Player of the Month

We know we are not walking alone towards Singularity. Many people around the world everyday bring all of us one step closer to semi-immortality. They have a pivotal role in the "Solution of the Game". These people are who we call, simply, Great Players.

August 2010 – Murray Rothbard
The publishing of the iLabs book on the law in the world of semi-immortality invites stimulating comparisons with prominent scholars in the philosophy of law and related topics. Murray Rothbard, a von Mises' student that managed to become an important economist, historian and philosopher, is certainly among the most thought-provoking thinkers on issues of social structure and individual freedom. Graduated from Columbia University, Rothbard helped define the modern libertarianism, arguing for a form of free-market anarchism termed "anarcho-capitalism". Heir of the Austrian tradition (Menger, von Mises, etc.), his premises are similar to Lockean considerations on the value of property and individual freedom: starting there, he ends up building a sophisticated theory supporting a society without a State. Putting Rothabard's suggestions in the Singularity perspective - i.e. adding the idea that artificial minds will help us shaping the new world and that semi-immortality demands a brand new ethics - results in a socio-political framework that is very close to the iLabs system developed in these years.

July 2010 – Aubrey de Grey
Confirmed speaker at teh iLabs Singularity Summit 2011 for the medicine-biology area, Aubrey de Grey is considered a prominent thinker on transhumanism and the scientific challenges of longevism. Born in London on April, 20, 1963, he graduated in Computer Science from Cambridge. After graduation, de Grey works as a software engineer and AI researcher, starting his own company, Man-Made Minions Ltd, to pursue the development of an automated formal program verifier. It is Adelaide Carpenter, geneticist and his (future) wife met at a graduate party, that introduces him to the science of anti-ageing. In 1999 he publishes The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging, containing his research on damage to mitochondria and senescence; thanks to this book, the University of Cambridge awards him a Ph.D., even if he is not registered as a Ph.D. student. Since 2005, he's been pursuing his research agenda according to the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project. He is co-founder of the SENS Foundation, a no-profit institution that "works to develop, promote and ensure widespread access to regenerative medicine solutions to the disabilities and diseases of ageing"; the foundation awards the prestigious Methuselah Mouse Prize to original research works that significantly extend the lifespan of mice. In recent years, Aubrey de Grey published several articles in international scientific journals, including collaborations with important scientists in the field of biogerontology. Interviewed by news sources such as CBS 60 Minutes, BBC, The New York Times, Fortune, The Washington Post, TED, Popular Science, he is internationally recognized as a leading figure of transhumanism and life-span extension.

June 2010 – Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman is a psychologist we feel very close to our vision, since he has always been advocating for a broader view of the notion of "intelligence" and he is an expert of meditation and his effect on brain and physiology. Ph.D. from Harvard with a final dissertation on meditation and stress, Goleman begins a exstraordinary career as a journalist and public figure: recruited by the New York Times in 1984, Goleman has the chance to improve his knowleadge of scientific journalism and focus several themes of scientific interests: it is by collecting studies and intuitions from this period that he writes the best-selling Emotional Intelligence, one the first successful volume to popularize the idea that emotions play a pivotal role in determing the performance of people in almost every field. In 1993 he is co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, a program designed to help children manage, express and use their emotions, improving social skills, public behavior and also cognitive abilities. He is also a co-founder - togethrer with friends Adam Angle and Francisco Varela - of the Mind and Life Institute, to foster the sharing of ideas bewteen the Dalai Lama and the scientific community. A keen practitioner of and researcher on meditation since his youth, Goleman still devotes much of his spare time to meditation retreats with his wife.

May 2010 – Luigi Verzè
Semi-Immortality does not call just for great scientists: we have always been admired people working everyday to realize visions and projects others coud not even conceive - that is why we devoted the third part of the book Semi-Immortality to real projects focused on building the Singularity at school, in our hospitals, in the business and financial world. The Player of the Month is thus one of the main visionary Italian leaders, Don Luigi Maria Verzè. Born in Verona in 1920, he graduated in literature and philosophy in 1947. In his autobiography he states clearly his concept of "mission": “As there isn't a man's sin another man can't commit, there is no good action that anyone could not do". His main project - the one he devoted his life to - is the construction of hospitals: in 1958 he founded a center for children and elderlies; in Milan he starts the San Raffaele project, a leading medical institution in Italy and Europe, based on the idea of a single institution providing healtcare, research facilities and education. Since 1980 the center has been growing in "quantity" and "quality", with new hospitals found in several part of the third world and a university (currently offering degree courses in Medicine, Psychology, Philosophy, Cognitive Sciences). In 2007 he found Quo Vadis, a revolutionary project where biology and genetics, psychology and neuroscience, philosophy and humanities would together bring a decisive contribution to the extension of human life-span.

April 2010 – David K. Lewis
The vision thorougly argued in the volume The Mathematics of Models of Reference is somewhat similar in spirit to the only systematic ontology developed by an analytic philosopher in the past half century, the "Humean Supervenience" thesis put forward by David K. Lewis. Roughly speaking, the idea is that all the things there are - tables, chairs, people, moral values, social entities, desires - are perfectly determined by the simple arrangement of natural properties in the space-time: in decades of philosophical activity, Lewis showed - with elegant arguments and brand new conceptual tools - that most worries and objections about such a radical riductionism are actually no problem at all. Some of these tools are also used within the theory developed in The Mathematics of Models of Reference, going some steps forward from Lewis framework by suggesting that the actual structure of the space-time may well be that of a cellular automaton. In his four monographs and countless papers, Lewis shaped the geography of the philosophy of his time and set today's agenda of challenges (and proposed solutions) in a variety of fields: Convention (1969) pioneered the use of game theory to explain social concepts and introduced the first explicit analyisis of the now famous notion of common knowledge; Counterfactuals (1973) presented a new formal semantics for counterfactual statements; On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) clarified and defended his own theory of possible worlds, putting together spared pieces of philosophical work in a coherent global picture; finally, Parts of Classes (1991) proved that what can be said using the most developed, formalized abstract theory - set theory - can be said without it by using the formal resources of mereology. With groundbreaking contributions in topics as diverse as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, decision sciences, David Lewis has been rightly described as the Gottfried Leibniz of XXI century philosophy.

March 2010 – Nick Bostrom
In the recent chart compiled by Foreign Policy on the Top 100 "global thinkers", there's also an eclectic Swedish philosopher. Nick Bostrom is director of the Future of Humanity Insitute, an Oxford University's institution whose mission is to bring excellent scholarship to bear on big-picture questions for humanity (such as "how we can better understand, evaluate, and respond to radical change"). Bostrom - who got a B.A. in Mathematics, Philosophy, Logic and Artificial Intelligence (setting of course a national record) and an M.A. in Philosophy and Physics - gave an original contribute in these years to many topics interlinked with transhumanism and Singularity-based issues: in more than 170 (!) scientific pubblications - ranging from Nature to the Journal of Philosophy -, Bostrom brougth in the traditionally conservative world of academia some fresh threads of thought concerning the opportunity and the risk produced by the exponential growth of technological. Particularly interesting are his works on values, ethics and social theory: he firmly believes - as we do here @ iLabs - that a critical discussion of our values should begin now if we want to be ready to handle the gigantic consequences of the forthcoming Singularity. As he readily summarizes in his website: "My working assumption: these high-leverage questions deserve to be studied with at least the same level of scholarship that academics routinely apply to all manner of arcane trivia. This assumption might be wrong. Perhaps we are so irredeemably inept at thinking about the big picture that it is good that we usually don’t. Perhaps attempting to wake up will only result in bad dreams. But how will we know unless we try?"

February 2010 – Steven Levitt
"I just don't know very much about the field of economics. I'm not good at math, I don't know a lot of econometrics, and I also don't know how to do theory" - surprisingly enough, these words comes from the mouth of the winner of the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, and co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Steven Levitt is not your average economist, first of all because he has no interest whatsoever in what people usually mean with "economics"; Levitt's area of interest and specialization is people' everyday decisions, especially if those decisions are somewhat risky and illegal. Probably the most popular and original thinker in the economics of crime, his work is based on two simple - and very iLabs-friendly - assumptions: first, people do what they do for a reason and quickly respond to incentives; second, (almost) everything can be measured effectively. Building on this credo, Levitt is able to analyze all the subleties involved in a variety of interesting decision-making processes and predict the change in behavior caused by a change in the available incentives. For example, in his latest hit, "Superfreakonomics" - the recently published sequel to the best-selling "Freakonomics" - Levitt carefully analizes the pivotal role of information in hospitals' emergency room, the impact of non-rational factors in the choice of appropriate treatments and discuss the difference between an average doctor and a very good one. Hardly the last word on any of his research topic, Levitt is an incredible observer of human behavior and his provoking, yet methodologically robust, work is everyday an inspiration for how to best measure and affect the social variables on which our life depend.

January 2010 – Konrad Zuse
"It from bit" - the fascinating idea that the whole physical universe is a digital computer running its program - has been gaining more and more popularity in recent years through the scientific efforts of brilliant minds such as Edward Fredkin, Juergen Schmidhuber and Stephen Wolfram. However, the father of this theory is a German engineer who happens to be also the father of modern PC, Konrad Zuse. More or less the Charles Babbage's counterpart in the last century, Zuse starts dreaming about a calculating machine when he finds himself terribly bored by the many routine calculations he has to do by hand for his studies. Working in almost total isolation from the outside world - with no connections with U.S. and U.K. scientists and no funding - he is still able to finish the first computer of history in 1936: called the Z1, it is host in Zuse's parents apartment in 1936. Following this first attempt, Zuse builds more sophisticated and reliable models: the Z3, completed in 1941, was a binary 22-bit floating point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays - primitive as it was, it's been proved decades later that this computer was actually Turing complete. The Z3 was destroyed in 1945 by an Allied attack, but the latest model, the relay-based Z4 still under construction, survives the war; in 1950, the computer company Zuse KG sells a finished Z4 to the ETH Zürich, the second computer in the world to be sold. Konrad Zuse dies on 18 December 1995: the scientific and hi-tech community - almost replicating the tribute Charles Babbage had received for his calculators - manages to rebuild, with 30.000 components, the original Z1; more recently, a team from the Free University of Berlin implemented a compiler for Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language, designed by the pioneering mind of Zuse from 1941 to 1945, but never published until 1972.

December 2009 – Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof
Anyone knows how hard it is to translate complex thoughts in non-native languages - we know, for example, how hard it is to describe our Great Players in English conveying exactly the same portrait we draw for them in Italian. The i-ese project, an ongoing iLabs project in computation linguistics, is designed to prevent misunderstanding when it comes to human-human, human-machine, machine-machine interactions. There are several examples of artificial languages built for similar purposes in past centuries, but this month we would like to remember the work of Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, 150 years after his birth (December 15, 1859). Born in Białystok in the Russian Empire, he was fluent in his father's language (Russian), but also in his mother's one (Yiddish); during his life he came to master German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English. Raised in a city made up of several ethnic groups, Zamenhof starts to believe that the different languages are to blame for many of the prejudices and social problems of his community. Building on this intuition, he begins his own project of Lingwe uniwersala, drawing upon the grammars and phonetic structure of the languages he knows. In 1878, the project is almost finished, but Zamenhof is too young to publish his own book: he graduates from school and then he goes to study medicine in Moscow and in Warsaw, becoming an ophthalmologist in 1886. It is only in 1887 that he finally publishes the volume entitled "Lingvo internacia. Antaŭparolo kaj plena lernolibro" (International Language. Foreword And Complete Textbook), under the pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto": it is after this that Zamenhof's artificial language was named Eperanto. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910, streets, parks and bridges worldwide (and a minor planet!) are named in his honor; December 15 is celebrated annually as Zamenhof Day by users of Esperanto.

November 2009 – Marshal McLuhan
In the Facebook-Twitter epoch, to point out the importance of communication is somewhat easy. It was much harder when Marshal McLuhan first argued that technological improvements in the communication business are what most influence our everyday life: the effects of such changes has been studied by McLuhan in a deep and inspiring way. The secret of communication lies in the ability to ask right questions to get informative answers: media are McLuhan's real interest as they are thought to be an "indipendent" entity between people and reality. In a slogan, the impact of communication can be expressed with the famous motto "medium is message". Since there is always something (i.e. a medium) between our minds and the world we live in, it is therefore natural that changes in that medium are going to revolutionize the way we percieve our life. In the end, a medium capacity to communicate something is dependent upon the fact that a medium first communicate itself - it is intrinsically self-referent. Since he was the first to uncover these complex dynamics, McLuhan surely deserve a place among the Big Players.

October 2009 – Karl Popper
The new iLabs partnerships, as well as iTech start-up - a new lab for technological application of iLabs research -, are all grounded in the same conviction: scientific theories and rational tools may play a big role in improving almost all human activities. Back in the Thirties, there was a huge debate among philosophers and scientists on how to best define "science": what is the difference between astrology and physics? Why should we rely on the latter and not on the former? The most popular answer to this challenge was put forward by (arguably) the best philosopher of science of last century, Karl Popper. The idea is fairly straightforward: pseudoscience and science may both be perfectly compatible with available empirical evidence; indeed, it is remarkable the ingenuity of astrologists when they try to reconcile their predictions with observed outcomes. The difference lies exactly in the opposite ability: that is, phyisical theories but not astrological theories may be refuted because of experimental results; in Popper's own terms, science is falsifiable, pseudoscience is not. Apart from his contribution on related problems in the philosophy of science, Popper is well known for his work in social and political theory. In particular, he fought a tough battle againts historicism, a theory that was very popular at his time (historicism holds that history develops inexorably and necessarily towards a determinate end). His proposal, mainly exposed in the book "The Open Society and Its Enemies", was a so-called open society, where individuals are free to make their own choices (taking full responsability of their actions) and critical debates on any issue are strongly encouraged, since Popper claimed that only rational discussion - both in science and in society - lead to true progress. A truly revolutionary spirit, Karl Popper is more than just a big thinker: his thoughts and works still inspire us today on how to best use what we learn from science to improve our society.

September 2009 – Alan Turing
The scientific and philosophical contribution of Alan Turing to U.K.'s history (and to mankind in general) is so outstanding that more than 30.000 signatures were recently collected for a Downing Street petition calling for an official apology. 55 years after Turing took his life - after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay -, Gordon Brown recongized his leading role in "Britain's fight against the darkness of dictatorship", since "without his outstanding contribution, the history of world war two could well have been very different". Turing's studies comprise seminal contribution to several scientific fields, from mathematics to biology, from statistics to chemistry: in each and every debate, his ideas proved to be groundbreaking and his research paths truly inspiring for the next generation of practitioners. Brown's words emphasized his work as Enigma code-breaker during the Second World War, but his scientific production is not less important: he worked in mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesis and pattern formation, and he proved (indipendently) the Central Limit Theorem, one of the most important results in statistics. Of course, the most influential part of his studies is computability theory: he provided the popular formalisation of the concept of algorithm in terms of a virtual machine, and then proved some fundamental impossibility theorems. As the Time Magazine stated in 1999 (naming Turing one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century): "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.". Finally, it is worth noting his pioneering work on the foundations of Artificial Intelligence: more than five decades ago, Turing proposed an empirical test to assess whether a given machine was able to think; the so-called "Turing Test" still remains today the AI-addicts' Holy Grail. Considering such an outstanding record of innovations, the end of the story looks even more humiliating: Turing's homosexuality was illegal at that time, so he accepted treatment with female hormones as an alternative to going to prison. Quoting Brown's apology: "We're sorry, you deserved so much better".

August 2009 – Will Wright
The publishing of Avatar and Surrogates - two movies on doppelgangers - is forthcoming; moreover, the topic is already a legitimate part of pop culture and academic discussions, as the "Second Life" phenomenon and the "Extended Mind" theory vividly show. For this reason, our monthly choice goes to Will Wright, whose work, over the last decades, has been highly influential in theis field. Raised in Atlanta and Baton Rouge, deeply influenced by his Montessory-style education ("SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design") and his passion for model-building, Wright creats his first Commodore 64 videogame - Raid on Bungeling Bay - in 1984. Two years later, he shocks the videogamers' community with his ground-breaking SimCity: when almost all other games are first person shooter, Wright's game is a "software toy" where it is not important to live or die, but to create and mantain over time an artificial city. After a bunch of less revolutionary (but still commercially successful) titles - such as SimEarth (1990), SimAnt (1991), SimCopter(1996) - it is time for another shock: in 2000 he publishes The Sims, a "life simulator" where players guide the life of their avatars in a simulated city. Thanks to the appealing game concept and the sophistication of the AI involved, the game managed to become the most successful game in the history, featuring seven expansion packs and 100 milion copies sold. His latest work is called Spore, another product merging where cutting-edge technology and new ideas: the fact that the videogame is used to teach kids the marvellous mechanism of biological evolution is a further confirmation of Wright's ability to build alternative universes, enanche creativity and teach important notions in an entertaining way.

July 2009 – Henri Poincaré
In 2009 Santa Fe Institute celebrates its 25th birthday. Founded on methodological and scientific premises overlapping those inspiring iLabs, the institution is world leader in interdisciplinary studies on complex systems and chaos theory: the Player of the Month is the "grandfather" of deterministic chaos, Henri Poincaré. Poincaré's seminal contributions encompass a variety of disciplines: mathematics, cosmology, physics, philosophy of science. His treatise Analysis Situs presents the first systematic treatment of topology: a founding father of the field, his topological conjecture - recently proved - was one of the seven mathematical challenges of 21th century worth one million dollar. Poincaré develops some key ideas on physical relativity that play a central role in the full development of the theory of Special Relativity. When, in 1887, the king of Sweden promotes a mathematical challenge to celebrate his birthday, Poincarè submits an essay on the so-called "three body problem", a problem in cosmology that was unresolved since Newton's work. The French mathematician does not solve entirely the original problem - which was too hard - but still wins the prize for the scientific value of his work: Les Méthodes Nouvelles de la Mécanique Céleste - published between 1892 and 1899 - presents new accomplishments in the field. Poincaré is the first scientist to explicitely recognize that determinism and predictability can (and indeed very often do) diverge: due to the complexity and non-linearity of relationships between the parts, certain systems can be unpredictable even if they are deterministic because of the sensitivity to the initial conditions. Henri Poincaré dies prematurely at the age of 58, while still being the only one to be included in all the five sections of the French Academy of Science.

June 2009 – Milton Friedman
The Seasteading Institute and its mission – building independent societies in the ocean as a ground-breaking, alternative approach to current social structures and governments – has been receiving increasing attention by international media. The man behind this revolution (a revolution that matches almost perfectly iLabs ideas for the semi-immortality society) is Patri Friedman, grandson of the Nobel Prize, and Player of the Month, Milton Friedman. It is hard to underestimate Friedman’s impact on politics, economy and “social philosophy” in the last 50 years: The Economist hailed him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it". After undergraduate studies in mathematics at Rutgers University, Friedman receives his M.A. in 1933 from the University of Chicago, to which he will eventually return in 1946 to teach economics for thirty years. A brilliant statistician (the “Friedman test” for sequential sampling was invented by him while working at Division of War Research at Columbia), he is famous for consumption analysis and monetary theory. On the philosophical side, Friedman’s ideas shape the contemporary debate in almost any topic in public policy and strongly influence U.S. and U.K. government decisions. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocates policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of licensing of doctors, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. Luckily, some of Friedman’s spirit and revolutionary attitude managed to survive till these days through his grandson. We look forward to seeing the completion of the promised revolution in human society.

May 2009 – Alfred Tarski
i-ese, iLabs formal language for human-machine interaction, is currently under development. As a formal language, its roots heavily rely on the seminal works of May's Great Player, Alfred Tarksi. Born as "Alfred Teitelbaum" (he will lately change his name because of the growing, strong nationalist feelings in Poland), he enters the University of Warsaw in 1918, beginning a course leading to a degree in biology. Destiny, however, has special plans for the young Alfred. In 1919 Stanislaw Lesniewski accepts the chair of the philosophy of mathematics at Warsaw: during his logic course, Lesniewski quickly sees Tarski's genius and persuades him to major in mathematics. Under the influence of Lesniewski, Lukasiewicz, Sierpinski, Mazurkiewicz, Tarski starts his brilliant career: he is only 22 when he publishes the now famous paper on Banach-Tarski Paradox (the proof that you can cut a mathematical sphere in pieces, riarrange them and get two spheres, each one as big as the original!). His interests are unusually broad for a logician: during his life, he makes several important contributions to topology and geometry, as well as logic and metamathematics. In 1933 Tarski publishes The concept of truth in formalized languages, in 1936 On the concept of logical consequence. These two papers are among the most important articles in the whole history of logic, since they provide formal foundations to the (otherwise shaky) notion of Truth (and the related notion of logical consequence, arguing that the conclusion of an argument will follow logically from its premises if and only if every model of the premises be a model of the conclusion). Tarski's definition is recursive, so that the truth conditions of complex sentences are always determined by the truth conditions of their constituents: if your looking for a formal and computable semantics, there is no need to search further. Along with these exciting insights, Tarski proves a fundamental limitative result concerning the definition of truth, namely the fact that under certain (quite general) assumptions a truth predicate for a formal language cannot be defined within that language without creating an inconsistency (yes, the Liar Paradox we all know and love): that is the reason why the semantics for a language should be given in another language (yes, the language/meta-language distinction we all know and love). On 31 August 1939 Adolf Hitler gives the order to attack Poland the next morning but again destiny has special plans for Alfred. Invited by Willard V.O. Quine to attend a Unity of Science meeting at Harvard, Tarski is on the last boat that leaves Poland before the Nazi occupation; while Tarski will spend most of his life as a teacher in the U.S., many members of his family are killed during the War.

April 2009 – Richard Feynman
A Nobel Prize winner once remarked how frustrating it is that today laws of physics requires an enormous quantity of information to calculate what is going on in a small fraction of space-time: "how many things can happen in a place that is so small?". Richard Feynman - "Nobel Prize winner, teacher, storyteller and bongo player" as he describes himself - gave us wonderful insights on the fundamental nature of Nature and can be considered one among iLabs Universe grandfather. Interested in science and maths since he was a child, Feynman receives his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942 under the supervision of John Wheeler: from 1942 to 1945 he also takes part in the Project Manhattan, together with the leading figures of theoretical physics of that time. After the Second World War, Feynman becomes professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, continuing his groundbreaking studies: he makes fundamental contributions to quantum electrodynamics, superfluidity and models of weak decay; he also developes the so-called "Feynman diagrams", a bookkeeping device which helps in conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime. Some of his lectures and conferences became widely read books, due to Feynman's own style and his ability in explaining every concept at "a freshman level": no wonder that it is considered one of the greatest teacher of physics of all times. In a 1959 legendary speech, entitled "There is plenty of room at the bottom", Feynman iillustrates a completely new way of conceiving matter manipulation, a subject matter that lately became known as nanotechnology (whose Feynman is of course one of the founding fathers). Some of his intuitions are still alive in our model, that ties together matter and information in any dimensional level: as we may put it, "There is plenty of Boole at the bottom".

March 2009 – Douglas Hofstadter
It has recently been published in Italian the translation of Douglas Hofstadter's latest book, I am a Strange Loop, where the author uses all his knowledge, experience and ingenuity to tackle tricky issues such as consciousness, mind and the Self. Hofstadter's popularity is mainly due to his best-seller Goedel, Escher, Bach, a groundbreaking and entertaining volume exploring the hidden connections bewteen logic, languages, arts, biology and music (and much more!). He is the director of Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition @ Indiana University, but he is, above all, an extraordinary researcher with the ability of seeing analogies and similar patterns of behaviour in seemingly different phenomena. After mathematics at Stanford, he started studying physics (his father is a Nobel Prize winner) and logic. Douglas is a passionate student of "Language" and its deep structures: when Martin Gardner left, he took his place as Scientific American columnist. For two years and an half, he's been delighting readers with his mathematical and linguistic games: that articles were published years later with the title Metamagical Themas, that is (of course) an anagram of Gardner's "Mathematical Games" (en passant, it is maybe worth noting that Hofstadter speaks English, French, Italian and German fluently and knows some Russian, Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Hindi). Douglas and his research group (Fluid Analogy Research Group aka FARG) are studing cognition with computational models built under the working assumption that analogy and fluidity are the two notions at the heart of human intelligence. Two famous FARG's softwares are Letter Spirit, that creates an whole alphabet starting from few letters designed in a certain fashion, and Copycat, that does analogies in the realm of English alphabet ("If abc becames abd, what will happen if I do the same with efg?"). A firm supporter of strong IA, he also took part in the Singularity Summit that was held in Stanford in 2006. His Hofstadter's Law is, of course, self-referential: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account".

February 2009 – Charles Darwin
2009 is, in a sense, Charles Darwin's year: 150 years after the first edition of On the Origin of Species and 200 years after his own birth - February 12th, strangely enough the same day iLabs organized MENSA round table - there is no idea in modern biology that is more important than his theory of evolution. Darwin's childhood and early education don't show particular signs of greatness: he soon neglects his medical studies, becoming instead fond of zoology and botany. In 1831 he begins his journey with the Beagle: in five years spent travelling all around the world, Darwin makes some experiences and observations that later turn out to be crucial for the development of his theory. At the beginning of the century, there is just one theory of evolution on the market: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued that species evolve due to the transmission to their offspring of features acquired during their life. Darwin's idea is completely different and revolutionary, since it does not require animals' intentions or intelligent design to be effective. Bringing together several insights - from exotic birds' behaviour to Thomas Malthus' economic theory -, Darwin individuates two mechanisms, mutation and selection, that can explain two fundamental biological facts: the variability of living species and their supposed common origin. The natural world looks like a contest: mutation provides possible competitors, selection tests the validity of the proposed solutions. In other words, the environment plays the farmer role, giving to an individual X chances of reproduction based on X's fitness: the more the fitness, the more X is likely to have an offspring that will carry her features. Explaining away the Watchmaker intuitions that made (and still make) many think that natural world has some "intelligent direction", Charles Darwin creates the most powerful idea in the whole history of biology (notably, he didn't know anything about DNA and the like!). Two centuries after his birthday, his masterpiece On the Origin of Species may be well regarded as one of the most fundamental and inspiring contribution to the understanding of Reality's hidden laws.

January 2009 – Steven Pinker
An interesting article recently appeared in the New York Times. “My Genome, My Self” - that’s the title – is worth reading for at least two reasons: first, behavioral genetics is a rapidly growing business, in academia as well as in pop-science. “How much should I blame my genes for my mistakes?” and “Do I really want to know if I’ll get disease X by the age of 60?” are just two among the infinity of questions and doubts raised by this new field. Second, it is written by Steven Pinker, whose contributions to psychology and linguistics earned him a place in the Great Players. A Ph.D. in experimental psychology (Harvard), Steven Pinker taught at MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science for twenty years. Specialized in visual cognition and language development in children, he gained worldwide popularity explaining Chomsky’s idea of language to a popular audience (twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Price, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2004). Working within the framework of generative grammar (thus adhering to innativist ideas and completely rejecting the “tabula rasa” hypothesis), Pinker used the term “instinct” to best picture how language acquisition takes place in children. There is no fundamental difference between visual abilities (such as discerning shapes and colors) and language abilities: both are the results of brain architecture, whose, in turn, depends on the “Instructions” we all start with, DNA. Two more controversial claims are often associated with Pinker’s works: the idea that mind has its own language, the so-called “mentalese”, in order to think and perform symbolic manipulations, and the thesis that an highly specialized module for language was directly shaped by natural selection (contra many scholars holding that language is a by-product of other selected abilities). We actually don’t know if these claims will be experimentally confirmed in the near future. What we know for sure is that no matter what truth turns out to be, Pinker’s provocative mind and clear thoughts gave us new ways to look at human brain and its most amazing feature, the language instinct.

December 2008 – Eric Drexler
In 2008 nanotechnologies earned growing popularity in the media, for good (researches, innovation, successful firms) as well as bad (side-effects, lack of regulations) news. Unfortunately, the state-of-art nanoparticles are not yet good enough to have a deep impact on everyday life and fundamentally contribute to our quest for Singularity. However, we shall devote this section to nanotech guru Eric Drexler, hoping that the 2009 will finally be the revolutionary year we all expect. Grown up at MIT with “insane” passions (such as bringing human life outside the Earth), Eric started thinking seriously at nano-possibilities when he first met the seminal Feynman’s speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. It was 1979: love at the first sight. Just seven years later he was ready to publish his first original volume, “Engines of Creation”: great minds think alike, so it is no surprise that Drexler’s Ph.D. supervisor is a Great Player, Marvin Minsky. Twenty years after that sensational work, Drexler’s motivations are still the same: when nano-robots will be real, reliable tools, everything in our life will suddenly be different. Two Drexler’s projects seem actually very interesting: the first is the development of nano-robots with the ability of autonomous self-replication, improving efficiency and cutting costs in any aspect of real-world applications of nanoparticles. The second is a super computer that uses nano-robots to achieve unbelievable processing performances: just imagine Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, but much (MUCH) faster. Definitely, great minds think alike.

November 2008 – Roger Penrose
Latest CERN creature, the Large Hadron Collider, attracted media attention to the fascinating misteries of cosmology; one of the project under developement, "Alice", will try to reproduce what the Universe looked like 20-30 milliseconds after the so-called Big Bang. When it comes to pop-physics, creative theories and multidisciplinary interests, few contemporary Players can beat Roger Penrose's credentials. B.S. in mathematics, Ph.D. from Cambridge University, Roger shows in 1965 (at the age of 34) how singularities (such as black holes) can be formed from the gravitational collapse of immense dying stars. In 1967 he invents twistor theory, and in 1969 he states the "Cosmic Censorship Hypotheses". To understand the conjecture, it may be useful to remember that singularities, in theory, come in two kinds: hidden within event horizons, and naked. Penrose's conjecture is that no naked singularities other than the Big Bang singularity exist in the universe. But Roger Penrose is more than "just" a brilliant scientist: his book, The Road to Reality, is one of the best pop-science work that rigorously explains the fundamental laws of physics. Moreover, in the last ten years he's been more and more involved in the study of human mind: he proposed an original theory of consciousness - basically using quantum effects in microtubules - and a new version of the old, goedel-based argument against artificial intelligence. Although we do believe that Penrose's argument is fallacious and we are still not convinced by his approach to consciousness, our respect and admiration remain intact: the exciting challenges posed by a Great Player couldn't but be the best way to reach the final Truth about the universe and ourselves, whatever it may be.

October 2008 – Isaac Asimov
There was someone behind the scene during iLabs talk @ MENSA national conference. Since we talked about the role of intelligence in the quest for Singularity, we ideally owe a pleasant debt to the man who was vicepresident of MENSA International till 1992, Isaac Asimov. Much more than "just" a science fiction writer, Asimov's ideas - developed through his books and witnessed by his life - shaped our own perspective on the near future of humanity and the groundbreaking changes in social reality that will be brought by robots and other artificial minds. Born in Russia in 1920, Asimov moves to New York when he is three years old. He publishes his first novel in 1934, when he's still in high school. That is just the beginning of an unparalleled production, more than 500 works as diverse as novels, articles, short stories, textbooks, manuals. Graduated from Columbia - he will eventually earn a Ph.D. in biochemeistry in 1948 - he gets married in 1942, just few months before being enlisted as a chemist for the U.S. Army; in 1942 he also writes the first of his Foundation stories, collected lately in the Fifties in Foundation Trilogy, Foundation and the Empire, Second Foundation. During the Sixties, when he is already an acclaimed author, Asimov's attention shifts from science fiction to popular science: he writes college-level textbooks and become a columnist for the Magazine of Fantasy of and Science Fiction; his ability in pop-science writing earns him the nickname "Great Explainer". Isaac Asimov died in 1992 at the age of 72, supposedly for an heart failure, but ten years later his second wife revealed that he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion received during a heart bypass operation in December 1983. Among the most prolific and diverse writers of all time - believe it or not, his works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System - Asimov is an inspiring example for anyone interested in the future of science and the role of humans in a world inhabited by robots and other artificial beings. With the aid of his tremendous ability of forecasting the future, we hope the present we all live in will finally find a viable path to Singularity, allowing humans and robots to live together in the same, fair society.

September 2008 – Willard Van Orman Quine
iLabs conventionalism - i.e. the view that everyday objects are mind-dependent entities that exist as individuals only insofar human beings are willing to be focused on their spatio-temporal boundaries - can be traced back to Protagoras. But in the 20th century it's Willard Van Orman Quine who did the most for this philosophical account of material objects. In Quine's opinion, there is no reason to acknowledge metaphysical importance just to common sense objects (say, chairs, persons, cats), since any region of space-time (say, the sum of Eiffel Tower and Ray Kurzweil's laptop) is as good as any other. The fact that our language doesn't have a specific way to refer to such strange things is not significant; furthermore, it provides indirect evidence that names and predicates in natural languages refer to objects whose individuality is just the result of human conventions. It's not easy to resume Quine's legacy for 21th century philosophers: his arguments shaped the landscape of philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and, of course, mathematical logic (in 1937 Quine published NF, a new, non-orthodox set theory that allows for the existence of the set of all things). At the end of his life he was wordly recognized as one of the major philosophers of his time: he got 18 degree and, more importantly, he taught to some of the most brilliant scholars of the next generation.

August 2008 – Sun Tzu
Since nothing truly spectacular came out from labs around the world in August and since worldwide attention has been focused on China all summer long, it should be no surprise that the Player of the Month is Sun Tzu, the heroic general of King Wu. Historical sources on his biography are scarce: he probably lived between VI and V century b.C. and he is the author of the masterpiece "The Art of War", an essay in which Sun Tzu put together all his toughts about theoretical as well as practical aspects of fighting a war. Strategy is the key word: realiable information about the enemy and knowledge of one's own weaknesses and strengths are far more important than the size of the armies or the power of the weapons. That's why Sun Tzu says that the best general is the one who wins a war without fighting. Much more than just a military essay, "The Art of War" is an invaluable reading even for people in the 21th century: Sun Tzu's words may well be a perfect companion in our world full of conflicts and everyday competitions.

July 2008 – Raymond Kurzweil
Wandering around in New York City, you may easily find a Raymond Kurzweil’s book on the “recommended books” section of a university bookstore, in the bright window of a shop on the Fifth Avenue, on a dusty shelf in a small-but-fashionable bookshop in Soho. Graduated (B.S. in Computer Sciences and Literature) from MIT in 1970 but already an inventor at the age of fifteen, Raymond Kurzweil is simply THE man to talk to when the topics are the forthcoming Singularity, Transhumanism, the Law of Accelerating Returns; unfortunately, his name and research interests are widely known in the U.S. but almost ignored in Italy. Although The Singularity is Near has recently been translated into Italian, Kurzweil’s name is famous only in those fields where he pioneered new developments of technology, such as, for example, OCR, text-to-speech synthesizer, and the K-NFB reader, a pocket-sized device designed to aid blind people by reading written text out loud. iLabs carefully follow Kurzweil’s work as a successful writer, scientist and entrepreneur, since, from our point of view, his career is definitely the proof that people from different countries and cultures can share almost the same dreams and values. The main difference between us is that Kurzweil’s “receipt to immortality” is mainly based on exogenous factors, such as pills, while iLabs’ bet is that extending endogenously human mental and physical abilities will be enough to guarantee semi-immortality. Trascendent Man, a documentary film on Kurzweil’s life, will be released in 2009; we hope that by that day his ideas and dreams – that is, our ideas and dreams – will be widely known in Italy as well as they are in the U.S..

June 2008 - William Gibson
The latest William Gibson's book - "Guerreros" - has recently been published in Italy. Gibson is more than a visionary, with his unique ability to understand our era and carefully describe our future. "Neuromancer" - his first book - was published in 1984: Gibson invented there the word "cyberspace", forecasted the World Wide Web, depicted virtual reality and the artificial worlds that years later we found pictured in Matrix and the like. The (somewhat troublesome) evolution - so well described in Gibson's book - of the everyday life of both human and artificial people due to massive techonology can already be seen in our world and its rapidly changing society. Although (maybe) his books are too "hard" to be widely read and appreciated, his writings are constantly inspiring artists, philosophers, futurists and inventors: by "using" these people, Gibson's messages reach the mind of all of us.

May 2008 - Tenzin Gyatso
Tenzin Gyatso (“Ocean of wisdom”), also known as the 14th Dalai Lama, is the spiritual guide of Tibetan people. Gyatso has regular contacts with scientists all around the world: mathematicians, physicians, logicians ane many other researches from other fields. As far as neurobiology is concerned, he underlines the scientific aspects embedded in many Buddhist practices: his religion provides valuable insights on the functioning of cognition, emotions and, above all, mind-body relations; transcendental meditation is used as the main tool to achieve great perceptual as well as autoreferential abilities. Tenzin Gyatso recently faced a tough ethical challenge due to the political and military tension between Tibet and China: is it better to profess nonviolence in every moment and try to resolve disputes with diplomacy or are there some circumstances that justify a violent reaction? More generally: nonviolence is the first in the hierarchy of values or is there something more fundamental, so that sometime nonviolence can be ignored? The answer to the "Dalai Lama Dilemma" - especially if you think about it from the point of view of semi-immortality - is not easy nor trivial. Whatever answer you choose, the ethical stance of Tenzin Gyatso stands as an outsanding and inspiring example for anyone engaged in this reflections.

April 2008 - Desmond Morris
Desmond Morris is the Player of the Month. He recently presented his opinion about immortality in an article appeared in La Repubblica, "Why mankind can be immortal". Morris, a famous ethologist, spent his life studying the similarities and the differences between human beings and other primates. In his work he underlines the biological as well as behavioural continuity between human beings and monkeys; his methodology is well summarized in the provocative motto "look at humans with monkey eyes". Morris is not simply a great scientist: a lot of his time is spent explaining his surprising findings in highly-readable and highly-successful books. His eclectic personality loves surrealist pictures: it is somewhat amazing that in 1957, during an exhibition organized by Morris himself on monkey drawings, both visitors and critics acclaimed enthusiastically pictures made by the chimpanzee Congo.