Constructivist Computing - Peter Krieg

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        Applying the biological principals of ontogeny, self-organization and self-construction to 
        computing has been the driving vision behind the BCL and its core team around Heinz von 
        Foerster, Gotthard Guenther and others. While they could identify some of the basic 
        conditions for such a 'constructivist machine', like a polycontextural logic architecture, 
        a new concept of data, and a strictly relational approach, the technical implementations 
        of these principles failed.
      
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        Nearly a generation later, a young inventor in Israel, completely unaware of the earlier 
        attempts, finally solved the puzzle. The paper will present some of the principles of this 
        invention, compare it to the BCL concepts and explain the potential of the constructivist 
        approach to computing.
      
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        Emphasis will be on:  
      
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        - Virtual data concept (similar ideas are expressed in HvF: Memory without Record). Here a 
        new constructive representation is introduced in contrast to the traditional instructive 
        representation. Data are not recorded, but dynamically generated.  
      
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        - Polylogic architecture (similar ideas are expressed in Gotthard Guenther's 
        'polycontextural logic'). Here a new multidimensional structure is introduced which 
        integrates an order structure and a complex topological structure.  
      
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        - Radical relationist approach (at the BCL this idea was still limited to neural 
        networks). The new concept introduces a multidimensional space of 'pure relations? where 
        operations do not involve physical data but only signatures of data.
      
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        The constructivist computer paradigm is also emerging in interactive computer games, 
        Virtual Reality, generative programming and Artificial Life. It can now be extended to any 
        kind of electronic input and computing task, thus enabling generative and genuinely 
        adaptive applications in many fields, from data management to robotics, from language 
        computing to bio-informatics, and eventually to ontogenetic or generative programming, 
        where programs adapt and change themselves in interaction with an environment.
      
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        CV Peter Krieg
      
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        *1947 in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. Graduated from Berlin Film & Television Academy, since 
        1973 independent documentary film director and producer, media consultant, writer and 
        entrepreneur.  
      
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        Peter Krieg made a name first as documentary film maker with films like "Bottle Babies", 
        "September Wheat" and "Father's Land", but also with techno-philosophical essay films like 
        "Machine Dreams", "Report From a Deserted Planet" and "Suspicious Minds", the latter 
        featuring Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana. He founded festivals (Ökomedia, 
        InterActiva), developed the first computer controlled interactive cinema, was founding 
        director of the High Tech Center Babelsberg (a futuristic digital film production center), 
        producer and consultant for Expo2000 and Space Park Bremen and has published and edited 
        several books and articles on media, new technologies and socio-cultural issues (e.g. "The 
        Eye of the Observer", "Terror in the System" - both in German). In his new book "The 
        Paranoid Machine" he retraces the history of 'thinking machines' from Raimundus Lullus to 
        the competing concepts of the BCL (Gotthard Guenther, Heinz von Foerster) and MIT 
        (Artificial Intelligence) and presents a radically new approach. He is also founding 
        partner and CEO of Pile Systems Inc, which develops Erez Elul's revolutionary generative 
        software technology, Pile.  
      
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        Lives in Berlin, Germany. Contact: kriegpeter (at) pilesys.com 
      
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