Wolfram|Alpha

[vetalalumni]

...

Hofstadter's a genius [[needless to say). He wrote about a particular feedback loop where you point a video camera at its own monitor then twist it. I tried it once and found all kinds of weird emergent behavior in the image -- not just the infinite tunnel of mirrors I'd expect. It starts with an out-of-focus image then, randomly, light areas get lighter and dark areas get darker until it finds a squirming, psychedelic, geometric image that the system just "dreamed up" on its own. It kind of looked like a close up of a squirming fingerprint. I think that was in either GEB or Metamagical Themas.

I AM A STRANGE LOOP
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Basic Books, 2007

A New Journey into Hofstadter's Mind
The eternal golden braid emerges as a strange loop

By George Johnson
From the March 2007 Scientific American Magazine --> http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ey-into-hofsta

To get into a properly loopy mind-set for Douglas R. Hofstadter's new book on consciousness, I plugged a Webcam into my desktop computer and pointed it at the screen. In the first instant, an image of the screen appeared on the screen and then the screen inside the screen. Cycling round and round, the video signal rapidly gave rise to a long corridor leading toward a patch of shimmering blue, beckoning like the light at the end of death's tunnel.

Giving the camera a twist, I watched as the regress of rectangles took on a spiraling shape spinning fibonaccily deeper into nowhere. Somewhere along the way a spot of red--a glint of sunlight, I later realized--became caught in the swirl, which slowly congealed into a planet of red continents and blue seas. Zooming in closer, I explored a surface that was erupting with yellow, orange and green volcanoes. Like Homer Simpson putting a fork inside the microwave, I feared for a moment that I had ruptured the very fabric of space and time.

In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter, a cognitive and computer scientist at Indiana University, describes a more elaborate experiment with video feedback that he did many years ago at Stanford University.

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[Jimaz]

You must have done development in the pre-IDE days.

No doubt. I do recall using a pre-Windowsâ„¢ IDE which in retrospect seems laughably primitive. I think it was made by Borland. It came with a stack of paper manuals a foot high. They simulated windows using the line-drawing character set for borders.

Stephen Wolfram's website: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/