I wonder what the space of problems that we consider puzzles is like.  I mean how big is it?  What characteristics in general do they have?  Does computational complexity correspond to how difficult the puzzle is?  Puzzles usually require some degree of logic.  So, I’d imagine that puzzles that are most difficult correspond to those that have you solve NP-hard problems without you realizing it.  Can we use a language that describes puzzles in general, like maybe some form of logic, and then we can maybe automatically generate puzzles.  Interesting especially when you consider multi-agent puzzles.

I had an idea this morning that i had forget but now remembered!  It wasn’t that good, but I still thought it’d be worth writing since I remembered :).  So, the idea was that faucets (like in your kitchen and bathroom) should have water atomizers like in the shower head that Nebia makes.  I don’t think that that unlike with the shower we’d want it to be adjustable so that if we wanted a fast stream of water we could and if we just wanted to wash our hands we could get the atomized version.  Because there are things like filling a water cup or whatever where we actually need it blasting.  Otherwise, we are wasting water.  We already have faucets that spray out a couple thin streams of water.  However, I hate those.  I think its because I don’t feel like my hands are wet enough.  I think if the spray was like the Nebia that I’d like it.

I think that this idea could go rather well with my other idea of putting a kinect like device for vision to control the faucet.  Then it could also control how the water would come out.

I just now realized that the bounty systems is very similar to the bitcoin mining method for getting tasks done.  There can be multiple people working on the same mining job at the same time.  However, only the system that finishes first gets the reward.

According to a Quartz article on bitcoin mining

Or rather, some miners are rewarded. Miners are all competing with each other to be first to approve a new batch of transactions and finish the computational work required to seal those transactions in the ledger. With each fresh batch, winner takes all.

So, as a young person in the 90’s (and of course earlier) we didn’t photograph and video everything with everyone, everywhere at anytime.  We would just remember the events, forget them, or be reminded by others about them.  Currently we can and most do take pictures and video and share with everyone about pretty much everything.  I wonder what the long term affects of having pretty much everything digitally recorded about our lives will have on the memory and society?  Will our memories be more accurate or will just forget things more easily and can just look at them when we want.  We rely on Google or Facebook to tell us what was happening in our lives “at this date one year ago today”.

Certainly ethicists, philosophers and historians have discussed and considered the lasting effects of changes to society and how our current digitization of society will effect the world.  Will the future look back at the time when we couldn’t replay a nice summary of the day with disquietude while we look to the future where that is the case also with disquietude?

This brings me to the point of prejudice across time.  Culture is rooted in time and space.  But resisting change that is perceived as progress (pedestrian thinking haha) seems to be something that is socially unacceptable across time and space.  Will this ever change? Humans are natural hill-climbers

So, I was just reading a Fast CoDesign article about a new product that is essentially a moving mirror that tracks the sun to redirect the light to dark places in a room.  This seems brilliant (haha pun intended).  This made me think that instead of needing this thing in the room wouldn’t it be better if you could coat your window with a substrate that had reflective qualities that would better illuminate or darken your room.  This brings up an interesting point.  I’ve seen in movies and tv shows were the windows are able to go from transparent to opaque.  I have not seen any window amplify or focus light on command or at all besides with a magnifying glass…  So, that would be an interesting optics problem.  I do realize that windows already diffuse daylight by having a coating on them.

I was then considering the fact that the placement of windows for optimal sunlight distribution and heating and cooling effects throughout the house is a challenging optimization and architectural problem.  Basically the idea is that neither solution above would be necessary if the placement and style of window and house were created with that problem in mind.  The style and location of a house/building has a profound impact on the quality and quantity of light that enters the house and is useful.

I must remember this when looking for a house and also possibly if I ever build a house.

I wonder why we only count the number of citations our papers get.  We should also count the citations of all of the papers that cite you, since they were somehow related.  Maybe as the degree of separation increases the weight of each citation in that layer changes.  Would be interesting.  Also, maybe included in the weight calculation is the distance from the related paper in terms of subject area (like astro physics and psychology are light years apart in similarity but if your paper was influential enough it might be cited by someone in psychology and that would imply importance…).

I had a rather random idea.  Music seems like it could be modeled by a petri net.  A petri net can model distributed systems, such as the instruments in a band, mathematically.  I googled it and it seems like that I’m not the first to think of this.  I think one of the first papers to model music with a petri net was “Music and Causality” in 1983.  So, seven years after petri nets were formalized they were applied to music.

Could model the system of how the agents are operating in the environment as a petri net.  Going to different tasks and using different resources at a top level to measure system efficiency.  This might be a useful way to look at comparing coordination mechanisms especially for bounty hunting.  Something similar to this idea was discussed on this site.  What if we considered the agents as resources as well…

I might also be able to use them as a deductive device to realize where some inefficiency due to mis-coordination or deadlock are in the system and can develop ideas on how to improve/fix them…  That would be nice to have.  It would also allow me to create custom benchmarks that show that my system is able to solve such problems.  That would be awesome!  This seems like a good idea.  Contract nets did this to prove particular aspects of there system in this paper.

Now I think that the people in Milan Italy are really interested in Petri nets.  I just need to find out how I can go to Italy :).