Taivo Lints Blog

A book by Ricard V. Solé and Brian C. Goodwin, originally from year 2000.

The cover gives an impression that the book is a discussion about what life is, but this is not the case. Instead, it is a good and relatively easy to read overview of a large number of tools and approaches that are often referred to as complexity science. There are deterministic chaos, emergence, criticality, self-organization, patterns in excitable media, entropy, Ising model, information theory, renormalization, self-similarity, sand-pile model, metabolic networks, genetic networks, cell differentiation, reaction-diffusion systems, biological clocks, neural nets, phase transitions, ant colonies, nest building in social insects, biodiversity, ecological stability, viral quasispecies, catalytic chemical networks, evolution and extinction, stock market fluctuations, urban growth, traffic models, etc.

As the page count is around 300, the book obviously doesn't go into great details of every concept, neither does it always have all terminology explained, neither is there a coherent overarching story. Thus I don't know if it would be a good reading for somebody who has never heard most of the presented ideas before, but for me it is a good collection of notes that can be used for sparking inspiration and for quickly remembering the key concepts, the details of which should then be looked up from other sources. So, in general I like it.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465019285/

and if you have access to Wiley InterScience, then: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/97519452/

A book from 2006, with a slightly misleading title. Actually it is only about Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization, plus introduction to optimization and Evolutionary Computation in the first parts of the book. But as of PSO and ACO, it is a very clearly written and thorough review work -- there are 667 references.

The few more general sections occasionally seemed to me somewhat less substantial. For example the comparison of Particle Swarm Optimization vs. Evolutionary Computation quite strongly tries to separate them, while for me it seems that although it is very practical to have these different approaches, many of their underlying principles are overlapping quite heavily, if suitably interpreted (e.g. the trajectory of an individual in PSO should be compared to a trajectory of a generational family chain of parent-child successions in EC, and an explicit test should be done about whether such rules of EC could be found so that the trajectories would be similar to PSO, or vice versa. I haven't checked it, but at least reading the book didn't convince me that the check would fail.).

I would recommend the book to people who are seriously interested in Particle Swarm Optimization or Ant Colony Optimization. Those having a more general interest in swarm intelligence might find the book a bit limited in breadth, but flipping through it might be useful nevertheless.

More info at book's homepage: http://si.cs.up.ac.za/

Two new posters about my PhD project are available in my homepage's subsection "PhD Topic".

One of them I used a little bit in Imperial College London's Summer School in Complexity Science in Wye, Kent, UK, and more in 20th International Summer School / Conference in Nonlinear Science and Complexity in Patras, Greece.

And the other, newer poster is for the 6th Estonian Summer School in Computer and Systems Science.

However, they are still "calls for suggestions", NOT presentations of my results... I plan to start getting original soon, though :-)

The book is about applying the concepts of self-organization and the mathematical tools of nonlinear dynamics to studying human perception, behavior, learning and thinking. The general idea is that the working of most biological things, including brains, can be explained as dynamic chaotic patterns, that there is a general tendency toward (self-organizational) phase and frequency synchronization (but not phase locking) of components in complex living systems, and that most patterns (including the maps of brain areas responsible for specific actions) are more flexible than generally believed by most people.

The book was interesting enough for me to read through, but I occasionally felt that the point could have been conveyed with a considerably thinner book... Basically, while I did have some "AHA!" moments, they were outnumbered by "Sure, but so what?" moments. Then again, this may be due to the book being published on 1995 and me reading it on 2007. Also, occasionally I had "Er... why are you so sure about that?" moments, but in general the book was well supported with the results of various scientific experiments.

More information at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262611317/

This week I participated in 12th Estonian Winter School in Computer Science, which was a pleasant and well organized event in a nice location. Not all lectures were equally interesting for me, of course, but I had foresightedly taken some reading with me to avoid wasting time :) But some of the lectures WERE interesting for me, too (e.g. membrane computing by Gheorghe Păun, digital watermarking by Ingemar J. Cox, and Arvind's lectures about hardware synthesis), and anyway, such schools are not only about listening lectures, but also getting new contacts and having discussions and just having fun :)

I also made a poster presentation for EWSCS'07, which is now downloadable from my homepage's subsection PhD Topic (in the end of the page).