Adam A. Stokes
Welcome to my personal webpage, where you’ll find a collection of essays on topics I’m actively trying to understand. These are not static publications but live documents that evolve over time as I think in public, refine my views, and respond to new ideas and conversations. If you wish to discuss anything I’ve written, or wish to engage with me on a project or a talk, then please contact me. My primary email address is a.a.stokes@ed.ac.uk.I am Full Professor and Head of the Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Edinburgh and a research-led advisor on robotics, AI, and bioinspired innovation. Outside of the academy I am an active entrepreneur and consultant. I work with organisations to stress-test assumptions about emerging technologies and chart practical paths from prototype to deployment. These essays capture the thinking behind that work—I offer them as a public resource and also as an invitation to collaborate.
My most recent post is shown below, see all essays here.
Local and Global Optima: What “Best” Means at the Edge
Ask an engineer for the best solar cell and, if they are honest about what "best" means, they will ask a question back: best under what constraints? That return question is the subject of this third essay in my techno-crofting series. Most of the difficulty in building anything at the edge — a Highland croft, an island, a research station, eventually a habitat off-world — comes from being slightly sloppy about which constraints we are actually holding fixed. If we get precise about the constraints, I think a surprising amount of the techno-croft idea turns from musing into a more generalisable method. As with all of my essays, this is a live document that will change and evolve as I explore how useful this line of thinking is. Two kinds of best There are two optima worth discussing explicitly, because we (by which I mean engineers) constantly confuse them. The global optimum is the best solution that physics allows if you ignore material constraints. Assume any material, any...