Ebb and Flow

This piece is available, free, and high resolution for your digital needs at ko-fi.com/s/f51f964f95 but if your taste runs more toward physical objects, those are available at redbubble.com/shop/ap/16381133…

Now that you've been called to action, I'm going to tell a long, esoteric sorry that you can skip if you just want to look at the picture (though you can do that in higher resolution for free at ko-fi.com/s/f51f964f95 hint hint). Thanks in advance for indulging me if you have.

When I was in college back in the early years of the Dark Ages (you may think I'm joking but I'm really just anticipating future history) I fancied myself much more of a math person than I guess I really am. It helped that the professor of computer science topics also taught various ancillary topics including math, and I really liked him, so I took whatever courses he was offering. That's how I came to take a class on Complexity, which, for the non-mathematically-inclined, is the study of how simple rules and behaviors create complex systems when many simple individuals interact. We did Chaos Theory too, but if I can be honest, chaos theory is less interesting to me. I'm not Ian Malcolm, I'm a bird watcher, as it were.

Now, as this was the Dark Ages, a lot of this stuff was just being theorized, and a lot of computer stuff which is probably simple today was incredibly complicated back then. For instance, I took an artificial intelligence course where we built simple neural nets ourselves because the tooling didn't exist outside of labs with more money than God. I was lucky enough to have a computer powerful enough to do this, but computer vision, for instance, was in its infancy. We were really excited about the possibility that OCR might one day exist for the average human. Heady days.

Anyway, the tool we used to explore complex systems, when possible, was a program called NetLogo. I say "program" but it was more of a programming language with an IDE. And if you just said to yourself, "I wonder if that's related to Logo?" schedule a colonoscopy but also, you're intuition is correct. Except that where Logo has one turtle, NetLogo allows you to make many turtles, all of which follow the same instructions. It's also Turing-complete, which means it's capable of getting you into a lot of trouble when you ask it to do things for which it was never intended.

I am... really good at asking NetLogo to do things for which, it turns out, it was never intended. It's a teaching tool, and at the time was underpowered, and I liked to try to simulate things which were more complicated than the simple stuff. I take no real pride in this. I also did the same things with training sets for neural networks. I actually plugged the output from a NetLogo simulation into a neural network. I'm stupid.

Anyway, for those of you whose eyes glazed over a paragraph or two back, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetLog… is the Wikipedia page, but one must understand that we were using a very, very early version. Basically, all you really need to know is that it can create pretty pictures like the example. Think of it as a more complicated version of Conway's Game of Life.

I spent *a lot* of time staring at the pretty patterns that NetLogo can create. A lot. I still have flashbacks occasionally. The ones I spent most of my time looking at would ebb and flow like tides. And then, many years later, I created the image below and it reminded me of the patterns I still had burned into my retinas, and so I named the piece "Ebb and Flow" even though it has very little tidal about it really.

Obviously I can't tell this story to everyone. But now you know.

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