Computational Thinking: Lecture 8: Thinking

Computational Thinking

Joel Gethin Lewis

Lecture 8: Thinking

Seymour Papert was interested in learning theories - especially in how computers could make a difference in how children learn. Logo was the first computer language that I encountered as a child - all based around drawing with a Turtle.
Papert pioneered the idea of Microworlds - places where you could safely experiment to think about how to change the future, rather than train children for the jobs of today.
Alan Kay was inspired by Papert and others and went on to pioneer thinking around Object Orientated programming and Overlapping Window Graphical User Interfaces both at Xerox Parc.
Three great talks by Kay: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental, Normal Considered Harmful and Education That Takes Us To The 22nd Century.

Conway's Game of Life was invented by John Conway in 1970. Conway created it to simulate simple biological life with four rules.
It turns out you can even make Game of Life inside of Game of Life.
There was an existing field called Cellular Automata which began in the 1940's. Nils Aall Barricelli was a pioneer in this area. A demonstration of his work.
Stephen Wolfram did further work on CA's in the 1980's discovering several interesting systems - including Rule 30 (which is unpredictable) and Rule 110 (which has been proven to be Turing complete).
There is also The Game, which I just lost (again).

Boids was an artifical life system developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. It simulated realistic flocking with just three simple rules. Compare the simulation to this murmuration.
Evolved Virtual Creatures was a film created by Karl Sims in 1994 that showed how virtual creatures could evolve the ability to walk.
Both are examples of emergence - or the idea that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts".

Joscha Bach is a researcher in Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence.
He's done a series of talks at the annual Chaos Communication Congress.
My favourite talk of his is titled "Machine Dreams - Dreaming Machines" is concerned with the idea that the basis of the entire universe is computational. His talk discusses a computational approach to Epistemology (what the fuck?), Metaphysics (why the fuck?) and finally Ontology (the fuck?).

Pace layering is Stewart Brand's six layered framework for how a healthy society works.
Pace layering grew out of Brand's thinking that he developed for his book "How Buildings Learn".
This grew out of Frank Duffy's work on Shearing Layers.
Christopher Alexander's book "A Pattern Language" which proposed ways of thinking in a variety of fields, as a way of helping people solve very large complex problems.
Brand argues that it is Art's responsibility to experiment in all areas, in order to test the future and create ways of thinking about new problems or opportunities.
An example of this would be MC Escher's collaboration with Rodger Penrose. Bonus: Escher sentences.

I am a Systems Artist. I make systems that people interact with to make new things.
I want to re-establish the Digital Commons, and eventually the Analogue one.
Everywhere uses solar powered computers to allow people to make their own networks and to put content in the real world around them via Augmented Reality.
Another Sky is a global scale sculpture that creates a new ecosystem in the sky above our heads, fed by interaction with a an augmented reality layer based on the topography of the planet, inverted.