It’s less then a year since the last news, so yes, there is something new going on! You can get the quick answer to what’s up by going to our old address, www.qflux.net, where one of my new projects now resides. I have also temporarily closed new registrations and the forums on www.qflux.org; I’m going to do a bit of reorganizing. Here’s the details.

As some of you know, in addition to Quantum Flux I also have a kind of “real’ job, being a professor and running a neuroscience research lab. In Quantum Flux I work on software-based aspects of machine intelligence etc., and in the lab we are developing interfaces between living neurons and digital technology, one application of which is a biological-computational device. So that would be silicon chips with living neurons growing on them, and the neurons do the thinking and the chips feed the data in and out. One of my long term goals is to fuse the two together - use a machine intelligence to interface with living neuronal networks to create a very powerful cognitive entity. And it seems now that all the things we’ve learned by watching the Virtual Intelligence Matrix run and all the feedback I’ve received over the years, will actually contribute to the development of this hybrid information processing technology.

So what this means is the main focus of my coding is now geared toward the research lab work, and as you’ve noticed the VI programs themselves have not progressed much in the past few years. So with not many people around to post news stories, and the forums and comments have been pretty quite (except for hackers and spam), the plan is to downsize www.qflux.org to once again focus on just the VI programs. There will still be the screenshots and download pages, but I want to go back to the old phpBB forums for support and discussion, I really don’t like the one we’ve been using for the past few years.

And more detail on my new project...it seems like quite a departure from the machine intelligence world, but actually it isn’t at all. I have been into photography for many years, and to say a lot of things in a few words, it is the difference between “vision” and “seeing” that I find most important about it. This is part of the blurb that I’m putting up on the gallery:

“Vision is an abstraction, meaning that our eyes sense light from the world around us, and then transforms it into a construct in our mind that represents our perception of reality. Inherent in this process is the minds ability to turn patterns into objects and by doing so we “see” much more than a camera can.”

So how is this like how the VIM works - well, its how it’s designed it to work anyway. It’s the ability to conceptualize things, define them as objects or entities that is the fundamental step in building a complex, thinking, information processing system. So to make a long story short, this conceptualization of the world around us is one of the things that I am trying to illustrate through the photographs.

So the short form of all this is check out the new image gallery here, support and discussion forums will be coming back in a better format, probably no new updates for the VI programs for a while due to me working on integrating the code with living neurons (or something like that...)

And hey, thanks again to everyone who has stuck around all these years (Alain from France, Markus, Shon Whalen..I don’t forget all you folks, you know).

Btw, if you would like to comment on the Images of Perception project, just make them here until I get the forums back up, thanks.

It always surprises me to count up the years that the VIM has been around; 2008 will mark 9 years of public releases. I’m always glad to see Impress still hosts this page, one of the first reviews of VIM30c. And to see all the names of people on the forums that were also there right from the start. Anyway this Christmas I thought I'd finally get VIMind out there. It's up on the downloads page now, and there is a registered version, but all you have to do is enter your code from any other Quantum Flux program that you've registered and it should work.

Wishing everyone the best for 2007 from all of us here at QFlux.org...it’s been quite a year and here is what is on the horizon...

I thought I'd make a News section for site info of immediate relevance. I'm finally rolling on the "A Walk in the Forest" column, which wasn't quite as "Daily" as first announced. The column will be basically me writing a book about how the brain works etc., but what will actually make it interesting is that Johanna is illustrating the chapters. You should check out her art if nothing else.