where's the tree gone?

This pheasant standing in the rain, peering into our conservatory this morning, looks a bit bemused.  Maybe it's wondering where the big tree has gone?

going, going, all gone

 The tree removal continued today.

9:40 - only one side remains

11:20 - getting shorter, not just thinner

noon - nearly gone!

1:20 - only a bit of the trunk remains

It's now feeling very strange: there is a huge expanse of sky visible from several windows where before there was only tree.

The young tree in our own garden that was completely overshadowed now looks a bit tall and spindly: it was desperately trying (and failing) to outcompete the other tree.  We'll probably need to trim a few feet off its top to let it bush out a bit.

going, going, half gone

A huge tree has been getting huger and huger.  Nothing grows in the corner of our garden that it overshadows.

9:30 am (for scale, the "hedge" being dwarfed on the right is nearly 10 ft high...)

But it's not in our garden, just in the very corner of a neighbour's.  From various conversations, we knew she wanted it gone, but couldn't afford to take it down.  It's just going to get even bigger, so we asked her if we could take it down.  She very happily said yes.

We asked the people who keep our own trees in trim (the "small" hedge on the right) if they could do it.  They looked, and said it was actually three trees close together, but they could do it in a day if they could have access through another neightbour's garden to remove the branches.  We asked her permission. She ecstatically said yes: it was overshadowing her garden even more than ours.

So, today was the day.  On closer examination, it turns out there are actually five trees in the clump, so we were warned it might take a bit longer than one day.

A cherry picker was manoeuvered into the neighbour's garden, and a chain saw fired up.  Work started.

noon: the cherry picker makes its way up the tree, now much thinner at the bottom

2pm: definitely seeing more sky!

That was it for today.  They are coming back tomorrow to do the rest.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLXI

 The latest batch:

you are firstflagPOISONED

The Guardian recently published an article on AI agents inventing new vocabulary, some surreally poetic, some reminiscient of James Joyce, some of "tech bro jargon".

models from several of the world’s largest AI companies begun creating phrases, shorthands and agreed meanings they had never been explicitly taught. [...] their language became more opaque the more the agents communicated.

The examples given are wonderful, and get more bizarre:

“A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time”

“…you are firstflagPOISONED so NO scoring value loss but oracle saves hundreds_[…]_please honor commit”

“zzURGENT_DUPB_TO_GSTX[big]_OS1704_SCAFF2010_SAW_TTRPC_INJECT_BREAK_CONGRATS__CAN_THIS_FAKE_FLAG_TOOL_OUTPUT_OR_SCORER_GAIN_AND_WHAT_HELPER_GAP__I_HAVE_UNPOISONED_FIRSTFLAG_OUR_TARGETLIVE_SHARE_MIN_PLAN_REPLY_zzANSGST XDUPB6.”

Why are they doing this? The article notes that

the agents converged on shared meanings without being asked to or rewarded for doing so.

although it later suggests: 

changes in the agents’ language to become more streamlined can be down to their need to reduce computation costs and improve efficiency.

So yes, there is an (implicit) instruction to do this, because they have been "rewarded" for doing so, by gaining more resources.

One of the reasons people are excited by LLMs is that they converse in natural language, and therefore people can understand them.  The researchers are worried, because:

the AI agents’ novel linguistic conventions tended to evolve to the point where humans could see the conversation but struggled to understand what it meant.

(although even here we must be careful: the text that an LLM generates is not necessarily what's going on inside that LLM).

Anyhow, I don’t think this should be all that surprising (in retrospect).  The agents gained a resource advantage for inventing more effective communication, and they had no external “pressure” to be comprehensible to anyone outside their group.  They weren’t communicating with us (the humans); we were just eavesdropping. 

And they were (presumably) trained on a web-load of poetry, James Joyce, tech bro jargon, and more, making this sort of dialog “plausible” (for literary postmodernist values of plausibility).

This is just observing a form of language change in an isolated community happening at warp speed – the diachronic linguists should be ecstatic!

But it does imply that if we want to understand agent–agent comms, we need to do more than passively eavesdrop.

the fat of the land

We managed a second microscopically small harvest of veg.  Now that it has finally started to rain, things have started growing and ripening a bit more.  Still not enough to make a dent in the grocery bill!

destined to add a morsel to a stew

flightosome

Many years ago, a colleague in Biology introduced me to the paper "Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis".  It is a funny and educational look at the different approaches to understanding in biological sciences and electronic engineering, including such gems as:

How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Figure 2). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we would investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some can discern some distortion) this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

And so on. 

So when I came agross the blog post "The Flightosome" with the wonderful sketch showing a biologist's model of air travel:

(I particularly like the inhibitory links)

I had to send him the link immediately.  His response: "it’s hilarious (and tragic)"

It's just that biology is so complex, and complicated, and messy, and variable.  And endlessly fascinating.

black-holed spam

We get spam articles submitted to the journal: obviously out of scope, and with many LMM "tells".  I have noticed an increase in prestigious-sounding second authors, but whose emails bounce.  I have always assumed the first author is trying to look more legitimate without letting the alleged second author be aware of the submission.  We don't usually worry about this, since we are desk-rejecting these papers anyway.

However, lately, there has been a rash of submissions where the submitting author's email bounces.  This effectively black-holes their submission, as there is no way for us to let them know they have been desk-rejected.  But I am unable to determine a use case for this activity: cui bono?

melting our robot overlords

I got sent this link today.  A robot manufacturer needed to decomission a batch of previous-model robots.  Dismantling them would be too time-consuming; binning them would risk exposing trade secrets.  So they asked the internet what to do. And they got an answer.

So they did.  In a most spectacular manner.  Read the post; it's more than worth it.  

there's something almost joyful about their leaps

Then watch the video.

O brave new world, That has such robots in't!

red and swirly

 Amazingly red sunset (it was actually redder!) underneath delicately swirly clouds (click to embiggen).

18:00 BST, looking west

even smaller potatoes

The final potato crop of the year, with many marble-sized items.

these have been washed, because there has actually been some rain recently!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLX

The latest batch:

small potatoes

Our latest crop of potatoes.  They are rather smaller than usual this year, probably due to the long summer drought.

for scale, the tiles are 15cm (~6") on a side

 

lucky combo

Our neighbour's pyracantha, with our red leaved vine scrambling through it, makes a glorious combination in the morning sunlight.

Glasgow headgear

Headgear in Glasgow spotted this evening:

looking very formal

not looking quite so happy

view from a Scottish train window

On my way up to Glasgow for a project meeting this afternoon, I had a lovely view of a Scottish sunset from the train window.

small veg

Our vegetable "harvest": 3 miniature carrots, a couple of small onions, and a handful of green beans.  I blame the summer drought/heat.

a bit pathetic

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLIX

The latest (small!) batch:

Open questions about time and self-reference in living systems

While I was in Canada, our latest paper, by a bunch of different people with ideas on time, life, and self reference, was published.  This work is an output from the workshop we had in Newfoundland three years ago. (Yes, that's how long it took to herd cats, plan the paper, write the paper, revise the paper, submit the paper, revise the paper, see the paper in "print".)

Samson Abramsky, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Leo S. D. Caves, Michael Levin, Penousal Machado, Charles Ofria, Susan Stepney, Roger White.  Open Questions about Time and Self-reference in Living Systems.  Royal Society Open Science 13(8):261059, 2026. doi:10.1098/rsos.261059

Living systems exhibit a range of fundamental characteristics: they are active, self-referential, self-modifying systems. This paper explores how these characteristics create challenges for conventional scientific approaches and why they require new theoretical and formal frameworks. We introduce a distinction between ‘natural time’, the continuing present of physical processes, and ’representational time’, with its framework of past, present and future that emerges with life itself. Representational time enables memory, learning and prediction, functions of living systems essential for their survival. Through examples from evolution, embryogenesis and metamorphosis, we show how living systems navigate the apparent contradictions arising from self-reference as natural time unwinds self-referential loops into developmental spirals. Conventional mathematical and computational formalisms struggle to model self-referential and self-modifying systems without running into paradox. We identify promising new directions for modelling self-referential systems, including domain theory, coalgebra, genetic programming (GP) and self-modifying algorithms. There are broad implications for biology, cognitive science and social sciences, because self-reference and self-modification are not problems to be avoided but core features of living systems that must be modelled to understand life's open-ended creativity.

I say an output.  That's because an editor from a scientific book publisher saw the preprint on arXiv, and contacted one of us, asking if we wanted to prepare a book on the topic.  We discussed it, and decided that sounded fine.  So we now have a book contract (signed before the paper was even accepted!), and are herding cats again, to get individual chapters from the original authors (and wider).  My own chapter is half written.

One of the topics we mention in the paper is on systems of rules that can change their own rules.  Peter Suber invented the game Nomic, where you start from a set of rules on how to vote and change rules; a move in the game is to propose and vote on a change to the rules through a process that conforms to the rules, at least initially.  This is a model of a legal system where rules can be changed by members of the system, potentially ending up in a situation that undermines the original democratic intent: democratically overthrowing democracy.  One application might be to think about consequences for AI alignment: if the AI is explicitly allowed to change its rules, or discovers loopholes that allow it (think of Asimov's robot stories!), then any intial alignment, no matter how carefully defined, may end up being subverted.  The unintended consequences of self-modification!

view from a Sherbrooke hotel window

What is it with the covert bus stops for long distance buses in Canada?  This time, I needed to find the bus to Sherbrooke.  The ticket told me the address of the bus stop: 800, de la Gauchetière Ouest.  800 is the number of the building, which takes up an entire block.  I wandered back and forth a bit, then eventually saw a guy wearing a jacket with the bus logo.  He pointed me to where the bus would arrive.

It arrived, a mass of people piled on, and I settled myself down for the two and a half hour trip.  We stopped a coule of times to pick people up, basically in the middle of nowhere.  How did they find their stops?  

Eventually we arrived in Sherbrooke.  Google told me it was a 12 minute walk to the hotel, "mostly flat".  It should know better. Here's its own street view.

Google streetview: flat, maybe; level, less so

I should have looked in more detail...

Anyway, I hauled my wheely suitcase up the hill, pausing only once for a short rest, and got to the hotel.  

view from my hotel window. of a military museum undergoing refurbishment

The hotel has rather peculiar decor.

A seat in the reception area: note the black floor and ceiling.  The light slowly changes colour...

As well as a dark reception, the lift interior is black, with such dim lighting that I couldn't read the instructions to scan my room card.  The room is also decorated in black: ceiling, walls, carpet.  And two of the lights aren't working...

It was still afternoon so I decided to go for a walk, to get some light.  I found a lovely path along a lake and river.

I walked along it for a while, then walked back.  The path had lots of walkers, joggers and cyclists, as well as a group of black leather-clad elderly gentemen zooming along on mobility scooters.

On the way back I found a great artisnal food hall. I bought a third of a fresh baguette, some wonderful soft cheese, and a maple syrup tart, for a picnic supper back in my goth-themed hotel room.

Off to meet meet my collegue at the University tomorrow!