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The leapfrogging concept at the Horizon Forum meeting was a hit!

The April 2006 issue of Popular Science reports that John Koza’s:

1,000 networked computers don’t just follow a preordained routine. They create, growing new and unexpected designs out of the most basic code. They are computers that innovate, that find solutions not only equal to but better than the best work of expert humans. His “invention machine,” as he likes to call it, has even earned a U.S. patent for developing a system to make factories more efficient, one of the first intellectual-property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.

Using evolutionary algorithms, Koza’s machine is able to produce technological improvements without violating patents filed by others. In the near future, this technology may have an impact on creative processes:

The machine has inspired a new way to think about our own creative process: Perhaps extraordinary thinking is simply the product of gradual refinements and serendipitous recombinations. Darwin’s combination of mutation, sex and selection creates not just new species, or antennas: It spawns creativity itself.

Koza’s computers show a promise of contributing to an innovation-based society, but can they outperform humans?

Date:      04 April 2006

To:          All Participants

From:     Arthur Harkins and John Moravec

Subject: Building a “Leapfrog” University: Renovating Undergraduate Education (Version 3.0)

Preface to Version 3.0

A New Paradigm founded on the convergence of globalization, rise of the knowledge society and accelerating change is emerging.

The first country to adopt the New Paradigm, bolster it with advanced communications technologies, and applies it in pre-K through graduate contexts, will either continue to lead or will acquire newfound leadership among emerging knowledge and innovation economies.

We are aware of the need for simplicity, but the problem is that the New Paradigm we describe is fundamentally cognitive in nature. It is the new educational mission required to support knowledge based innovation economies. New language and concepts are required.

Our focus, which will be amplified in an expanded Version 4.0 early next month, is the undergraduate education required to produce knowledge and direct it toward continuous innovation. We call for an entirely new undergraduate education mission –one that requires a different vocabulary and mindset compared to the now globally-distributed education missions for agricultural, industrial, and information-based societies.

Under the circumstances it will not do to simply call for interdisciplinarity, which mostly turns out to be cross-disciplinarity. Achieving the New Paradigm will require transdisciplinarity (the dynamic creation of new disciplines) and postdisciplinarity (the creation of routinely productive uniqueness at the level of the individual). (Read more …)