The Creation of Beatshifting (re-shifted)

My song release of the day is Beatshifting (re-shifted):

To give you a little insight into the underlying creative process I'll highlight some of the coolest things I did on this remix of my own song.

• Create an awesome piece of original electronic music. Here's the original, which comes from my album Splinter Stone.  You can download the original track for free.

• Use Ableton Live to deconstruct the original song into its component sections. Merge similar tracks from the original into a smaller set of remix stems. 

• Study The Glitch Mob's music and become entranced by their use of selective silences to create spooky rhythmic effects. Take this idea totally overboard to create rhythms that as awkward as Napoleon Dynamite by routing some of your tracks into the "Gator" track which has a clips to automate muting of your submix in a rhythmic way.

• Record your own percussion instrument samples and apply the stochastic music principles pioneered by Iannis Xenakis to create a custom music digital instrument in Kontakt to add randomized chaotic musical noise to your remix.

• Use Ableton Live's Beat Repeat to sound like every other kid sitting in his bedroom making a remix with Ableton Live in the 2010's. Also automate a low pass filter to get that sweet 'whole-mix filtered' sound.

• Use the built-in OSX voice to create custom robot lady voice samples, from the terminal.

• Map a variety of strange percussion sounds to your Launchpad and add mad finger-drumming to your remix.

• Use Processing to create song art by algorithmically kit-bashing fonts together, blending sections of letters to create a smooth transition between two words.

• Write a blog post about the process so that your audience can enjoy a full multi-media experience. And so that you can be a pretentious stuck-up geek.

Why Looking for a Job is Fundamentally Demoralising

Looking for a job begets misery because job hunters face brutal free-market competition, the expected time until employment is constant even if a hunter has been unemployed for a long time, and getting a good job means turning down adequate jobs. Ultimately, I aim to encourage my fellow job seekers by helping them to understand their predicament more clearly so they take the bad aspects less personally.

Many people find that looking for a job is a long, frustrating process. No, duh. I'm not here to talk about the beaten-path reasons for why job hunting sucks, I want to convince you that job hunting is fundamentally demoralising. Why?

1) You are un-jacked from The Matrix. Welcome to the real world of free-market competition. At school, or in your last job, someone was telling you what to do so that you could add value to yourself. Now you have to show someone else how you can add value to them. You are truly master of your own destiny. You feel the full weight of your freedom, but also the opposing force of everyone else's freedom.

2) Finding a job can take forever. Think about it like this: you either have a job or you don't. Each day you actively look for a job, there's a chance you might get a ready-to-sign offer. That chance is the same, regardless of how long you've been looking. So the length of your periods unemployment are drawn from Poisson distribution. (A better model would be that they're fractally distributed; read about Black Swan theory.) This has horrible psychological implications because you seem to be making no progress while facing a constant flow of rejection. But, while we're breaking illusions, the rejection is not personal. Employers aren't looking to objectively evaluate prospective employees, they're just trying to find ones that they like without doing much work themselves. Read Paul Graham's essay on judgement.

3) Getting a good job requires reckless bravery. Different job offers have different values to you. You're probably looking for more value than a job at McDonalds, so you might reject some jobs. Some of those jobs would be good enough. But you're trying to do what you love
not just survive. Read Paul Graham's essay on doing what you love. So you have to voluntarily stay unemployed until you get that amazing job offer that you can't refuse. It takes guts to do that.

Misery is in the very essence of the job hunt process. Once you realise that, hopefully you will view your search in a different light. You're not a loser, you're just facing self-interested employers in the free market. Don't give up, you get out of the unemployment rut not by searching for a fixed time but by getting just one lucky break. Be brave, you might just have to turn down an offer. To get practical help on finding a job, read the excellent book by Richard Bolles, "What Colour is Your Parachute?" 

My PhD dissertation summary

Today I submitted my PhD dissertation for examination. The title of my dissertation is: ‘Measuring and Influencing Sequential Joint Agent Behaviours.’

The essential thesis of my research is that:

Algorithmically designed reward functions can influence groups of learning agents toward measurable desired sequential joint behaviours. 

The thesis is demonstrated with research explaining how to measure a particular sequential joint behaviour, turn-taking, how to identify rewards that are conducive (or prohibitive) to turn-taking by learning agents in a simulated context and how to design rewards that incentivise arbitrary sequential joint behaviours in multi-agent stochastic games.

Informally, the thesis is about activities performed together through time by a group of agents that figure out how to do things better as they go. An agent could be a person, a robot or a computer program. We mathematically explain how to get the overall outcomes we want by telling the agents what they should individually want. Because we do this mathematically, we need to measure the things we want our group of agents to do. This dissertation explains some new ideas about how we can measure how well a group of agents is taking turns, how we can guess whether or not pairs of a certain kind of robot-like computer programs will take turns, and how we can tell individual agents what they should want so that they collectively end up doing something that we want, for some situations.

My dissertation includes most of two journal papers that I published, plus other bits that I’m planning to submit as another journal.

One of the things I studied was simulated agents communicating and learning from rewards.

Nash and Bourne

Violent intrigue can be analysed mathematically

Recently, I finished reading "The Bourne Ultimatum" by Robert Ludlum, an energetic, intriguing tale of violent, manipulative men head-to-head in a struggle of life and death. My definite impression was that Robert Ludlum's Bourne series is a realistic portrayal of the total opposition that can be mathematically modelled as a 'Nash equilibrium.' Read on to get the details.

Many of you will know of Jason Bourne by the series of movies where Matt Damon plays the amnesic protagonist. However, the book series has a different plot and a different mood. In both cases, Jason Bourne is an intelligent man of violence that outguns and outwits his opponents in deadly struggles.

Matt Damon plays Jason Bourne

At the same time as I read the Bourne books, I was studying mathematical ways to understand groups of opposing agents. The concept of a 'Nash equilibrium' is one mathematical way to understand the theory behind violent strategies. A Nash equilibrium is a situation where each person is acting to as to maximise his or her own good, given the actions of everyone else. A Nash equilibrium can be a good thing, where everyone is helping each other, or a Nash equilibrium can be a bad thing, where each person is at the others' throats. In the case of Jason Bourne, the Nash equilibrium is always one where the two masters of intrigue are trying to kill each other. There can only be one winner in the Bourne series.

Without giving too much of the books away, Jason Bourne opposes Carlos the Jackal, the leading international assassin. One will set a trap for the other and the other will 'reverse' the trap, and the one narrowly escapes. Neither man's appearance is clearly known by the other and they both enlist pawns to fight against each other. Jason Bourne threatens, bribes and takes every possible extreme measure in order to defeat the Jackal. If you have only seen the movies, then consider how Bourne tricks and outwits his opponents for his own ends.

John Nash was a revolutionary mathematician

The overall impression I got from the books was 'Oh, this is what a purely competitive Nash equilibrium really looks like.' The winner is not the strongest, the fastest or the man with the best weapons, but the man who thinks the extra step ahead. If you can foresee what your opponent will do, then you can defeat him. But your opponent will try to foresee what you will do. So you must think N+1 steps ahead. In fact, to win, you must be unpredictable. The mathematical solution of a purely competitive game is to randomise over all of your possible actions. In practise, you become an unstable psychopath who commits apparently arbitrary acts of violence without any discernible pattern. I read a lot of action books, but most of the bad guys are stupid or have some other drastic failings. Jason Bourne's opponents seem much more closely matched.

Life can approach the theoretical abstraction of a Nash equilibrium, but game theoretic methods often provide exact answers to slightly the wrong questions. This can make game theory blindingly addictive to some, as Venkatesh Rao observes. In the areas of game theory that I've studied, people often assume that the people have a finite number of actions available to them. However, in practice, the number of devious things that you can do to someone else is limited only by your imagination. Game theory can give us some intuition, but it's probably best to let Robert Ludlum fill in the details. (Actually, stop that thought process right there, just in case you think of a new way of inflicting harm.)

In "How the Mind Works," Steven Pinker gives some good explanations of why people are emotional and do crazy, violent things that seem irrational from some perspectives. In "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," Pinker explains why people have become much less violent with time. Contrary to the constant whine of the alarmists, not all our morals are bad and getting worse. Part of the reason for the decline in violence is a change in the prevailing Nash equilibrium. We are now more incentivised to be peaceful and non-violent, which is good for all of us. Centrally administrated justice helps us all be more charitable. The real life Carlos the Jackal is serving time in a French prison and Jason Bourne is best approximated by Matt Damon, who co-founded Water.org to help the poor get better access to water.

How to be an Awesome Postgrad Student

Here are a few tips on getting through a PhD or a Master’s, based on my experience doing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the University of Canterbury. I’ve had a good time so far, and I hope that you can have the best experience possible. This document is based on ideas that I gathered from other written works on how to be an awesome postgrad, my supervisors, friends, parents, wife and various talks that I attended as a postgrad. I hope you can translate any discipline-specific details into your own field. Your PhD experience probably be unlike mine, especially if you are not doing electrical engineering. Get advice from wise scholars in your discipline on how to do be an awesome postgrad student in your context.