The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge
Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.
– David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993
Geek Attitude
The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
Definitely the only way to travel.
– Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.
Kuehleborn's Unfathomable Thoughts
Third International Conference on Virtual Worlds
The Third International Conference on Virtual Worlds (VW’2012) will be held from July 3 to 5, 2012 in Paris.
A Virtual World can be defined as a computer-simulated environment with its own physical and biological laws, populated by dynamic interacting entities such as artificial creatures and human avatars. Whereas Virtual Reality largely focuses on the design of 3D immersive spaces, and Artificial Life on the modeling and study of life-like systems, Virtual Worlds embrace both dimensions by synthesizing an entire digital universe. Their design and realization requires competency in various fields from Virtual Reality and Physics to Artificial Life and Ecology, Computer Graphics, High Performance Computing, and more.
Virtual Worlds have many applications in 3D simulation, computer games and online business. However, the approach is still broader and more fundamental. It also addresses the crucial problem of elucidating the constitutive principles by which large numbers of interacting elements can self-organize and produce emergent phenomena as they are observed in the natural world. Therefore the study of Virtual Worlds is particularly concerned with the formal basis of synthetic universes and offers a promising new way to contribute to the understanding of Nature and of complex systems in general.
Topics of interest for the conference include, but are not limited to:
- Virtual World applications
- Video games and entertainment
- Educational, medical and business solutions
- Virtual economies
- Social and philosophical implications
- Virtual Worlds and Ecology
- Virtual World technologies
- High performance and low latency solutions
- Virtual and Augmented Reality
- “Avatarization”
- Human-machine interfaces
- Virtual World fundamentals
- Artificial physics and chemistries
- Complex systems, emergence, self-organization
- Artificial Life
- Artificial life and ecosystems
- Evolution, co-evolution and adaptation
- Collective intelligence, cooperation, communication