It's an interesting piece of work and I enjoyed helping Soo Ling create the model. We're still working on it, and are looking at the effects of publicity strategies, different charts, and all kinds of other things...

The article is available online here, or below if you want a quick view.

The Blind Watchmaker - Dawkins inspired a whole generation of computer scientists and artists with this work, which even included output from a computer program he had written to evolve forms.

Evolutionary Art and Computers - William Latham and Stephen Todd showed just how powerful evolution in computers can be. This book inspired me personally through my early career.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. David Eagleman. A quirky but fascinating view of life and death, which includes some science fiction and computer-enabled afterlives.

Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI (Bradford Books). Rodney Brooks helped change the way we approach Artificial Intelligence by thinking about emergence, bottom up processes instead of engineered, top down intelligence.

The Unnatural Nature of Science. Lewis Wolpert - Like all his books, this is a joy to read. It's also a fascinating exploration of what science is and is not. To a computer scientist this is essential reading, for Lewis explores the difference between science and technology - a topic often confused in my field!

In their wisdom, the BBC Focus folks decided to focus on three. They rang me for an interview (my words may be online somewhere as a podcast as well). This article was the result: