• Handle: Alexandros
• Name: Alexandros Marinos
• Location: Guildford, UK
• Age: 27
• Gender: Male
• Education/Occupation: Currently in 3rd year of PhD in Computing
• Links: Blog, FriendFeed

Hi all,

I spent the first 25 years of my life in a christian quasi-fundamentalist environment. As time went by I was increasingly struggling to reach a consistent mindset within the christian belief-constraints. Over time, I kept removing elements of the belief system while nominally retaining the fundamentals even if simply as shells. At some point, I lost someone deeply important to me due to not providing her definition of a spiritual relationship, a situation similar to MBlume's even if predating my explicit conversion to atheism. This led me to distance myself from the christian circles, as I considered being truly accepted without effectively leading a double life an impossibility. About a year later, discovering Eliezer's writings provided me with the mature articulation of many thoughts that had existed in embryonic unexpressed form in my mind and added many others. In this sense it provided the coup de grâce to my theistic beliefs.

Simultaneously to the above, I am a programmer who has not seriously written code in the last three years. This is because I have hit on a problem the solution to which I need to thoroughly formulate before resuming my efforts. The essence of the problem is that whenever I code, my intuition is to take soft-coding to the extreme. That is, I see each (algorithm/process/program) as a compilation of items of source knowledge and try to factor each item out. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to something that could be called knowledge-oriented programming or some such. I did not consider this related to artificial intelligence but I am now not entirely certain.

Additionally, I am involved in Digital Ecosystem research, what I consider the effort to make control the property of networks rather than individual agents in the network. As an extension of this field, is my interest in social computing and the goal to make an unmoderated online community that allows freedom from coercion to its members while at the same time is able to collectively control itself. However, among the three, if I had to state only one goal, it would certainly be the effort to achieve 'extreme soft coding'

I recently have grown increasingly unsatisfied by the contents of my feed reader, I find in this community a higher a satisfaction-to-noise ratio than even Hacker News, and intend to try and participate as much as I can, although I don't expect to have any major contributions any time soon.