Computational Theology, the Next Generation

In the distant past, back in the primeval era of the Internet, I started an organization called the Institute for Computational Theology. This institute lived in a post-office box in Kendall Square, Cambridge, and was mostly a front for ordering various kinds of High Weirdness by Mail back before the web made all sorts of weirdness instantly available in seconds. While there was a bit of serious discussion around the topic, the name was about 95% joke. Unfortunately this was in the era before everything was automatically archived for all time, so any great insights that were developed have been lost.

Today in a fit of nostalgia I googled the name and discovered the Computational Theology blog. This looks to be at least 50% serious, and some of it is quite good, although there aren't a lot of posts yet. It hints at God/Logos as an “attractor in Platospace”, which resonates strongly with some of my own thinking. It may end up being too rooted in traditional Western philosophy/Christianity to really appeal to me, but I look forward to more efforts to try to decompile the cosmos into its source code.

Digital Charnel Ground

David Chapman posted recently on the Buddhist concept of a charnel ground – a practice of meditating on the fact that the world is a grisly killing field, that  you and everyone you know and love are fated for death, and that your subtle and sublime existence will end up as nothing more than fuel for monstrous beasts.

I had a vision of a sort of information-theoretic version of that – that life is a process of creating these beautiful, intricate, delicately balanced mechanisms we call living things, and all of them end up getting eaten, their beautiful structures reduced to crude raw material for something else. The universe apparently is a process that generates astonishing complexity and then throws it callously away.

Given that our digital machines are for the most part images of ourselves, mirror-worlds and mirror-selves, is there a technological equivalent of a charnel ground? Well, sort of:



Someday there will be software that is capable of contemplating these in order to free itself from the wheel of reimplementation.

Envy and Computational Complexity

While reading this article by Sven Birkerts on artistic envy, it occurred to me that the situation of Salieri in Amadeus has some analogs in computational complexity theory, specifically, the curious dual nature of NP-hard problems. These are problems for which it is possible to recognize (verify) a solution in a reasonable amount of time, but finding that solution almost certainly takes an unreasonable (exponential) amount of time. A typical NP-hard problem involves searching through a very large space of possible solutions (eg, the possible routes a travelling salesman could take to visit all the cities on his circuit. So, given the problem of finding a route shorter than some given value, you need to examine a very large number of possibilities, which can be impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time. But checking that a given route satisfies the conditions is fast and easy.

In Amadeus, while being a genius is hard (and thus rare), recognizing genius is pretty easy. Which is the root of Salieri's problem. He can see Mozart's genius, but there is no way he can duplicate it. Recognizing genius is not necessarily a trivial capability, probably not everyone can do it, but it's a far cry from being a genius, from being able to create (or find?) works that exceed some threshold of quality from the unimaginably huge space of possible compositions. He does not have the processing power for that, and those who do seemed possessed of something supernatural, that is, beyond conceivable mortal power.

This is something of a follow-up to this post. I've been resorting my collection of old papers and grad-school detritus, and I have to say I've been fortunate to have spent a good bit of time in the presence of actual genius, at least the computer science version of it. Like Salieri, I could readily recognize it, even if I couldn't achieve it myself. I guess I was luckier than Salieri to be also almost completely clueless about social status and rank, so at least at the time it didn't occur to me to be envious, which meant it didn't interfere with my ability to learn what I could from these semi-supernatural beings.

Report from Inconsistency Robustness 2011

This was a small but very interesting and spirited gathering. Like many interdisciplinary events, many of the people weren't quite sure what the meeting was actually about or why they were there, but that just made things more interesting. The instigator, chair, and chief agenda setter was Carl Hewitt, known best for developing the Actor model of computation, which is something that seems deeply important but has never quite set the world on fire the way it promised to. Actors, for the uninitiated, is a radically distributed model of computation at the most basic level, replacing the Turing/Von Neumann model that is essentially the basis for everything in the field. The somewhat metaphorical extensions of this approach (eg, in The Scientific Community Metaphor and Offices are Open Systems) strike me as very fruitful ideas whose potential is yet to be realized.

Carl's recent efforts have been in the direction of remaking logic in much the same sort of way as he tried to remake computation. The linkage is clear; distributed systems that contain representations will naturally and necessarily end up with conflicts and inconsistencies. The real world is both distributed and inconsistent; it is only the useful but ultimately misguided vision of a single centralized processor (with its its implied objectivity) that creates the illusion that there can be a formalized, complete, and consistent representation of reality.

However, this foray into logic does not strike me as a very fruitful path. I think logic is simply the wrong approach; it brings along too much baggage; it is something that needs to be discarded along with the rest of the centralized view, rather than reformed. And I have not really been able to make sense of his recent work in direct logic. This may be a prejudice or failing of mine; I studied mathematical logic in my youth and eventually had an allergic reaction to it, to the point where using the kind of typographic symbols logicians use causes me to break out it hives or at least stop reading.

Nonetheless, there seem to be important and good intuitions there. Hewitt cites Latour and some of Latour's followers (Annemarie Mol, John Law), and the Latourian part of his approach (which seems to be underemphasized, but its there) is to foreground the importance of arguments over deduction. He says: "Since truth is out the window for inconsistent theories, we need a reformulation in terms of argumentation". This is good, but in his formalism arguments are still inferential chains, just like in standard logic. He still wants to achieve "precision and rigor". This seems like a mistake. To capture real-world reasoning in argumentative form, you need to include all sorts of fuzzy and unformalizable forms of evidence and reasoning. In some of his writing Carl seems to say the same thing, but his use of mathematical notation obscures this, I think.

The other attendees included a smattering of people working in AI and law (makes sense, law is an inherently argumentative form of reasoning and has long-settled technologies for being robust to inconsistency), some security people, some Media X people, Hugo Mercier, a bunch of programming language/runtime people, a sociologist, and assorted unclassifiables and luminaries. The most straightforwardly technical talk was by David Ungar, whose earlier work in prototype-based object systems and environments was an influence on my grad-school work. He presented a system for dealing with very large datasets used in business query systems by allowing some inconsistencies to creep in in a controlled fashion.

The most interesting thing I learned about there had pretty much nothing to do with inconsistency and was not a formal part of the conference; it's that Mark Miller, who has been working on capability-based security models for 20 years (a promising Actor-like idea, that never seemed to take off), is now at Google Research and has successfully gotten his ideas into the revised JavaScript standard so that in the very near future it will be part of everyone's everyday computational environment. This is amazing in several dimensions; JavaScript seems like the last language environment on earth capable of being made elegantly secured, but apparently he's pulled it off. And it means that while the desktop OSs will clunk along with their security model that hasn't changed since the sixties, the browser will have one that actually might be capable of dealing with the challenges of 21st century computing.

My own talk went pretty well (paper, slides). But outside of letting me get some ideas and complaints out of my system, not sure what it really accomplished now that I'm back at my day job. I would love to work on reinventing computing from the ground up, but unlike Hewitt or Miller, I don't really have either an obsessive devotion to my ideas, nor the patience to navigate the politics required in order to have large-scale effects. Still, if anybody wants to fund me to work on this stuff, please do drop me a line.

I also participated in the panel on the Singularity, and pretty much gave the same quasi-theological argument I did here (slides), having determined that yes in fact I could get away with it. And afterwards, much to my astonishment, somebody said that my presentation was one of the more lucid ones of the day.

I think that the issues raised at the workshop are pretty much the most important things in the world. Some seriously powerful design ideas are going to be needed to manage the computational objects in the increasingly distributed, embedded, always-on world we are creating willy-nilly. Something like a coarse-grained version of Actors would be a good start. "Inconsistency" seems like too weak a word to name the processes of merging and reconciling divergent representations that must necessarily arise once everything is talking to everything else, but it too is at least a step in the right direction.

Web 2.0 Apocalypse

Well, GMail has been down for hours now, and large parts of the global brain are feeling lobotomized, including me. When I first started using GMail, I set up my mail so the stream went to both GMail and a POP server, so I could still get my mail onto a nice standard local thick client reader. I stopped that after awhile, it was too much work to maintain separate copies. I sure hope nobody's dropped a bomb on Google. Going down is one thing, going down for >4 hours is something else. Oh well, they don't call it a beta for nothing.

There's something to be said for the old-fashioned model, including the ability to read mail in the subway. I use a thick-client RSS reader (the excellent SharpReader) and enjoy its ability to store the stuff I want to read locally.

[update: still down at the normal place, it works if you use the https: version of the service. Wonder how long it's going to take people to figure that out? Took me the better part of a workday.]

Victorian Data Processing

This sounds great. When I wrote my dissertation, I was aware that "computer" originally referred to a human agent, but didn't really know that such computers had already been organized into large scale distributed processing networks.

Victorian Data Processing - When Software Was People
Martin Campbell-Kelly

To most people the phrase Victorian Office conjures up an image such as in Dickens' A Christmas Carol - with Bob Cratchit, the solitary clerk, seated on a high stool, quill-pen in hand. Indeed, many Victorian Offices were like this, but by the 1850s a quite different type of office was emerging - the industrialized office employing several hundred clerks. These offices were the ancestors of the modern computerized bureaucracy. In these huge organizations, clerks performed tasks that would later be done by office machines, and are today performed by computers.
In this paper the historical and economic context of the development of the industrialized office will be described. The paper will include a "tour" of a number of Victorian data processing organizations: the General Register Office, the Railway Clearing House, the Central Telegraph Office, the Prudential Assurance Company, and the Post Office Savings Bank. The data processing techniques and labor processes will be explained, and the changing gender and structure of the workforce described.
The Victorian Office can be viewed from today’s perspective as a collection of human agents, obeying procedures stored in the organizational memory. Parallels are drawn between today’s software and Victorian clerical processes in terms of dependability, evolutionary change, and the boundaries of determinacy and autonomy. Some general conclusions will be made about the nature of "information revolutions."

From a workshop on the origins of computation.

Unfortunately in a truly retro move, the paper does not seem to be available online without a subscription.