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Polycomputing concepts in art. (A) Sculpture by Shigeo Fukuda, "Lunch with a helmet on", 1987 -appears as a random pile of knives and forks but when observed in just the right way, light moving through the sculpture reveals another pattern (a motorcycle) present at the same time in the same structure. (B) A well-known bistable (ambiguous) image, "My Wife and my Mother-in-Law" by British cartoonist William Ely Hill in 1915, reveals how our nervous system is not suited to taking in multiple meanings -it prefers to squash down to a single interpretation, even if it then has to vacillate back and forth.
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The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic view. Such a view dissolves the contingent dichotomies driven by human cognitive biases (e.g., tendency to oversi...
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Context 1
... it squeezes more action out of each level by overloading mechanisms with multiple functionswhich we term polycomputing. We argue that the most effective lens on a wide range of natural and engineered systems must enable a multiple-observers view where the same set of events can be interpreted as different computations (Figure 1 illustrates how artists have recognized this feature). ...
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The applicability of computational models to the biological world is an active topic of debate. We argue that a useful path forward results from abandoning hard boundaries between categories and adopting an observer-dependent, pragmatic view. Such a view dissolves the contingent dichotomies driven by human cognitive biases (e.g., a tendency to over...
