“Gods. What egg did you hatch out of?”
I get that a lot. With billions of species to mix and match genes from the birthing eggs can produce some real oddities. I get to be one of those oddities. I could change my body, but despite its eccentricities I find I’m rather attached to it.
Still. Two legs, two arms, a single head. Bilateral symmetry even. I’m a bit of a freak.
I spent some time as a superintelligence once. It was weird. Eventually I got bored of it, trimmed myself down and stuffed myself back into a body.
I don’t remember a great deal about it – it’s hard to remember what it was like to be smarter than you are now – but every now and then I get flashes where I remember some fact or event.
For example, once I remembered how the travel gates work.
It turns out this was not a good thing. I ended up terrified of using them and couldn’t bring myself to leave the planet I was on at the time. I spent most of the next century drunk out of my mind and, when I finally sobered up, I resolved to do something about it, built myself a slowboat (you wouldn’t believe how much effort it takes to bootstrap a society from hunter gatherer to interstellar) and took a thousand year trip to find someone I trusted to help me edit my memories.
Anyway, mission accomplished, I got the knowledge expunged from my mind and happily returned to the life of a modern interstellar traveller, gating all around the galaxy. What a lark.
Thing is, there’s a problem with memory editing. You tend to edit out the reason you got your memory edited in the first place. And then you start burning up with curiousity. After a good few hundred years I finally couldn’t take it any more and just had to find out. And I did.
Want another drink? I think I’m going to be here a while.
I’ve decided to accelerate my plans for moving planetscala away from this domain. So, this is an announcement: At the end of the month, drmaciver.com/planetscala feeds will no longer work. Please point your feed readers to the new planetscala.com URLs.
One of the problems with my old kitten clustering was that inside the black bits (text, the kitten, etc) the clustering descended into a chaotic rainbow of teeny tiny clusters.This turns out to be little to do with the clustering and more to do with the slightly moronic way I’d calculated edge weights, which was doing a bad job between dark colours. I’ve simplified the calculation, so the following should be more indicative of how markov clustering clusters this sort of thing:
The clusters are still very small, but now recognisable rather than just dots.
In case you’re wondering, this isn’t going anywhere in particular. I’m just experimenting and figured I may as well do it in public.
I’ve been experimenting with using Markov Clustering at work. It’s a very nice algorithm for clustering certain classes of symmetric graphs.
I had a vaguely interesting thought: What, thought I, if I took an image and built a graph out of its pixels. The edges would go between nearby pixels and would be weighted according to the similarity of their colours. We could then markov cluster that and see what the results looked like.
Well… the results are amusing. There’s some interest in them, but mainly in what it say sabout how markov clustering works. Behold, as we turn this:
Into this:
Hmm. Back to the drawing board.
I’ve dumped the code here if you’re at all curious.