1997 was my last visit to the Santa Fe Institute as a graduate researcher, as I recall. I spent a few weeks in the Fall, finishing (I imagined) my Ph.D. research and working up a first presentation of my research on fitness landscapes, multiobjective optimization in pharmacological design, and the philosophy of function in structural biology to the Biology Department at my home institution.

[Not long after, they allowed how it must make a very good computer science or math degree or something, because they couldn't follow it at all. So the next time I visited SFI, it was as an Entrepreneur; that was more comfortable, to be honest. In a way. My advisor started a company about then doing what... well, things similar to what I was also doing, we'll say.]

But those were nice days. Nice place, SFI. We all miss it — it’s different now, I hear.

Aside from the multiobjective stuff, and the origin of life sims, and the grammar-based chemistry stuff, and the Tierra fork Simon Fraser wrote, and this and that neat research, I made wind chimes out of hard drive disks, and helped set up Ian Malcolm’s SFI web page (he was faculty at SFI, according to Michael Crichton) … and one day in October I tried to morph all the people in the building into a single image.

That one never got very far. The software for the Mac was crap back then: all PICT based and kludgy and full of System 7 (!) goodness. I think I was working on a Quadra 900 at the time; shared the desk with Ken Arrow.

But now, ten years along, I’ve lost the names of some of the people whose portraits I took. Should teach me for not taking good notes, when I know I rarely finish anything within a decade.

Well, anyway. These aren’t single people:

And I don’t know who some of these component (actual) people are at all. Some I do, of course: Stu Kauffman (who was my advisor), Cynthia Breazeal (who was using Post-Its for Kismet’s ears back then), some of the staff. But some of my best friends on staff and people with whom I had long late-night conversations about philosophy and science and the world as it should be? Nada.

So memory, she does me no good.

Maybe that’s what social networks are for. Distributed storage and processing.