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My HTML Page – Mingyue Deng

Project: My First Communications Lab Page

Documented by: Mingyue Deng

Link: imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~md3606/commlab/week1/index.html

I made this portfolio page for myself, and it contains a lot of information about me. When I wrote the codes, I had trouble putting the image source in the codes. After I directed the path to the images and I opened the preview on the browser, the images are shown as broken. Then I asked Professor Chen and figured out that it was because I did not put the index.html page in the right folder. I put it in the right folder, then I changed the path to the images. I tried again and it worked. My images are not broken anymore.

The other problem is that the heights and widths of the images are hard to determine, so I tried my best to fit it in scale and not too small. The last problem is when I was trying to upload the site to IMA NAS, I opened the site to check if I did it correctly and the images are broken again. Then I realized I have to upload the images too so it could be seen through opening the link. When writing the link, I encountered some problems too since I forgot to put in the “~” sign before my net ID. Otherwise, putting in the paragraphs and other contents are not a problem.

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Week 1 – HTML Portfolio Page (Jiannan Shi)

Project: An HTML portfolio page for myself

Documented by Jiannan Shi

Webpage link:  http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~js9686/week_1/index.html

Date: Feb. 14, 2019

Description:

I made this portfolio for myself using all the tags we have learned in class and recitation. It went on smoothly when I was building this webpage, and here’s one thing worth documenting:

I made a navigation division at the top of my page, but I wanted to mark that the default “index.html” page is exactly the “Home” page in the menu. One solution that I found was to bold merely “Home” these letters, and leave the other items in the menu in the regular font. Similarly, when directing to the “Contact” page, the item “Contact” would be bolded and “Home” would be in the regular font again. By doing so, I made the navigation explicit about which page the viewer is looking at.

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Reflection # 3 – The Game of Life

Synopsis: This is an article from ‘The Guardian’ which using youtube videos gives an introduction to the mathematical recreation and its astounding patterns. The article ends with a video interview with the creator John Conway explaining his thought process when designing the rules.

In short Conway states that the beauty of Life is that it stands to reason that since you couldn’t predict what could happen ever, it is safe to say that anything can happen.

Questions: 

  • After reading The Crucial Experiment the value of this universe is a bit more apparent but still I have to question, what truly is its purpose?
  • Conway stated that the Game of Life came about from a desire to solve the challenge of creating a machine capable of building itself, while I don’t fully understand how Life solves this, it comes into question… can this be considered a rudimentary version of machine learning?
  • If there are rules but the patterns are unpredictable what do the rules prove? 
    • It almost works like some sort of negative induction or null hypothesis
  • A follow up to the previous question would be are there finite sets of rules that don’t develop into a regulated pattern?
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Reflection #2 – The Crucial Experiment

Synopsis: This reading was an except from Stephen Wolfram’s The Crucial Experiment – A New Kind of Science. The except looked at cellular automata* and asked the question “Can Complexity come from Simplicity?” 

Questions: 

  • My biggest question for this reading was, why is this information useful? 
  • What is the different between one dimensional (Game of Life)  and two dimensional (cellular automata)?
  • Why the fundamental idea that nature works like these complex automata in that it all stems from simple beginnings, how can actual rules and examples help us better understand nature.
  • How are these autonomous agents programmed (purpose of the lab I assume)
  • Does a step refer to a change in a cell or a change in a row.

Notes:

  • Cellular Automata is easy to follow since their behaviour must have the ability to be readily presented in a visual way.
  • Fractal Patterns are the perfect balance between complexity and simple repetition
  • The basic phenomenon is ultimately responsible for most of the complexity in nature
  • Even though cells follow the same rules, different configurations of cells will have different behaviour

Thoughts on Lab:

  • Physical computation behaves similarly to cellular automation
    • executing few simple instructions in large numbers generating complexity
    • however this is just one aspect of computation
    • understanding how to generate autonomous agents on through cellular automata, we can apply skills to creating autonomous robots which is basically the foundation of nature’s complexity 

* Cellular Automata is a collection of “coloured” cells on a grid of specified shape that evolves through a number of discrete time steps according to a set of rules based on the states of the neighbouring cells. Rules are then applied iteratively for as many steps as desired.

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Reflection #1 – Fish’n’Robots

Synopsis: Fish’n’Robots was a TED Talk given by Maurizio Porfiri on his findings on Robotic Fish. He hopes to use robotics and biomimetics*  to help better understand and improve nature. 

Questions: 

  • Porfiri used fish because of their similar genetics to humans and their qualities that allow for the robotic fish to be accepted. However how self aware and smart are fish as opposed to other organisms? Will his finding and research stand when applied to larger ‘smarter’ organisms?
  • If these findings are to be developed how realistic must robots become to truly mimic and blend in with nature? How long will this take?
  • If in fact completely realistic robots are invented how will it affect of sense of reality. What are the ethical implications
  • The children naturally added components to the robotic fish such as propellers to make them more like fish. Is it an inherent and general belief then that robots actually should imitate nature but in physique and action?

Reflection:

These questions all stem from a desire to answer – “What are the benefits of Bio-Inspired Robotics?” Should we even be trying to create robots and will this actually be beneficial to nature and not just humans. I believe that Porfiri touches on some good points. By being able to understand nature we can better help preserve it. Since we cannot yet communicate with nature (traditionally speaking) we can at least try to imitate and manipulate it until we better understand it.

*Biomimetics is a field of investigation which seeks to imitate nature to address nature