Morphogenesis.txt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._N._Furbank
If for some irrational reason you choose to believe in the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design, then you might not like to hear what Turing thought about that, which P. T. Saunders mentions in the foreword to Turing's collected works, citing what Hodges wrote about and quoted Robin Gandy saying in his "excellent biography":
For Turing, however, the fundamental problem of biology had always been to account for pattern and form, and the dramatic progress that was being made at that time in genetics did not alter his view. And because he believed that the solution was to be found in physics and chemistry it was to these subjects and the sort of mathematics that could be applied to them that he turned. In my view, he was right, but even someone who disagrees must be impressed by the way in which he went directly to what he saw as the most important problem and set out to attack it with the tools that he judged appropriate to the task, rather than those which were easiest to hand or which others were already using. What is more, he understood the full significance of the problem in a way that many biologists did not and still do not. We can see this in the joint manuscript with Wardlaw which is included in this volume, but it is clear just from the comment he made to Robin Gandy (Hodges 1983, p. 431) that his new ideas were "intended to defeat the argument from design".
Hodge appears to have Turing as an "out and proud" homosexual (eg https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/revie... "saw no reason why he should hide his homosexuality"), yet his fiancée -- whom he also worked with -- who he spent so much of his time with had to be told in a letter of his "tendencies". If he didn't hide his homosexuality how did his colleague & fiancée not know, or at least how did Turing suppose she didn't know and so need to write the letter.
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB2e9R7bXCk has an interview with Clarke, and some other colleagues, who say Turing wasn't known by them until later to be homosexual.
Turing appears to have had intimate affection for Clarke, perhaps she was intended by him as a "beard" but it seems as likely from what I've seen that he was bisexual?
Stepping sideways to consider Furbank's endorsement of Hodge. If Hodge were using Turing to attempt to push an idealised homosexual image then it seems -- reading _a_lot_ between the lines -- that perhaps would also be seen as beneficial to Furbank (who I read was a good friend of Forster, whom Hodge tells me in a pamphlet was a closet homosexual, http://www.outgay.co.uk/wdg4.html) either for himself or for his associates.
I'll reiterate, I haven't read exhaustively on this, but what little I have read seems to put Turing's character at odds with [again, what little I've seen of] Hodge's presentation of him. It's like you told me there's no fouling in soccer and the first media that came up in a search was about how there's so much fouling in soccer; it would make me suspect you were perhaps presenting things for other purposes than merely to show the truth.
Thanks for your post. I'm interested if you have more to add.
---
Looking back at bookmarks I see that https://www.csh.rit.edu/~jon/text/papers/turing/, http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=54 were sources I used for general biography previously. I can't recollect exactly but I imagine I read maybe 10 or 20 different sources, including Hodge (particularly lots of this, http://www.turing.org.uk/scrapbook/index.html), on the subject.
[1] https://nebulas.sfwa.org/ [2] http://www.thehugoawards.org/
I highly recommend them both.
At one point I though you'd completely changed the algorithm and put in a new rendering engine or something, because it started doing stuff like I'd never seen it do anything like before.
But it kept on doing even more stuff like I'd never seen it do anything like before, so I asked you about it, and you said no you hadn't rewritten it, and what it looks like is out of your hands and no longer under your control at this point.
Edit: you’re Scott. I had no idea :) Much respect and thank you for all the work you did on the project! My kids are getting installs soon.
This is a windows tool that works sufficiently well with wine. https://sourceforge.net/projects/apophysis7x/
Maybe I'd be happier if there were a 'mine bitcoin' option instead?
https://www.cmu.edu/homepage/creativity/2012/winter/spot-on....
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aw/people.html
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/69
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disast...
> The vendor was notified on November 18, 2005. The vendor was extremely responsive and cooperative in regards to these security issues. All issues are fixed in the CVS HEAD of Electric Sheep client development and will be included in the next release.
that's not remote code execution and in a 12 year old version that was fixed right away.