This was the best keynote of the conference. I am really hoping a book comes out of it.

the logs are a treasure - handwritten with doodles and annotations, they bring to life what had here-to-for been just another timeline mark.

The inter-office mail was quite funny. One was a complaint from the History Dept about the prodigious quantities of tea and coffee used by the 'coders,' highlighting the great disparity in sugar consumption between the old timers and this new crew.

Last year's keynotes were marred by the purchased ones - the ones that were in there only in exchange for the $$$ to host the show in San Diego.

Also check out The Starship and the Canoe, an excellent book that compares and contrasts the paths Freeman Dyson and his son George took. To be honest I don't recall much about Freeman, but I think the sections on George are etched permanently into my brain. A really amazing guy.

Plug: Dyson's book _Darwin Among the Machines_ is worth a read. Apparently, notions about intelligent machines, automata, and emergent intelligence go way back.

Damn, I missed George Dyson! Why couldn't he have been at last years OSCON...

It's interesting you mentioned John von Neumann in this context. Yesterday, I published "Can Machines Reproduce?" on my blog and I made references to the JohnnyVon project. The name of this project is a tribute to John von Neumann for his work on self-replicating cellular automata. And in fact, the aim of this site is "Self-Replicating Automata in Two-Dimensional Continuous Space."