I would safely say that the summer of 2012 has been the summer of reading and playing around with different ideas about evolution, cooperation and competition. I have not heard of Martin Nowak until I read his article in Scientific American's July issue. Then, a few weeks later, I was reading about him again in Chaitin's book Proving Darwin. Martin Nowak is a researcher in Mathematics and Biology. He spent most of his research career tackling problems about evolution and evolutionary games mathematically and through numerous computer simulations.

When I stumbled upon this title , I did not hesitate for a second to order it. A mathematical book on the theory of evolution and written by the the famous Gregory Chaitin on top of that. Things looked so promising and I was anxious to get the book by mail.

The first impression when I got the book in my hands was that it was very thin. Though, I did not want to let myself be fooled by the the size.

Proving Darwin aims at introducing a new science founded by Gregory Chaitin himself and called Metabiology. The book describes a toy universe of evolution. A model that,according to Chaitin, captures the essence of evolution yet it remains  simple enough to be tackeled mathematically.

Word frequencies are used in many text mining and information retrieval applications. Nowadays, and thanks to the Internet, it is easy to find lists of word frequencies for various languages.

Wikitionary, the sister website of Wikipedia provides such lists for many languages. I have decided to extract two of these lists the Gutenberg list and the TV movies list.

The Gutenberg list was built from the Gutenberg project book collection. This is a collection of classic books that fell into the public domain. The list has been last updated in 2005. All books in the considered collection were published before 1923. The TV movies list was built from TV shows and movies scripts and transcripts.

I post in this blog entry about the implementation of an immutable complex numbers class in Scala programming language. I have tried in this implementation and as much as possible to use Scala's functional programming style. This post shows how concise and beautiful Scala code could be.