A few years ago I was in Rome and I visited the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. Even though I found it breathtaking in scope and execution, with its grand proportions, fluid lines-of-sight and enormous gilded ceiling, I wasn’t inspired. I took a seat and closed my eyes, already thinking about my next stop in the city. As I was getting ready to leave, I looked up and was caught […]
‘I am a classical Greek living in the twentieth century.’ Iannis Xenakis In his Parisian atelier, Xenakis—Greek composer of some of the most thrilling and disturbing music of the last 100 years—always had to hand a slide rule, an electronic metronome, a stop-watch and at least one book by Plato in the original. His workspace looked more like a factory than a studio. Being without attachment to a particular style, […]
Collective Intelligence is a relatively new and loose term, which has been used to mean various things. A first attempt at defining it could go something like this: Collective Intelligence is an emergent property in groups of individuals acting both intelligently and collectively, which produces something inherently different from what would have been produced if each individual’s intelligence acted in isolation. There are many problems with how one defines intelligence […]
A novel, or a story, can’t be anything of the sort. It can’t be a machine, or a process, whether this is doing Bayesian inference or not. The novel itself is not dynamic and it doesn’t take an input, doesn’t produce an output. But of course when the book is picked up and read by someone else, other than its writer, something dynamic does begin to take place. The story’s […]
D. I. Tsomokos 