The second Grethumb gathering in The Netherlands was held at the KABK in Den Haag, in a really nice auditorium with a huge projection screen. The room was a little hard to find but Joost Rekveld, who teaches there, helped by sticking signs to the wall with pointing arrows. Eventually about 25 people found their way to the auditorium and we got started.
First off was Rudolf Penninkhof, who gave us a talk about Imagination Engines, describing the approach taken to neural networks. Rudolf had music playing in the background which was generated by their technology, and he expressed his regret that although the technology and the approach was extremely interesting and had great potential, it was not open source so you can't really dig in deep.
Rudolf had some good introductory video on the subject, some long and philosophical ones, for those interested.
Then Anne van Rossum (pronounced Ah-nuh, and yes it's a normal male name in the part of NL where he comes from) showed us a nice collection of movies about the Replicator project, which is central to his pursuit of a PhD degree. Anne told us about his adventures with this fascinating European project in which self-configuring robots are the dream they're working towards. Modules are to find each other, click together, network with each other, and form a body to accomplish some specific task. They would afterwards simply dissasemble and reassemble in another configuration.
Some of the most interesting parts of Anne's presentation were the videos and the stories about a 128x128 cell visual system that was a different kind of hardware. It was visual hardware that worked on the basis of "spikes", like when our neurons get hot and bothered and then eventually flash the accumulated energy in one shot. The fascinating effect that we saw was that only changes in pixels were registered. Imagine that looking through sunglasses from a distance makes it look exactly like the sunglasses are clear. Think about that. We saw it, and talked about how it is biologically inspired.
Finally, I got up and took the group through an accelerated history of Darwin at Home, going right into a demonstration of the program that I just got running a few days previously. I showed Bits Building Bodies which is the first application built on the basis of the fluidiom-core package I'm distilling from all the different D@H programs built in the last few years. This application represents the first application of the blind-watchmaker code that I've been developing for the last couple of months.
The demonstration showed a growing Darwin at Home body being built step-by-step over and over again, while along the top of the screen you could see the binary 00101001101011011010 genome as it is being read. The cool thing about it is that you can repeat it and watch the same building happen. It's genome building phenotype.
For the coders in the audience, I then proceeded to show the Embryology class where the blind-watchmaker annotations describe how the bits cause things to happen.
I ended off describing where I want the project to go now, as a kind of virtual world scenario where people can meet and chat while they watch things evolve. I asked them who could help me bring the evolution meme to as many people as possible.
Tamas Mahr, my Hungarian programmer friend made an insightful funny comment afterwards as we were walking downtown for a beer. He said that this binary scripting language knows no syntax errors. I thought that was a safe language to have a blind-watchmaker code with.
All in all, this was a very successful get-together, and some new faces appeared. There's a potential, according to Joost, that the Media Arts department of the University of Leiden may well be willing to host the next Greythumb NL.
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