Just posting to say that I have no clue what to do a project about. (Neither does jferraio, she says, though I have great faith that she'll come up with somethine awesome.) I hope I'm not alone. Coding, fine, I can do that. But I just don't know where to start. Anyone have any castoff ideas they're willing to hand down? Jumping points? When I asked Doug about this on Saturday, he asked me what I thought was most interesting in the course so far. I still can't decide. Help?

Pandora, as I mentioned in class, is essentially an evolving music website. You enter a song or artist that you enjoy, and Pandora chooses other music that it thinks matches your choice. You can then tell it "no" or "yes" on each song (or you can give no opinion, if you're lazy), and it will modify its choices. I assume that with each answer, the fitness function is modified according to certain variables that a song is assigned. *I have not been paid by anyone to mention this website...but all my friends think it's really cool.

So I know that there have been a lot of new theories about the beginning of the Universe since I learned about the Big Bang, but that's the oh-so-ancient premise I'll start my post on. Paul said in class on Monday that at some point the universe was computable - there were few enough particles and little enough space, I suppose, that you could follow what happened from microsecond to microsecond. My question is this: when did it stop being computable? Where was the breaking point? What emerged from this fledgling universe for the first or millionth time (depending on whether you believe in the Big Crunch or not) that eliminated all possibility of an ordered world? Was it humanity? Was it life? I can imagine being able to compute the doings of a single-celled organism: while (alive == TRUE){ if(hungry == TRUE) {find(food);} else {find(mate);} } When did it simply become too complex?

...to anything we were discussing in class, but I'm a gamer. I'm sure I'm not the only one, either. But someone (possibly Flora?) mentioned a man named Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, SimCity, and all their related expansions and franchise stuff. Great games, absolutely classic. They're largely in the "sandbox" style - you can't really win, you just keep going, dealing with events and continuing to manage your city or household or whatever. He's a highly acclaimed game designer, and also seen as something of a visionary in the gaming community. He has a new project in the works, under the title of Spore.

So, the first student post. Is it too early, were we supposed to wait until we read something? Well, I don't mind, I suppose. I guess I don't have much to say yet, but I'm excited about this class, and that's pretty rare. I find that my mind works in a certain way - it really enjoys searching out patterns in everything. Literature, music, even human interaction, and the idea of some kind of basic structure gives me brain tingles. While listening to Doug and Paul, I found myself thinking of a brick wall. You start with one brick, and you use a pattern, a set of basic instructions - put another brick next to this one; another on top of those two; rinse, repeat. And you have a wall.