Out of Control review

Now, this is done by chapter(ie: there is a mini review/description for each chapter.)

Chapter one in Out Of Control is a small introduction, and the writer says that he is writing it in Biosphere 2 (If you're wondering where biosphere one is, you're standing on it. It's the Earth.)

Chapter two is about hive minds, such as bees and ants. A very, very interesting experiment was also done. At a games conference, they took 5,000 people, divided them into two teams, and had them, as a whole, play a game of pong against each other.

Chapter three is about predatory robots, made by someone called Pauline, a leading robotocist, and how they hunted each other in a metallic enviroment. It was also about decentralised minds (ie: in a robot arm, the wrist is only concerned with when to flick, and the elbow is only concerned about when to fold or unfold .)

Chapter four was about how instability in the earths atmosphere caused life, and how stable planets, such as mars, are dead. It was also about coexisting life-forms, and how their fighting and competition leads to a perfect( by that I mean unstable) union.

Chapter five was about game theory, and the Prisoner Conundrum(two prisoners are locked up together. If neither confess, they go free. If one confesses, he gets fined, and the one who does not confess gets the money and goes free. If they both confess, they're both fined.) It also contained the Tit-for-Tat strategy; copy your opponents. This means that no-one wins, but you both end up better off.

Chapter six explained what chapter four started. There was also a pretty interesting fact there, that if the earth was a huge, smooth ball-bearing, the bacterial life there would become a more-or-less uniform Superorganism, due to not having to adapt to different enviroments.

Chapter seven was a brief history of self-controlled machines, starting in ancient china and ending with modern-day industrial machines.

Chapter eight was about self-contained vivisystems, most notably Biosphere 2.

Chapter nine was about how ecosystems, for the first part of their life, are very unstable, and how, if nudged along correctly by “keystone preadators”( Preadators at the top of the food chain; nothing tries to eat them) will eventually “pop”, and stabilise out.

Chapter ten was about how human industry has become an increasingly more ecosystem-like entity.

Chapter eleven was about how programs could become less erroneous; instead of having a single pod of four million lines of code, have a million pods of four lines of code, and where you find one error,you'll likely find another twenty-three lurking unnoticed; and for every bug you fix, another twenty three will appear(alike a very angry Hydra from greek mythology.).

Chapter twelve was about virtual money, and how in places like denmark and japan it is inevitably taking over.

Chapter thirteen was about god games, and something called the “Simulcra”, or the spirit of an object, or scene, is a half reality with the advent of virtual reality.

Chapter fourteen was about Borges library, a place where every book was different,so in essence it contains every book possible.

Chapter fifteen was about computer-contained life and evolution, and how writing a simple program that evolves itself is a much better use of time than writing a huge, and inevitably buggy program

Chapter sixteen was about how artificial behaviour is taking over the film industry(Mickey is no longer drawn, but computer animated).

Chapter seventeen was about open-ended life, and how self evolved programs are inevitably ugly and full of useless pieces, but are effective, and always work

Chapter eighteen was about the evolution of evolution, and how the more evolution evolves, the better it gets at evolving things.

Chapter nineteen was about the flaws in Darwinism, and about how scientists are trying to fill them in.

Chapter twenty was about Koffman machines, or machines that build themselves.

Chapter twenty-one was about how evolution is accelerating, making more diverse creatures faster.

Chapter twenty two was about predictions, and how long term predictions are worth celebrating if they come to pass, and how short term predictions are a thousand times more accurate.

Chapter twenty three was about all the holes in scientific theory(IE:how can light be a particle and a wave?) and how scientists are attempting to fill them in.

Chapter Twenty-Four was about the Nine laws of God
One: Distibute Being: Meaning, have not one complex machine doing something but a lot of little machines working towards the same thing
Two:Have control centered at the bottom; meaning, have lots of little things working together.
Three: Have creatures using the law of incresing returns to their advantage: (The law of increasing returns is this: the more of something you hav, the more you will get in return.)
Four: Grow by chunks: Meaning, get a machine to do it's first job perfectly, before adding another job.
Five: Have much diversity: Meaning, if you have a signle organism(or a small handfull; it doesn't matter), one catastrophe could kill off the lot, but if you have millions of organisms “working” together it will be harder to kill them all off
Six: Honor errors: Meaning, errors happen- but they're just another way of learning
Seven: Have multiple goals
Eight: Have persistant dis-equilibrium(because stability is death)
Nine: Change changes itself: Meaning, change has an infrastructure, and once you've got that up and running, it'll adapt itself as necessary.