CybCon 2000 Annual Conference of the Cybernetics Society
CybCon – 2000 Annual Conference of the Cybernetics Society
Keywords: Cybernetics, Conferences
The Cybernetics Society held its 26th Annual Conference at King's College,London on 16 September 2000. A full day of papers and discussions included the following.
Professor Koichiro Matsuno of the Nagaoka University of Technology, Japan,gave the keynote address on the spontaneous emergence of life.
Chemical evolution leading to the emergence of life on our primitive Earth must have required the hardware to facilitate the synthesis of oligomers from monomers, in view of the fact that those monomers, such as amino acids, could already have been abundant there. A possible likely locale for synthesising oligomers from monomers might have been hydro-thermal environments in the Hadean ocean, that could maintain huge thermodynamic gradients against the surrounding cold sea water. Those thermodynamic gradients can drive various synthetic reactions relevant to chemical evolution.
They had constructed a flow reactor that simulated a submarine hydro-thermal system. When fluid containing glycine repeatedly circulated through the hot(about 250°C) and cold (0.5°C) regions in the reactor, oligopeptides were synthesised from glycine. When divalent ions (such as copper ions) were added under acidic conditions, oligopeptides were elongated up to octaglycine. When fluid, containing mononucleotide AMP (adenosine monophosphate), repeatedly circulated through the hot (110°C) and cold (0.5°C), oligonucleotides up to trimers were synthesised. This observation suggests that pre-biotic monomers could have oligomerized in the vicinity of submarine hydro-thermal vents on primitive Earth. Once both oligopeptides and oligonucleotides are available, the experimental access to the emergence of life from the abiotic side can be further narrowed down.
Sunny Bains, scientist and journalist, talked about physical computation and artificial intelligence.
Traditional approaches to computation have proved extremely successful for some kinds of task, particularly those that humans do badly. However, it has been less easy to extend conventional computer technology to do the things we do well: digital computers are generally less efficient and robust than we would like them to be for many artificial intelligence applications. She discussed a class of "physical computers": devices that compute in a way that does not involve the conversion of physical signals into data (symbols) and back again. She considered various physical implementations and applications, the case for these machines being more biologically valid than their conventional counterparts, and their potential computational power in the context of arguments by Penrose and Siegelmann.
Dr Peter Marcer, of the British Computer Society Cybernetic Machine Specialist Group, spoke on quantum holography, new biology, and novel technology, or what physics can teach biology and biology, physics.
In the nineteenth century it seemed that the whole of the natural world could be described in terms of classical physics. In the twentieth century, the new quantum physics was needed to supplement this picture in relation to microscopic phenomena, successfully explaining much of elementary particle physics. However,in the new millennium, such explanations will be extended to the entire structure of the whole universe, cosmological, galactic, solar, planetary,geological, living and social, including the molecular biological, biological,neurological, psychological, noetic, medical, and even mathematical.
The key to such explanations is measurement, i.e. the process of extraction of information, which is the basis of all experimental science and experience. An appropriate starting point is therefore the work of John von Neumann, in relation to measurement in quantum physics. This definition of measurement not only introduces the concepts of information and signal processing into quantum physics, as integral phenomena of the natural world, it subsumes classical physics. Dr Marcer is convinced that this leads to a grand unification of the sciences, with new branches such as quantum cosmology, quantum biology, quantum neuroscience, quantum medicine, etc., within which are included the currently established classical understandings. This is a natural extension of the view,expressed by Feynman, that without quantum physics there can be no chemistry,and therefore, by implication, no molecular biology, no biology, nor indeed any of the life sciences.
He gave examples that these classical understandings, however, represent most likely only one half of the full eventual scientific understanding.
Dr Louis H. Kauffman, of the Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois at Chicago, talked about symbiologic, rational knots, and DNA.
His talk began with the problem: How does DNA manage to reproduce, given that the two strands of the DNA are wound around one another, and may (in closed circular DNA) be linked? He outlined a proposal by himself and John Hearst that sheds light on this problem, that is part of a larger project they call "symbiologic"– the relations between diagrammatic and logical schemata and the actions of molecular biology. Symbiologic includes the relationship between formalisms for self-reference, re-entry, self-reproduction and biology, self-activating automata (autopoeisis) and the uses of diagrammatic knot theory in studying DNA. He discussed the basics of the theory of rational tangles and rational knots in relation to DNA recombination, and ended with the description of a new proof of the classification of rational knots due to himself and Sofia Lambropoulou, and its relationship to DNA recombination.
Dr Ian White, of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, spoke about the limits and capabilities of machines.
His talk was a review of fundamental limits of machines, giving some emphasis to new developments in the physics of computers, and the relationship of physical and biological metaphors of computation.
Dr Geraint A. Wiggins, of the Department of Computing, City University,London, gave a presentation about musical communication and meaning, supported by audio demonstrations.
He introduced a range of issues related to the study of human musical behaviour, in a context of cognitive science and, specifically, from the point of view of computational linguistics. He discussed, and gave examples of,different aspects of musical communication, and attempted, where appropriate, to contrast this with common practice in computational linguistics. His presentation served as an introduction to some of the issues involved in understanding musical communication and meaning. He gave some demonstrations of how musical content can be automatically controlled to convey particular emotional impressions.
Dr Daniel M. Dubois, of the Centre for Hyperincursion and Anticipation in Ordered Systems, University of Liege, Belgium, gave an Internet presentation from Liege, using a colourful, on-screen text. His subject was "A survey of computing anticipatory systems with incursion and hyperincursion".
The main purpose of his paper was to show that anticipation is not only a property of biosystems but is also a fundamental property of physical systems.
For all Newtonian mechanical systems as well as all quantum and relativist systems, the description by local differential equations is identical to the description by the global Maupermis least action principle, which states that the trajectory given by an integral defined by initial and final states is optimum. So the Aristotelian final cause is implicitly embedded in any system theory and model. Thus such systems are implicit anticipatory systems, because they evolve from an initial state to a final state which is implicitly embedded in them. In an epistemic way, such implicit anticipatory systems evolve "as if they know their future".
Anticipation is embedded in physical systems. In electromagnetism, for example, a charge moving at velocity v' at time t'creates an electrical field travelling at the speed of light c. The electrical field is the field of the charge at the distance rand time t, anticipated from the past distance r'and time t' = t – r'/c.
Strong and weak anticipations can be defined by incursive and hyperincursive systems.
Dr Dubois showed that incursive and hyperincursive anticipatory systems could model properties of biosystems like free will, game strategy, theorem creation,etc. Anticipation is not only related to predictions but to decisions:hyperincursive systems create multiple choices and a decision process selects one choice. So anticipation is not a final goal, as in cybernetics and system science, but is a fundamental property of physical and biological systems.
Further information, including references and contact details, together with photographs of the conference, can be found on the Web site of the Cybernetics Society at http://www.cybsoc.org/. As well as activities and proceedings of the Society, this growing site also covers news items from the world of cybernetics, historical and analytical pieces about cybernetics, services and resources for members, reciprocal links, and more. The Cybernetics Society is one of the 35 societies or institutions affiliated to the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, and the Society's site contains a gateway to the official Web site of WOSC and the Norbert Wiener Institute of Systems and Cybernetics. This can be visited at http://www.cybsoc.org/wosc/.
