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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from weird computer science
  • And the dedication of Sussman 's thesis is a mindbomb:
from category theory
  • Note: the very last sentence of this connects up to Sussman's work on propagator networks.

Sussman

11 Feb 2023 - 20 Feb 2026
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    • See SICP. And the more recent Software Design for Flexibility
    • Jerry Sussman, an early AI researcher, dedicated his dissertation to Rabbi Loew, the Maharal of of Prague and creator of the golem, for noticing that the statement “god made man in his own image” is recursive.
    • In other words, if God can give humans a fragment of soul maybe we can pass that on to our own creations. Although in practice we are better at imbuing technology with soullessness, which sells better.
    • enter image description here
    • https://worrydream.com/refs/Sussman_2007_-_Building_Robust_Systems.pdf Can't believe I haven't read this? Or if I did, it was long ago.
      • Robustness, bio systems have lots of redundancy (degeneracy, although an MIT person might want to avoid that word)
      • generator and tester pattern, of which natural selection is the canonical example.
      • signaling among cells is permissive rather than instructive.
      • what an odd way to put it. true of course. I guess the point is that signalling and development are separate mechanisms so can evolve separately? Development can vary locally while retaining the fixed signalling protocol.
      • Metaphor of radio "body plans". Somehow this feels a bit crude, although I'm not sure why.