Conference report. CybCon 2000

Conference report

CybCon 2000

Keywords: Conferences, Cybernetics, Cybernetics society

The Cyberneties Society Annual Conference was held in King's College, London on 16 September 2000. An extremely interesting and varied set of papers was presented. The organisers are to be congratulated on assembling such a feast and not least for ensuring that a useful summary of every item was available on the Society's Web site http://www.cybsoc.orgahead of the event.

The first paper was that of Professor Koichiro Matsuno, of Nagaoka Technical University, on spontaneous emergence of life. He argued that likely sites for the origin of life are volcanic vents in the depths of the ocean. These provide conditions, which he has duplicated in his laboratory, where liquid passes through a small aperture from a hot region to a cold one. Unstable compounds that exist only transiently in the hot region become relatively stable once they leak into the cold environment, and it appears that the molecules essential for life could have been formed in this way. The process is consistent with the interest in dissipative structures in the work of Prigogine and his followers,but in the specific case studied by Professor Matsuno the mechanism is particularly transparent and the relevance to biology particularly clear.

Participants were lucky to be able to hear this paper, at the cost of starting the conference rather earlier in the day than is customary. Professor Matsuno had fitted his presentation into a tight schedule and after giving it and engaging in a short discussion he departed by taxi to Heathrow for the next leg of his travels.

There were three further papers during the morning session. The first was by Sunny Bains, who is both an established scientific journalist and a research student in the Open University. Her title was "Physical computation and artificial intelligence" and she argued that computing systems other than digital computers have advantages because of their correspondence to biological systems and also because there is reason to think they can perform calculations that are impossible for digital machines. There was not enough time to develop the last point in detail, but a book by Siegelmann (1998) was mentioned.

The next paper was by Dr Peter Marcer who defended his view that all intelligence, biological and machine, can be seen quite differently when interpreted in terms of quantum holography. The third paper of the morning was by Dr Louis Kauffman, from Chicago, whose title was "Symbiologic, rational knots, and DNA". He observed that the familiar double-helix account of DNA replication ignores difficulties due to the coiled and tangled nature of the helical strand. The mathematical theory of knots can be applied and leads to fascinating possibilities for disentangling the strand by breaking and reforming, in ways that can be mapped onto logical systems including Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form.

In the afternoon the first paper was by Dr Ian White who comprehensively reviewed possibilities for computing machinery of the future. This was followed by Dr Geraint A. Wiggins on the topic of "Musical communication and meaning". Relations between characteristics of music and its effect on listeners were explored and illustrated by the playing of recorded excerpts. Reference was made to an automated compositional system used to produce background music for Hitchcock films, allowing "scariness" to be set as a parameter.

The final presentation of the day was described as "an Internet tele-seminar" in which the speaker was Dr Daniel M. Dubois of the University of Liege, speaking from Liege. His slides appeared on a computer screen, beside an image of him from a Web cam, and the whole was projected so as to be seen by the audience in London, while the spoken lecture was clearly heard. The lecture was followed by two-way discussion.

The topic of the lecture was "A survey of computing anticipatory systems with incursion and hyperincursion". It gave a mathematical theory based on the observation that laws of physics have alternative formulations as causal laws and as variational "least action" principles. This gives grounds for asserting that a capacity for anticipation is not restricted to biological systems, and the terms incursive and hyperincursive are associated with the property.

It is interesting that the same duality of physical laws was noted by Rosenbrock (1990), though developed very differently. The mathematical treatment by Dubois was rather much to be absorbed immediately by a newcomer to the ideas,but help can be found on the Web site: http://www.ulg.be/mathgen/CHAOS/CASYS.html

The conference was indeed an intellectual feast and a credit to its organisers.

Alex M. Andrew