John Rieffel

Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory

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It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill...I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read - 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.'... The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage Charles Babbage in a letter to Tennyson about his poem "Emily", which ends with the lines: "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born" (Thanks to "The Code Book", by Simon Singh) "The Biological Isn't Logical" Design tends to follow the leading technical products of its period; in an age of aviation, even pencil-sharpeners are streamlined. Given this longstanding trend, the coming bio-genetic technical revolution should produce a biomorphic epoch in 21st century design. But the living world was not designed by a teleological, rationalist, reductionist process. The living world grew irrationally through non-systematic, genetic exploration of niche possibilities, pruned back by natural selection and occasional massive disasters. So if you're building distributed networks, learn from crabgrass. From The Viridian Design Principles 1.0 Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Francis Crick (via Dan Dennet)

I have also recently been thinking about what I like to call the "Horatio Principle" (After the quotation from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philsophy"). It is the notion that the real world contains more interesting solutions than those that can be derived via simulation. In a sense it can be considered a corollary of Jakobi's "Reality Gap".

Ultimately, I'd like my work to lead to a machine which can automatically design and build functioning robots.