Science

I'm very interested in science - I have always been interested in all kinds of science, and since I used to be a medical student I guess it won't come as a big surprise that I'm interested in scientific topics.

I'm very interested in snakes. I'm reading anything about these animals - and when I was in high school I even did a report on animal toxins (of course the main focus was venomous snakes and their venom).
I guess my interest in snakes won't come as a big surprise to the attentive visitor on this website since the domain name is bitis. As some of you might know, Bitis (Latin) is a snake genus of the Viper family commonly known as adder in English speaking countries; the best known species are probably Bitis gabonica (Gaboon adder) and the South African B. arietans (Puff adder).

But of course snakes aren't the only scientific topic of my interest. I'm interested in almost all fields, but among my prime interests are: medical (and biological) research, animals (especially marine animals, sharks and sea snakes in particular) and something I studied when I was a medical student - science theory. I'm also very interested in chemistry, physics (especially quantum mechanics) and chaos theory (also known as complexity theory).

As a Computer Scientist I'm also interested in neural networks and cryptography. Neural networks are systems mimicking the functionality of the neurons and their connections in the brain, naturally intelligent systems that are non algorithmic, non digital and highly parallel, they are built to be capable of learning and to handle complex problem solving and pattern recognition (just like the human brain). Neural networks aren't programmed to solve a specific task (unlike digital systems), they are designed to be trained or taught how to solve complex tasks normal (digital) systems can't handle - they have an analogous nature. A neural network is not the same as artificial intelligence (AI) since it is possible to work with AI without using neural networks (they can be programmed using digital systems) - and, as mentioned above, neural networks have a natural intelligence similar to that of the biological computer (i.e. the brain).