This article called Genetic Programming: A Novel Failure probably sums up my thoughts best. Genetic programming is only a slight variation on solution searching algorithms.  Based on my reading, most work in the field has focused on how to make systems converge on a solution more quickly, i.e.: improving efficiency.  This seems wrong, or at best premature.

We live in the 21st century. We have more CPU cycles than we know what do with.  Where are the systems that are wide but shallow? The ones that are really non-determinstic and will generate truly surprising results? We should be wasting cycles exploring new possibilities, not generating new solutions for known problems.

The free ebook, A Field Guide to Genetic Programming, is a great primer in the topic.  I read through most of it the other night.  My biggest frustration is that almost all genetic programing systems focus on evolving syntax trees, usually some form of Lisp or it’s semantic equivalent. I see why people would do this. Lisp code is easy to manipulate programmatically, so evolving it should be simple as well.  There are other kinds of systems using different gene encoding, such as image arrays and direct byte code. However, these appear to be far in the minority. The Field Guide has a chapter on the topic, listing several alternate systems. The fact that these systems receive a single slender chapter while the rest of the book covers syntax trees gives you an idea of how under-explored the topic is.

When I first heard of genetic programming I imagined having a sequence of simple instructions that could be mutated. The instructions would be extremely simple and limited, perhaps more simple than most assembly languages. Evolving syntax trees certainly does let you make progress quicker, but the generated solutions will be limited to the underlying tree language. Our genetic beasties will never evolve novel flow control systems, or invent a crazy kind of memory register. ASTs are great if we want to produce a human readable program as the result, but it still feels limiting.

I would like to see a system that is as open ended as possible.  Create a system of small instructions of uniform length that can only manipulate basic storage and do simple math.  Then give them as much freedom as possible. Let them live in a wide fitness landscape. A digital environment with a huge number of potential ecological niches. Ideally we could take this to the next step and give our digital creations physical bodies so that they may evolve targeting real world constraints.  Evolving a robot’s brain seems far more interesting than figuring out how to gain 10 milliseconds trading stocks.  Of course we lose rapid iterations by running them in the real world, so it my be better to run them in a simulation of the real world at many times normal speed.  I imagine we could build self driving cars this way, starting with bots that play racing games then upgrade them to working with real world footage from actual self driving cars.

Am I wrong? Is there cutting edge genetic programming that is truly open ended? What successes have they made?

Please send feedback and comments to my twitter account @joshmarinacci instead of on the blog. Thanks!

View the live demo here. I highly suggest you load it up on an iPad as well. Try rotating the screen (or make the browser window narrow if you are on a desktop.) Keep in mind this is just a prototype. It’s not skinned or made to look pretty at all.

You can spin the little sphere tree by dragging with your mouse. If you view this on a tablet it will respond to touch events as well.  You can click on the photo to see a large fullscreen version. The footer will stay fixed to the bottom. The inline photo and canvas will resize and move to the left edge if you switch to portrait mode.

My goal for this effort is use pure semantic HTML. If we want to scale this up to a full book then the markup needs to be as close to pure text as possible.  I’m using only divs with paragraphs and headers for all textual content. The interactive stuff is canvas or img tags.  All interaction is standardized and put into reusable javascript files except for the actual dot tree itself (though it does use reusable components). I had to add a little hack to make the canvas resize properly, but that is also reusable.  The footer and general layout is pure CSS.

I think the prototype turned out pretty well. It would be easy scale up to a full book with one page per chapter. Table of contents, index, and glossary would have to be written by hand unless we have some automated tool to do it, though I think such tools already exist.

So far I haven’t found much that the new iBooks 2 format does that couldn’t be done with plain HTML.  They did add nice columns and shaped floats, but that is part of the CSS 3 specs and could be implemented in the renderer quite easily. (And shaped floats have been hacked into CSS2 for over a decade!)

I do like the look of iBooks Author. It’s a very nice visual tool that should let people create books without any programming experience.  The new terms of service are a different issue, but after thinking about it I’ve decided I don’t care. iBooks Author is a tool for formatting content to be sold in the iBookstore.  It really has no purpose other than that so the terms of use don’t make much difference. Amazon has their own tools for their own store as well, and I expect them to get better with the advent of the Kindle Fire.

While I would love to see a beautiful visual editor like iBooks Author that formats content for all possible bookstores I don’t really expect Apple to build it for me.  Such a solution will have to come from a third party. Fortunately third parties now know that Apple won’t compete with them to build such a tool, so I expect we’ll see something like it soon.

Anyway, back to my HTML 5 prototype. Anything else you’d like to see it do?

Please send feedback and comments to my twitter account @joshmarinacci instead of on the blog. Thanks!

The Book

I’ve been working on a new book for O’Reilly, tentatively titled Building Mobile Apps in Java. I mentioned it briefly on Twitter but haven’t gone into the details before. It will show you how to use GWT and PhoneGap to build mobile apps. With these two open source technologies you can code in Java but target pretty much any mobile platform such as iOS, Android, and webOS.

The book will cover the technical aspects of using GWT & PhoneGap. It will also dive into how to design for mobile. Navigation and performance varies greatly across devices, so it’s an important topic. Oh, and the last chapter will show you how to make a mobile platform game with real physics. Tons of fun.

Building Mobile Apps in Java will be an eBook about 60 pages long, available every where O’Reilly publishes their ebooks. Look for it in February or early March.

Open Source and Speaking

For 2012 I want to spend some time doing more actual design work. I’m planning a new hand built wordpress theme for my blog, including proper phone and tablet support. I also have a few art side projects that you’ll get to see later in the year.

And speaking of design, I have new significant releases of Amino and Leonardo Sketch coming.  If you are in the Portland area come to the January PDX-UX meeting. I will be presenting how to do wire framing with Leonardo Sketch. I’ll give a brief overview of Leo and show off some of the great export and collaboration features.

I will also be doing a 5 minute Ignite talk in Portland on February 9th about the future of ebooks and what a Hogwarts Textbook would look like.

Onward!

Finally, I plan to post both more and less on this blog. I used to do short posts on small topics or collections of links. I found social networks better for that thing so I’ll do that on Twitter and Google Plus from now on.  From now on I want to use the blog for more long form content such as my well read HTML Canvas Deep dive. Look for more long essays on canvas, app stores, and technology trends this year.

2012 is finally here!

Traffic has grown for Josh On Design in general.  At the beginning of 2011 I was averaging around 20-30 hits per day. For December the daily average is around 180. So that’s quite a significant jump. However it doesn’t account for the nearly 50k hits of the entire year. A good portion of that came in two spikes at the end of September and the middle of October.  See the anomaly in this chart:

Those two spikes represent when I was linked by heavily trafficked news sites: Reddit and YCombinator’s Hacker News. These links are attributed to one piece of content: the notes and exercises from my HTML 5 Canvas Deep Dive workshop that I presented at OSCON in July. In fact, the canvas article accounts for nearly half of all hits I’ve gotten for the entire year.  So, lesson number one:  quality deep technical content is greatly appreciated.

The #2 hit is the main page of my blog, which doesn’t really tell us anything. #3 is my post about refactoring Amino with 1700 hits. Note that even though this is #3 it’s still only 3.69% of the total for the year.  What this tells me is that my blog has a very long tail. Only the canvas deep dive is significantly more popular that the rest of the site.

#4 four is a post about my App Bundler project which lets you easily build native Java exes for a variety of platforms.  #5 and #6 are more posts about Amino.. This surprises me because Amino doesn’t seem to be used very much in practice and the mailing list traffic is minimal, yet posts about it seem to be popular. Perhaps it’s a big hit with my Twitter followers.

With 898 hits Typography 101 is the seventh most popular post.  This is the first one that doesn’t surprise me. I figure reference material will generally pick up a lot of hits over time as people find it through Google. The two articles Future of Desktops and Design of the Workstation OS and Why 2014 won’t be like 1984 are rant essays about the industry.  I’m not surprised that they were in the top ten since controversial topics seem to always get hits. Finally UI Design Assets and Tools rounds out the top ten with 676 hits for the year.

Overall I’m happy with the blog traffic. Considering I haven’t had much time to work on it, especially since Jesse was born, I think it’s doing pretty well. I expect traffic to rise significantly early next year when my O’Reilly eBook is published (which reminds me that I’ve got more editing to do).

I’m officially on vacation today and will be offline for the next three weeks. I’ve got much needed baby time awaiting. I’ll see you in 2012!

I’ve had a lot of ideas involving social networking floating around in my head for the past few months. They were finally crystalized into a solid conclusion this week: I don’t want to work for a social networking company. There are really two distinct but related problems with social networking companies, and combined they form a deal killer for me.

First: they are free. With the possible exception of dating sites, social networking services are free. They do everything in their power to get as many people to sign up as possible. Due to the network effect they really can’t charge admission.  It’s not worth money to join the network until lots of other people are already on it. Combined with the economics of VC funding, the cost of joining is always driven to free.  You should always be nervous when someone offers you something for free.

If a service is free then one of three things will happen.  The service might charge in the future. This is a valid strategy but likely to piss off lots of current users. Next, the company could simply run out of money one day and shut down.  Many great sites have simply died due to a lack of a viable business model.  And finally, the site could remain free but make money doing something else; which, in the social networking world, means advertising.

Facebook doesn’t charge you money because you aren’t the customer.  The advertisers who buy your eyeballs are the real customer. This creates an inherent conflict of interest. They serve the advertisers over the users. The users still matter somewhat since without users there would be nothing to sell, but there is a constant tension between the two.  Still, this wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the second problem: scarcity

Fundamentally social networks are selling the users’ time, and time is the ultimate scarce resource. The only way for a social network to grow is by getting more users or getting more time out of their existing users.  There are only twenty four hours in a day and only a certain number of people on the planet.  Recent polls indicate that social networks are reaching saturation in developed nations. Most of the people who want to use a social network are already doing so, or will in the next year or two.  Without new users social networks must maximize the time they get from each individual user.  This is where things really start to get bad.

To further their growth Facebook has an incentive to optimize the number of ads you see per page, and the number of pages you see per day.  They constantly look for ways to bring you back to the site and spend more time interacting with it. I call this the Zyngafication of content, after its most famous implementor. I stopped playing Cafe World when I ran the numbers and realized there is no strategy. You can’t design a particular cafe or food item that will maximize profit. The most profitable food in the game was (as I recall) a 3 minute appetizer. The point values of foods are weighed to maximize the number of minutes you have to actually spend playing the game per day. Their incentive structure is designed to suck up as much of your time as possible.

Long term this can’t be sustainable. As free services try to maximize their profit the number of ads per page will increase, and the number sneaky ways they get you to stay on the site longer will only grow. The user experience will suffer and eventually users will leave. What we need is a system that treats our most valuable resource, time, as something to be conserved instead of wasted.  I suspect this is fundamentally incompatible with an advertising driven model.  And I don’t want to work for a company who’s business model requires reducing the user experience.

So this brings up a fundamental question: Would you pay to use Facebook if it let you accomplish things more efficiently instead of less?  What about photo sharing?  Is there a viable model for paid social networks and services?

What does this mean? Well, I honestly don’t know yet. There is a huge amount of planning to be done, but it could be the start of something great.  We will have to see. It will be a busy Christmas, that’s for sure.

In the meantime I’m working on a few other projects that I hope to share with you soon. Stay tuned. Thanks!

- josh

If you are a scifi reader but don’t know Larry Niven then you aren’t reading this blog because you don’t exist. However, in the off chance that you slipped in from an alternate dimension where Larry Niven never took up writing, then allow me to explain.  Larry Niven is known for hard-SF writing, mainly in the 70s and 80s, though he is still writing today. Unlike contemporary SF that moved on to cyberpunk, steampunk, and singularity visions, Niven still writes about humans exploring the cosmos.  He is also quite a stickler for scientific accuracy, to the extent he has created an entire universe called “Known Space” with a history extending from the early 21st century to the 32nd.

Larry Niven is probably best known for the Ring World series, about adventures on a giant ring the diameter of earth’s orbit circling an alien star.  The book I just finished, World of Ptavvs, is set in the same universe but much earlier. It also happens to be his first full novel, expanded from several short stories.  Given that he was still early in his craft, I was impressed that it was so interesting. Clearly he got better, but even this early work is quite entertaining.

World of Ptavvs is a short novel (almost novella) about humanity’s first-ish contact with an alien species, under the most strange and amusing circumstances.  Kaznol, a greedy alien with power of mind control, is accidentally stuck in a stasis field which freezes him in time. Two billion years ago he crashes on an empty planet that eventually becomes the earth of today. In the mid 21st century humans find the frozen alien at the bottom of the ocean and attempt mental contact using a man with slight telepathic abilities (he practices on dolphins who are by this time known to be intelligent).  Due to lack of planning on humanity’s part, they accidentally free the alien and in the process the alien imprints his memories on the telepath.  So now we have *two* rampaging aliens from billions of years ago bent on conquering the earth.

I know, it’s sounds super cheesy but it’s actually a very entertaining story with some cool twists. Throw in a team from the ARM (CIA of the future), some angry asteroid miners, and a few stolen spaceships and you get a rockin’ adventure. Best of all it’s *short*. Less than 200 pages.  In an age when many authors feel the need to produce thousand page tomes it’s nice to read a book that is no longer than it needs to be.

Your homework over the holiday weekend isn’t to learn the lessons of the video, but rather consider why it’s advice wasn’t heeded. It did not have any impact on the industry that sponsored it, which is now suffering the consequences.

Does amazing design and research have any real value if it doesn’t effect any change? What can we do to make our design have more impact?

A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1917, 326 pp

I’ve read a few of the Tarzan novels by and never felt drawn into them.  With the upcoming film adaption, John Carter, I thought it was time to finally get into the series.

A Princess of Mars is the story of Civil War vet John Carter searching for gold out west in the 1870s. He is mysteriously transported to Mars and quickly captured by a race of tall multi-armed green martians.  Thanks to his fighting skills, resourcefulness, and a body accustomed to the heavier Earth gravity; he quickly learns the language of his jailers then escapes with the captive princess Dejah Thoris of the red martians (who conveniently look like really attractive humans).  Throughout the book he goes on various adventures across the planet, gaining fame and glory among the martians all while learning the secrets of their planet.

The Martians call their planet Barsoom, so you will often hear the novels known as the Barsoom series.  Burroughs wrote 10 more in the series over the next thirty years though I get the impression they get progressively derivative as time goes on.

Princess of Mars was his first novel but it’s much better than I expected. The science is horrible by today’s standards because it was written in a time when we believed Mars had canals, water, and possibly intelligent life, but for the time it was pretty visionary.  He reasonably explains the different societies, lighter than air travel, light based power sources, and the thin but sustaining martian atmosphere. Pretty good for the time it was written.

Make no mistake: this is a swashbuckler.  People of the teens and twenties liked their buckles fully swashed, and swashed they shall be. The Princess of Mars has exotic women in skimpy outfits, green bug-eyed villains, oodles of chase scenes, and sword fights by the score. It’s quite fun to read and imagine it played in a theater between The Lone Range and Flash Gordon. Being public domain and free on the Kindle doesn’t hurt either.

Conclusion

So, is it worth reading?  I say yes. It’s a fun and fast read as well as a piece of sci-fi history. You will find references to Barsoom in many later works throughout the 20th century. It also inspired a generation of authors and scientists from Clarke to Sagan.

Wikipedia entry

Amazon Kindle page

John Carter movie website

Lets step back a minute and consider what Adobe actually does.  They have some enterprise backend products for document management and (amazingly still used) a server side platform in Cold Fusion.  They have some cloud products (Acrobat.com) built on the the Flash platform. Then there is Flex, an enterprise application platform designed to steal Java developers from Sun, as well as a mobile advertising and analytics platform (Omniture). And of course Flash for mobile.

Oh yeah. And they also make Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, and a bunch of other industry leading graphics and content creation tools so pervasive that some have called them the Adobe tax.

This really sounds like two different companies, doesn’t it?  I’m not exactly sure when, but at some point Adobe strayed from focusing on high quality content creation tools for designers and artists. They entered the “platform space”: trying to be an enterprise company, a software as a service company, and own the mobile content market.  That’s a whole lot for any company to do, especially one who traditionally focused on content creation tools.  In the end I think it just became too much for one company to do, and it takes away from the thing they are good at: killer tools for designers.  If killing of mobile flash lets them focus on their core competency then this is a good thing for everyone.

Adobe is known for tools used by professionals to create content. The Flash designer tool is used by professionals to create animated interactive content. Currently, the format of the final output is a SWF file. Do the purchasers of this tool care? Not really. Flash designers want to create content that is viewable by the most people. The audience wants great content accessible from the most devices. Neither of these two groups of people gives one whit about the actual format of the bits.  Flash, the runtime, was simply an end to a means.  With HTML 5 technologies becoming viable for interactive animated content, the Flash designer tool can simply output a new binary blob to be uploaded onto web servers.  The designers won’t care, the audience won’t care.  Everyone will get on with making/viewing their content and Flash Designer CS 22 will sell millions of copies.  This really isn’t a big deal.

Well, except for one group of people who really truly do care about mobile Flash: the makers of iPad competitors. Apple’s refusal to allow Flash onto the Safari mobile browser created a market opening for a device that *would* play Flash.  While it was never a big factor for webOS, it was a flagship feature for the BlackBerry Playbook and various Android Tablets.  They’ve now lost a checkbox in their feature war with the iPad.

No matter. The world will move on.  The mobile web is built on HTML 5 standards. And in 5 years the mobile web will simply be the web; which may foretell the end of the desktop Flash plugin as well, but the end result is the same. Adobe will continue to sell world class content creation tools. Tools which output whatever format the world actually wants. And now, finally, the world wants HTML 5.

Long Live the Web. Long Live Adobe.