In this episode, I ask the question: what would a software design style inspired by ecological and embodied cognition be like? I sketch some tentative ideas. I plan to explore this further at nh.oddly-influenced.dev, a blog that will document an app I'm beginning to write. In my implementation,...

In the '80s, David Chapman and Phil Agre were doing work within AI that was very compatible with the ecological and embodied cognition approach I've been describing. They produced a program, Pengi, that played a video game well enough (given the technology of the time) even though it had nothing...

Scientists studying ecological and embodied cognition try to use algorithms as little as they can. Instead, they favor dynamical systems, typically represented as a set of equations that share variables in a way that is somewhat looplike: component A changes, which changes component B, which...