Financial Cryptography describes the alleged mass forgery of identity documents in the US. You can buy a set for $300, but it costs far more than that to get your (genuine) name off the Terrorist Watch list. So, what is identity? Our society relies more and more on external proof of identity: an ID card,…
Owing to an attack of comment spam, it is now only possible to add comments for a short while after entries appear on this weblog. Sorry. Ill go back to normal after a while. I cant understand why they bother. The site emails me when someone puts a comment on it; so these comments were…
A bizarre but rather charming combination of the mediaeval and the modern: this Java simulator models the motion of pageant wagons during a simulation of medieval Englands York Corpus Christi Pageant. In effect its a queueing simulator, set against the backdrop of a Speed map of York. Alas it doesnt show what the pageant wagons…
A simulation of bucket brigades shows the power of simulation to illustrate dynamic concepts. On the one hand, read the explanation: “..A classic difficulty in the management of flow lines is to balance the line so that it will be maximally productive. This requires precise and time-consuming identification of the work elements and estimates of…
According to an article in Bit-IT World, the US FDA is taking disease and drug simulation seriously: and a post on Simblog argues that quiet revolutions in simulation techniques will culminate in an in silico human system. Firstly, FDA is working on a disease modelling programme, using Pharsight software to make a data warehouse. This…
I havent blogged for too long, largely because Im spending all the time left over by my day job coding a personal project. Some time ago I referred to Eliza, the computer therapist. I came across an Eliza written in Perl yesterday whilst looking at AI stuff. The code is so nice I just want…
Fascinating essay by Jaron Lanier on Digitel Edge, arguing that the collective process (wikis, aggregators, meta-search engines, etc) goes too far and produces a kind of impersonal, popularist dumbed-down intellectual world. Simulation is a form of the collective intelligence hes talking about, because simulation uses existing assumptions to generate new knowledge. (Those who understand the…