Long time delayed, I finally got a copy of The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose. The book was originally published in 1989. Yes, I never read it from cover to back, and finally yesterday I run out of self imposed excuses and got me a copy. I guess that it was the result of listening to the Teaching Company lecture series The Phylosophy of Mind by John Searl, also falling on the same alley. Recreative reading, may be, but I am still fascinated to keep running into belivers and detractors of strong and soft AI almost 20 years after Penrose’s book was published. ...

Yes, I disappeared from my blog during GECCO 2008. Yes, I started blogging about the International Workshop on Learning Classifier System 2008 held on Sunday 13 at GECCO 2008. The workshop was terrific. Lots of new ideas were presented, but more importantly, lots of new ideas end sparking in participants head. As usual, the big workshop family went to dinner together where we all end having a blast. Some good traditions do not change, fortunately. Then, GECCO started. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday have been the most unusual GECCO days in my 10 years of attendance. Yes, I presented our paper and attended some interesting talks, but what made it different was that I spend a lot of time on hallways talking to people. There was an unusual concentrations of very interesting people to talk to, not to mention friends I have not seen in a long time. So, overall was really fun, and now I am trying to catch up with the papers published on the proceedings… ...

The 11th edition of the International Workshop on Learning Classifier System 2008 is hot. So far a lot of idea exchange and interesting discussions. So far Gilles Enee, myself, Natalio Krasnogor, Albert Oriols, Thyago Duque covering map problems, encoding language and model building, TSP and metaheuristics, learning association rules, and multi class labeling. Had to rush back to the next one :D

Yup, I am just packing on the run. Should get to Atlanta late afternoon or early evening. Wish me luck :D A bit of information about the city provided by Wikipedia Atlanta (pronounced /ətˈlæntə/ or /ætˈlæntə/) is the capital and the most populous city in the state of Georgia, and the core city of the ninth most populous metropolitan area in the United States at 5,278,904. It is the county seat of Fulton County, although a small portion of the city extends into DeKalb County. As of July 2007, the city of Atlanta had a population of 519,145[4], and a combined statistical area population of 5,626,400[5]. Residents of the city are known as Atlantans.[6] ...

Preparing for the upcoming Meandre release, as part of the larger SEASR on, I have been exploring a bit the inner machinery of WordPress to create a simple plugin for the SEASR site that could render Meandre component and flow descriptions straight out of their RDF desciptors. Actually, it turned out to be a breeze. After being a heavy user of WordPress in several project for few years now, its extensibility keeps sparking new possibilities in my mind every time I look into any of its facets. Anyway, I am rambling. Back to the point. To hit the ground running, I started by creating a simple generic plugin that would replace a tag with parameters for something else. I looked into several freely available plugins, the one that got me going was a very simple one, the SlideShare plugin by Joost de Valk. ...