Engineering Persuadable Matter

My latest publication, commenting on a paper about agential chemistry, from my own computational perspective.  This topic falls in the intersection of Artificial Life and Unconventional Computing, forming a research area I am intensely interested in.

Susan Stepney. Engineering Persuadable Matter: A Comment on Armstrong’s ‘Life, Mind and Matter’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 14(3):33-42, 2025.

Rachel Armstrong (2024) advocates for a new approach to ‘agential chemistry’, a form of ‘new materialism’ that allows matter to take an active role. Here I comment on some of these ideas through a computational lens: the consequences if agential chemistry can perform computation to advance its own agenda; how it might provide the structure and dynamics needed for computation, and the metadynamics for open ended systems; and how it opens the possibility of a new technological discipline of engineering ‘persuadable’ agential matter.

While searching for an image to use to spice up this post, I came across an interesting Medium piece that forms a nice overview of some of the issues, from a neural AI perspective.  And has the pretty image I use above (click to embiggen). 

misty morning

 Early morning view: the world has gone away...

07:33 GMT, looking west

It's always worth checking

I was writing some Python code today, and I had some logic best served by a case statement.  I remembered that Python doesn't have a case statement, but I decided to google to see if there was a suitably pythonic pattern I should use instead.

Aha!  Python v3.10 introduced a case statement, and I'm currently using v3.13.  Excellent.  I scanned the syntax, then added the relevant lines to my code.

After I'd finished that bit of coding, I went and read the official Python tutorial.  Of course, Python being Python, its 'case' statement is actually a very sophisticated and powerful 'structural pattern matching' statement.  I might have some fun with this...

So, every day in every way, at least Python is getting better and better.

Reservoir computing benchmarks: a tutorial review and critique

Our latest paper, reviewing a bunch of standard benchmarks for Reservoir Computing, digging into their histories, and why some of them might not be the best approach to be using.

Chester Wringe, Martin Trefzer, Susan Stepney. Reservoir computing benchmarks: a tutorial review and critique. International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, 1-39, 2025. doi:10.1080/17445760.2025.2472211

Reservoir Computing is an Unconventional Computation model to perform computation on various different substrates, such as recurrent neural networks or physical materials. The method takes a ‘black-box’ approach, training only the outputs of the system it is built on. As such, evaluating the computational capacity of these systems can be challenging. We review and critique the evaluation methods used in the field of reservoir computing. We introduce a categorisation of benchmark tasks. We review multiple examples of benchmarks from the literature as applied to reservoir computing, and note their strengths and shortcomings. We suggest ways in which benchmarks and their uses may be improved to the benefit of the reservoir computing community.

If you don't subscribe to that journal, you can find the same text (if not as prettily typeset) on the arXiv, at   arXiv:2405.06561 [cs.ET]

partial lunar eclipse

A photo, with a digital SLR and an ordinary lens, of the partial lunar eclipse this morning, looking nice and red:

By the time a longer lens was fitted to the camera, low cloud had bubbled up and hidden the moon.  (We should have been better prepared: we will be for the partial solar eclipse in a fortnight.) In fact, the moon was nearly set anyway, as can be seen by "enhancing" the picture above, making the horizon visible:

A bit later, the sky was light, with an amazing contrail disappearing into the distance, as if following the setting moon.

You can identify on this picture where the moon was above, by comparing horizon profiles.  (The spike pointing to the moon is the pylon on the right.)  And yes, that position is still in cloud.

sunset with a bonus

Gorgeous sunset, with a bonus Venus -- can you spot it?  (You will probably need to click on the image to make it full size.)

18:30GMT, looking west

Here's a clue:

king of the castle

We had a tree cut down recently. One of the neighbourhood cats clearly likes this new perch.

what a difference a day makes

Yesterday, we had had nine sunny days since the beginning of the month, and the solar PV plot looked amazing.

Today broke the streak.  It was not sunny: it was full cloud cover all day, with a bit of brightness around noon.  The solar PV plot now looks very different, with a lot of (pale) orange filling in the minimum to lower quartile range:

Nine sunny days in March

I make a variety of plots of data from our solar PV system.  One set is of the power generation over the day, plotted on a background of the month (so far) averages.  February looked like this:

The horizontal time axis runs from 3:00am to 9:00pm GMT. The vertical axis runs from zero to 8kW. The orange regions indicate the minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, and maximum generation at that time, over the month. The line indicates the actual generation at that time.  Several days have very little generation, with the black generation line hugging the x-axis (February this year seemed a particularly dark month), so the orange fills the shape.

March so far has been somewhat different:

Nearly full sun every day; hardly any orange in sight on the plots.  Even on the 7th, originally forecast to be dull, there were only a few dips in an otherwise bright day.  It has been very mild, even warm.

The weather is due to break tomorrow.  Ah well, it was glorious while it lasted!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLIX

The latest batch:

not in a pear tree

 View from our kitchen window:

snapped on my phone through the kitchen window, so a little bit of reflection on some pics

This red-legged partridge was pecking around under the birdfeeder, on which was a great tit flinging seed around.

By the time we got a proper camera with a bigger lens, this bird had flown.