A Hacker in Ibalab
Today Professor Lee Spector, , a well known researcher in the field of Evolutionary Computation, came to visit Iba Laboratory. The plan was to give him a demonstration of our research work, then listen to a talk from him, and then a dinner at a nearby traditional restaurant.
The whole day was delightful, and very inspiring. Professor Lee has what the japanese call “playful heart” (遊び心), which means that he really seems to take joy in letting his imagination roam free in his ideas. Talking to him reminded me of how fun it is to do research about GA/GP - taking a computer and making it learn things in a totally emergent fashion. One part that rekindled my interest was when he talked about “getting people from other fields to share a beer with you”, to get them to tell you their problems, so you could try to solve them with GP. It reminds me of what I used to think about CS, in which it is a tool for other sciences to achieve nice things, and not an end to itself - another lesson which I need to remind myself of. It was also quite a Feynman-ish thing to say. The technical contents of his talk were two very simple GP ideas that could be easily implemented and tested in our systems - his main point was that GP needs more simple ideas than extra complex systems.
I got to play tour guide and take his family around the University of Tokyo, and that was really refreshing. I was surprised about how much they knew about his work - It got myself thinking that this was the kind of familiar/professional position I would like to see myself 10-15 years from now.
Now to go back to my papers and start working towards this direction 