Self-Generating, Evolving Music
This is blowing my mind. This is Darwin Tunes. Fast forward to around 3:00. You hear what sounds like a palatable keyboard song. With rhythm and progression and all. Go back in the song and you can see how the song literally evolved. A computer program created bits of noise that adapted to the preferences of thousands of users. And in the end it produces some pretty decent music. I mean, a bit like a dude in the subway on a synthesizer, but a talented, cyborg dude.
The experiment began with 100 randomly generated loops. On the DarwinTunes website, listeners could listen to these and rate them on a five-point scale, from “I can’t stand it” to “I love it”. Every time 20 loops were rated, the top 10 pair off, mate with each other to produce two daughters, and die. At any time, there are only 100 loops in the total population.
To date the loops have been evolving for 3,060 generations, and over 50,000 of them have been born. By taking loops from DarwinTunes’ entire history and asking volunteers to rate them, MacCallum and Leroi showed that they became more appealing with time. For example, they were more likely to contain chords found in Western music and they contained more complex rhythms. (Discover Magazine, via Andrew Sullivan).
Kinda awesome and kinda trippy. Combine this artificial intelligence with pubescent teen avatars and you would get… Carly Rae Jepsen. Or a robot Justin Bieber. Oh God.
Not to quote Ice Cube, but the Sri Lankan police are hardly beloved. A 
I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.
I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the 
I met an old-timer who said they used to drop acid and sleep atop Sigiriya, but the place has taken on a more commercial and quasi-spiritual role now. It was built by a king as a sort of retreat and used as a monastery. Now it’s a prime tourist and cultural destination. Hence it’s a bit odd to see a Japanese beer commercial shot up there. There’s a bunch of people eating, um, deep fried cream filled coconuts and then drinking some bracing beer. I hear the whole thing cost Rs. 25,000 (I’m presuming they used stock images).
Crazy! but Awesome!
Not computer based but still amazing:
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Fake meat: is science fiction on the verge of becoming fact?
The race to make fake meat just got interesting. Two scientists on opposite sides of the world both claim to be on the verge of serving up the first lab-grown hamburger – and saving the planet in the process. The new reality is so close, you can almost taste it
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/22/fake-meat-scientific-breakthroughs-research
We have had that for years at McDonald’s :)
The real bieber is creepy enough, we don’t want no robots