Stephen Waldon - Research

CONNECTING THE DOTS: 

evolution, human creativity, and artificial Intelligence

One of my life long passions has been to understand the connections between complex biological phenomena such as consciousness and evolution and the fundamental physics of the universe. In particular I am fascinated by the creative capability of the human mind to generate new ideas and the evolutionary processes that created new species. I am also very interested in applying this knowledge to the problem of creating artificially intelligent machines and the generation of artificial life.

Most of my time these days has been devoted to developing a generalized theory of creativity that encompasses all natural and artificial creative processes (including both evolution and human creative thought). My theory builds on and synthesizes Hameroff and Penrose's work on ORCH-Or Process, McFaddon's work on Quantum Evolution, and more recently Kauffman's work on Trans-Turing Machines. More details on my thinking have been published in a series of papers presented in poster sessions at the last three Science of Consciousness Conferences. Links to the online abstracts and full papers can be found at the following:

The Science of Consciousness 2010:
Quantum Chalk for a Classical Blackboard.

The Science of Consciousness 2011:
The Non-computability of Creative Processes

The Science of Consciousness 2012:
Towards a Formal Definition of Non-computable Creative Processes

In these papers and through additional material on this site I develop two unique contributions. First a generalized notion of creativity that encompasses all natural creative processes and through a unique definition provides the foundation for a class of creative processes that are not computable. Second, I describe a generalized model of computation (the hybrid quantum - classical computing system) where classical algorithmic computation orchestrates the behavior of a quantum system which in turn effects the outcome of the classical computation. This hybrid quantum classical computer is an abstraction of a device that is capable of exploiting both classical computation and the computation inherent in quantum-wave collapse and as such is a generalization of ORCH-Or, Quantum Evolution, and Trans-Turing machines. 

In the past, I spent a number of years researching artificial intelligence specifically autonomous vehicles and computer vision. I have published a number of papers in the field. Here are a few:

Dynamic Shading, Motion Parallax and Qualitative Shape
Multiresolutional Spatial Knowledge Representation