The Great Programmer

I have just read something which got me thinking about my old theory of The Great Programmer ;).

I started my today's reading with the following article (if you want to follow the links, I recommend skipping this one and going straight to the source - i.e. the next two): A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution.

The first article refers to another article, by professor James M. Tour*, available here: Layman’s Reflections on Evolution and Creation. An Insider’s View of the Academy; and a video recording of the professor giving a talk: Nanotech and Jesus Christ - James Tour at Georgia Tech.

It was all interesting and I do recommend checking out those sources (especially the last two).

My thoughts?  I am not really convinced by professor Tour's argument as I view macroevolution as just an emergent property of a complex system which means that chemistry is just a medium for this system and not really important to understand macroevolution as a whole (as long as we understand all the basic interactions between the simple elements (i.e. molecules) the system is composed of - which, as far as I know, we do). What follows is that the system may be too complex for us to ever be able to explain macroevolution on the level of abstraction professor Tour is talking about.

Of course it is possible that I just do not know enough about chemistry and/or macroevolution to fully appreciate professor Tour's thoughts on the subject.

I also do agree with him that the new dogmatism becoming so prevalent in academia is not only troubling but unbecoming to scholars.

Even if I am right though, it does not mean that evolution disproves intelligent design as both those theories are not mutually exclusive (unless one chooses an arbitrary (and probably least intelligent ;) ) definition of intelligent design).  In case you were bored, here are some of my thoughts about that (and The Great Programmer) I wrote down some time ago: On computer programming, atheism and human cognizance

Who will save the forgotten music

I was just listening to Janacek's sinfonietta when my thoughts drifted away from one of my top secret projects and, in my mind, I saw a vision of all the pieces of classical music ever created, one by one sliding into oblivion and dying.  The process is slow but it is happening even now, as I am Swyping these words on my Android phone.  The most well-known masterpieces are still with us, still far from being forgotten, but most of classical music is not being played anymore.  It is all over again the vicious circle of marketing probing customers' demand, selecting musical pieces for which  the measured demand is highest (i.e. the most popular (or, in other words, the least forgotten) music is being selected), and feeding this selection back to the customers.  The music which has not been selected is effectively being slowly erased from our collective memory (and less and less is being selected with each iteration of this cycle as yesterday's less demanded becomes today's least demanded since the previous least demanded have been filtered out from the today's selection list).  How many of you had ever listened to Janacek before Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 appeared?
What could be done to save dying music (and bring all those forgotten pieces back to us)?  I think I have found a solution which would be quite easy to implement (certainly easier than bringing down capitalism with its monetary system and switching humanity to the resource-based economy (which, I hope, will happen someday)).  Hiring a good director and a full orchestra to prepare and then perform even just one piece is incredibly expensive but importing a score into a computer programme and charging a computer with the task of performing such music is very cheap and quick nowadays (I am sure most of us have used a midi player at least once in our life).  Of course settling for just that is nothing new and would not be enough as computers are notorious for their mechanical and dull music performance.  However, if we go one step further and throw machine learning methods into this then we should be able to teach our computers how to give unique and inspired musical performances.  We have all the needed elements.  Machine learning methods have become quite powerful and the data - I.e. recordings of the best and worst performances together with their complete musical scores - is there.  Each performance is different which means not 100% faithful to the score.  It is these fluctuations what makes one performance unforgettable and another just dull.  Finding patterns in these fluctuations and being able to generalise these patterns and apply them to any score is, from my perspective, just another exercise in supervised learning.  Seems like an interesting machine learning project with possible commercial applications (think about economical impact on production of classical music considering the huge savings on live performers and production time).  Too bad there are only 24 hours in a day and I cannot realise all those ideas which appear in my mind every day.  Maybe I should start publishing them in hope that someone will be inspired and see them through ;).  Let us hope the music will be saved.  It would be so nice to be able to browse through and listen to all those now forgotten masterpieces (most of them never recorded) somewhere on the Web.
Apropos inspiration.  I just realised that the chain of events which led to my reading the novel which resulted in my listening to the sinfonietta which in turn made my thoughts wandering and ended up  in my writing this blog post, all that started with my dear friend Yoshi who I should probably thank for this moment of contemplation.  It is good to have friends who can inspire us, without them our life would not be full.