Stepping stones in possibility space An Article by Gordon Brander subconscious.substack.com If we try to cross this lake by following only the stepping stones that lead toward our objective, we’ll soon get stuck. But what if we let go of our objectives? What if we focused on trying to find new stepping stones instead? This is novelty search. Instead of looking for something specific, you look for something new. Novelty search isn’t just random, it’s chance plus memory. Together, these ingredients do something interesting. ...Stepping stones are also combinatorial. Each new stepping stone we discover expands our potential to find even more stepping stones. Collecting stepping stones is a luck maximization algorithm. By collecting and combining stepping stones, we might arrive at our destination by accident, or somewhere more interesting! chanceknowledgeprogressnoveltyevolutioninvention
On Memory Palaces & Visual Computation An Essay by Taulant Sulko www.are.na Show image 0 Show image 1 I now use Are.na as a Memory Palace, separating my channels into rooms. For example, I have a channel that I call the Computation Room. It’s pretty generic and includes any type of block that relates to computation. If I notice a pattern in the computation room I create a more specific channel in that room. I think of that more specific topic as an object within the room. Then there are the adjacent topics that I often find even more exciting to focus on. For those, I choose a name that corresponds with the nature of a room and also its size. For example I have a channel called the Visual Computing Observatory. In my head I am imagining an actual observatory where I am looking and observing and studying a given topic. The Method of Loci memorycommonplaceplace