🎶 Resources and Notes to Myself

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Introduction

The course is based on large Human Experiences that can form the basis for Model-based Thinking.

Each of the following Section Titles is an Abstract Noun that represents one such Human Experience. The understanding of each Human Experience is intended to lead to a Model, in the manner of Charlie Munger and Scott E. Page. The Human Experience + Model will be, in each case, motivated by contemplating a well known Story, or a Drama, and a Painting. The Models may resemble a Thought Experiment, or a Diagram, or a simple Procedure or Math Formula, or a piece of Computer Code. The Models are intended to provide directions for artistic and design endeavours.

The Models will be understood, internalized, fitted in with what we already know, and generalized to new applications. This will done with the help of activities based on games, videos, art-related activities, open source software tools, field experiments, field visits, additional readings, writings and discussions.

Complexity

Other Terms: Emergence / Coherence / Aggregation / Unison / Self Organization

  • Mitchell Resnick: Beyond the Centralized Mindset
  • Steven Johnson: “Emergence”: Chapter..TBD
  • Motivate “individual, simple rules” that lead to “emergence of patterns” as a central idea
  • Motivate Philip Anderson’s idea “More is Different” PDF
  • Simple and not so simple Phenomena
    • Mexican Wave and Clapping Patterns
    • Arpita Baypeyi’s Idea: “Repetitive Patterns in Dance - Kathak”
    • Kannada Proverb “Gumpinalli Govinda”
    • Douglas Hofstadter, “Ant Fugue” in his 1979 book
    • Use the “Rain” video ( though that does have Central Control…). Can be set up to be an emergent exercise:
      - by setting up the three actions ( snapping fingers; slapping the knees; Jumping)
      - Rules would be to decide whether or not go to the next action in the sequence, spending 15-20 seconds in each
      - Imitate your nearest neighbour
      - Can we have a spontaneous a capella, like a flash mob?

Feedback

Repetition

Chaos Theory

  • Steven Strogatz’s book, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
  • Iterated Function Systems IFS
  • Chaos from Deterministic Iterations
  • Frame - Golubitsky: Symmetry on Average. Need to explore this concept and link it to Randomness
  • Feigenbaum and Cobweb Diagrams. Can we do analytic algebra in R / Orange and create cobweb diagrams?
  • Stephen Smale and the Art of mixing Atta; Chickpete Experience of NavaDhaanya
  • Richard Anil Devaney, First Order Differential Equations and Phase Plane Plots, Poles and Zeroes
  • Phase Locked Loops: Is there a physical role-play model for entrainment? Line a network model?
  • Activity:
    • Time Series Analysis and the Stock Market??
    • Weather Data Analysis??

Fractals

References

Symmetry

Modularity and Orientation (as a part of Symmetry)
  • To be Written up
  • Activity: Frozen Light: https://imaginary.org/program/frozenlight
  • Questions:
  • Can this be lined to Peano’s “Monster Curves”?
    • By creating smaller and smaller grids, ( repletion / scale..) can we create Koch snowflake like drawings from Sona art? (Gerdes, page 22 - 2)
  • Use R to do some of this:
    • R package deldir for Mandalas
    • Note: I don’t like Mandalas Mondays.
Modularity ( To be written up properly)
  • Small Unitary or Atomic Pieces
  • Cannot be broken unto smaller pieces
  • Reuse etc.

Proximity

  • Kandinsky Math Artist: Examine his artistic credo and motivate
  • Motivate the idea of “Proximities” and Metrics to measure Proximity
    • Manhattan Distance; Euclidean Distance ; Great Circle Distance; Hamming Distance as examples of distance metrics
  • Emotional and Psychological effect of Proximity
  • Motivation for Voronoi Diagrams
  • John Snow and the epidemic in Soho
    • Analysis using Voronoi diagrams in R ( R Package: deldir )
  • Florence Nightingale and her Coxcomb chart and how she could have used a Voronoi diagram
  • Multi-dimensional Distances:
    • Support Vector Machines:
    • Andriy Burkov Machine Learning in 100 Pages
    • [Math for Machine Learning] (https://mml-book.github.io/)
    • Alexandre Kowalcszyk’s SVM Tutorial
    • Activity: Sorting Veggies based on touch and crouching at table level. Then stand up and use eyes. Motivate kernel trick from this exercise; tie up to TRIZ ( Another Dimension) + Childhood story of Hide and Seek in the attic.
    • Projection as shadow to explain distance of support vectors from separation hyperplane
  • Classroom and Outdoor Assignments:
    • Using Proximity and Machine Learning together:
    • Activities:
    • “Painting with Distance”
      • Exercises with Strava
      • Exercises with Google Literature Trips
      • Voronoi Self-Portrait using GeoGebra
      • Or using R + deldir following Fronkenstin
      • Kolams on a Map: City centres as pulli-s:
      • Use the work of Darrah Chavey and Madhuri Bapat (Bridges Conference)
      • Kolam based story illustration

Connectivity

Rationality

Human Behaviour and Game theory

  • Alexander Dumas “ The Three Musketeers” as a Manifestation of “Prisoner’s Dilemma” (Chapter 5 )
  • Presh Talwalkar’s article on the South West Airlines episode
  • Public Behaviour and extract from V S Raghunathan’s “Games Indians Play”
  • Axelrod Experiment and Strategy
  • Play Prisoner’s Dilemma Game on Nicky Case Website Trust Game
  • Schelling Segregation Experiment (Nick Case website)
  • Hotelling’s experiment from Presh Talwarkar’s Book
  • Schelling Points as an “Emergent Phenomenon” ( Preface of Thomas Schelling’s Book, example on Audience Seating )
    - Visit to local “urban ghetto”
    - Blockchain or Email + Timer based stock exchange:
    • random cheating, personal values and strategies
    • 4R ( Reward, Risk, Regret, Repetition)
  • Wishlist: Create Bitcoin economy in class using a captive Bitcoin installation
  • Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs):
    - Use Game Theory in to create faces to be used in Illustration
    - Nvidia AI Playground: GANimal and GauGAN.
    - The GAN Lab and The GAN Zoo

Sound

Fourier Series and Music Synthesis

  • Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” and “Tower of Babel”
    • Motivate Music as common emotional language; PsychoAcoustics
    • Gallopin’ Gertie Bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw
      • Vibration and Resonance, Idea of Acoustic Length / Natural Frequency
      • Example of Childhood Swing: How did Dad/Mom know when to push your swing?
      • Resonance
  • Activities:
    • Measure vibration frequencies from common objects and tabulate “Acoustic Length” of objects
    • Using Simple Network Graphs to construct Musical Scales
    • Arduino and Sound Projects TBD
    • Use Mozart’s Random Music generator along with Makey-Makey to create movement and sound
    • Use R packages seewave, soundgen, phontools and tuneR to synthesise sound algorithmically in R

Music Theory Stuff

  • Introduction to Sound Synthesis and Systems Theory
    • Complex Rotating Vectors, Symmetry and Fourier series
    • Decomposition and synthesis: Music
    • Ear as FFT analyser
    • Eigen Functions and how they are like an alphabet
    • Musical instruments and Timbre
    • http://andrewduncan.net/
SuperCollider and PureData Stuff
Rhythm

Adaptation

To be written up
- John Holland
- Adaptive Equalizers?

Randomness

Probability, Frequentist and Bayes Estimation

  • Hamlet “To be or not to be”
    • Motivate uncertainty, randomness, information gathering and experiments
    • Judea Pearl’s “Ladder of Abstraction” (LOA): Observation; Association; Imagination.
    • LOA - Observe:
      • Plot of Traffic Data, Histograms
      • Means, Variances and Medians
      • Poisson Process
  • Is Randomness good?
    • Randomness as “Fairness” : Sharing Mangoes during Childhood
    • Creating Randomness ; Randomness as a Tool
    • Experiment design: Blindness
    • MonteCarlo experiment to calculate pi
    • Generating Random Numbers as Modelling in Monte Carlo methods

Hypothesis Testing and Design of Experiments

  • Observational and Interventional
  • LOA - Associate:
    • College Survey:
      • Set up Hypothesis
      • Design Randomized Observational Sampling Experiment
      • No of Readings/Samples to get good Confidence Intervals
      • Standard Errors, CI
      • Motivate Allen Downey Stat Test
  • LoA - Imagine: Counterfactuals with Facebook Prophet or Google CausalImpact

Bayesian Estimation

Estimation

Interpolation / Regression / Averaging

Universality

  • How the same Model shows up in different places and domains
    1. Physics/ Urban Traffic: Tipping Points / Thresholds
    2. Networks: Power Laws; Clustering; Small Diameter; Navigation across a netwrk by individuals with only local knowledge i.e. with no idea of the complete picture of the network structure

References

  1. General:
    • Francis Su, “Mathmatics for Human Flourishing”, to be published Feb 2020
  2. Symmetry
    • Doris Schattschneider
    • Brian Sanderson’s Page on Symmetry and Tilings
    • Joe Rosen
    • Marcia Ascher “Ethnomathematics”
    • Paulus Gerdes
    • Darrah Chavey
    • Jay Kappraff
    • Kristopher Tapp’s website and PPTs;
    • Rachel Wells
    • Warren Weaver
    • Prof. Naranan’s PPTs
  3. Fractals, Chaos and L-Systems
    • Frame and Golubitsky
    • Gary William Flake
  4. Game Theory
    • Presh Talwalkar, “The Joy of Game Theory”
    • Robert Axelrod,” The Evolution of Cooperation”
    • Brian Skyrms,” The Social Constract”
    • V.S Raghunathan, “Games Indians Play”
  5. Sound
    • Trevor Cox
    • Daniel J Levitin: The Story of the World in Six Songs
  6. Statistics.
    • Stephen Stigler: Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom
    • David Spiegelhalter: The Art of Statistics
    • Derek Rowbotham
  7. Machine Learning.

Final Course Exercises and Projects

Project 1: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark over Wi-Fi

Task: Create an experience to enable multiple users to simultaneously use hand-phone gestures to create collaborative music/sound. Viewers must use dance and/or gestures holding handphones, to create music together . Each user must be able to control unique aspects of the music to create a collaborative piece each time. There must be clear opportunities and instructions for collaboration based on a Stag Hunt / Coordination Game. Tools: Software: Pure Data for sound synthesis; Android apps like Sensors2OSC for sensor data logging and sharing over WiFi Hardware: WiFi network hotspot; Smartphones; Laptop or Raspberry Pi running PureData
Ideas from our Course: Proximity; Game Theory / Stag Hunt; Networks and Graphs
Resources:

Project 2: Living on the Ceiling

Task: Use physical movement in the room along with smartphone sensor data to project a live Voronoi Diagram on the ceiling. (Hat tip to Anuja Gaikwad, FSP 2019-2020)

Tools: Software: Processing; Android apps for sensor data logging and sharing over WiFi `Hardware: WiFi network hotspot; Smartphones; Arduino + Wi-Fi; Makey-Makey’

Ideas from our Course: Proximity; Schelling Points

Resources:.

Project 3: Nightmare at Room 307

Task: Create strange bloodcurdling sounds based on where individuals are standing in the room. Participants need to move, perhaps be blindfolded and wear headphones / earphones.

Tools: Software: Geogebra or R/RStudio; Android apps for sensor data logging and sharing over WiFi Hardware: WiFi network hotspot; Smartphones; Arduino with Wifi; Makey-Makey for position location based on footfall

Ideas from our Course: Proximity; Schelling Points

Resources:

Project 4: Friends (Season 65, Episode 12)

Task: Use this article in the Atlantic Magazine as inspiration: How friendships in Adulthood. Create a physical graph/network related installation, based on personal, or crowd-sourced, or fictitious but plausible friendship data, and show in an interactive way how these friendship networks change over time. Use our collected college network data, and inspiration from https://graphcommons.com as a starting point. Can embed electronic (lights) or computed elements ( touch ) , if desired from an aesthetic point of view or to create/enhance Viewer participation. The installation should show small changes over “time” and must be wilfully and meaningfully degradable by viewers. Water, ink, knives, or flame, rubber-bands and oil are possibilities. No acid.

Tools: Software: None specified. graphcommons.com and RStudio are possibilities. Arduino can also be used for embedding computational elements. Hardware: None specified. NO THERMOCOL.

Ideas from our Course: Networks and Graphs; Connectors and Hubs; Network Dynamics and Measures; Erdos-Renyi / Watts-Strogatz / Barabasi-Albert models; Power Laws

Project 5: Six Degrees of Separation

Task: Read the Skit/Play , “Six Degrees of Separation” by John Guare. Stage or show in some way, part or all of it.

Tools: Software: None specified Hardware: None specified. NO THERMOCOL.

Ideas from our Course: Networks and Graphs; Network Dynamics

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Last updated on Jul 21, 2024