From: "Nicholas Thompson" <nickthomp...@earthlink.net>
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Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:39:56 -0700
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The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
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Subject: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 4
All,
For those of you who werent there, last friday,
we got into an intersting discussion about the
possibility of taxonomies of agent based
models. Are there only a few basic types? Are
many apparently different agent based models,
deployed for widely different purposes,
fundamentally only subtle variations?
Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They
argued that any such classification system must
be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me
argued that there MUST (note the use of modal
language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In
ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You
should know that Me has never written a program
longer than a seven line Word macro.
Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that
his position is shaped by his experience in
evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty
important. Taxonomic systems are mostly
devised to relate contemporary species, But for
evolutionary theorists, there is a natural
validator of taxonomic classifications, the
historical record of evolution. If we took
this analogy seriously, we would be led to try
and validate classifications of ABM's on the
history of their development, perhaps doing dna
analysis on the code fragments that make them
up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in
the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a
dark art of classification that uses a variety
of obscure incantations to lable relations
amongst species without, so far as I understand,
any reference to evolution. Yet, as I
understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there,
what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
From: "Russ Abbott" <russ.abb...@gmail.com>
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In-Reply-To: <380-22009163203956...@earthlink.net>
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:16:01 -0800
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 5
Hi Nick,
What's wrong with this argument?
My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern
English, which means English literature,
culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. She is interested in how people
thought about things in her period as well as
how those ways of thinking developed from
previous periods. We are continually arguing
about the value of that sort of study. If you
are interested in the history of ideas or
culture, it certainly has some value. But if you
are interested in the best current thinking
about a subject, why should you care how people
thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really
care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if
I want to know how the physical world works? I
would say, "No" what I really want to know is
what the best current physicist think.
Why isn't that same argument relevant to
ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we
currently think about ABMs, not the history of
the development of ABMs that got us there. If
that history makes it easier to understand the
current best thinking, so much the better. But
it is only in the service of the current best
thinking that history is useful when what one
wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.
-- Russ
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas
Thompson <<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote:
All,
For those of you who werent there, last friday,
we got into an intersting discussion about the
possibility of taxonomies of agent based
models. Are there only a few basic types? Are
many apparently different agent based models,
deployed for widely different purposes,
fundamentally only subtle variations?
Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They
argued that any such classification system must
be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me
argued that there MUST (note the use of modal
language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In
ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You
should know that Me has never written a program
longer than a seven line Word macro.
Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that
his position is shaped by his experience in
evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty
important. Taxonomic systems are mostly
devised to relate contemporary species, But for
evolutionary theorists, there is a natural
validator of taxonomic classifications, the
historical record of evolution. If we took
this analogy seriously, we would be led to try
and validate classifications of ABM's on the
history of their development, perhaps doing dna
analysis on the code fragments that make them
up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in
the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a
dark art of classification that uses a variety
of obscure incantations to lable relations
amongst species without, so far as I understand,
any reference to evolution. Yet, as I
understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there,
what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
<http://www.friam.org>http://www.friam.org
From: "Nicholas Thompson" <nickthomp...@earthlink.net>
Precedence: list
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Cc: friam@redfish.com
To: russ.abb...@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 17:25:32 -0700
Reply-To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net,
The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
Message-ID: <380-2200910402532...@earthlink.net>
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 6
Hi, Russ,
Thanks for your interesting response.
Well, the same argument could be made, could it
not, against trying to gather information about
human evolution. After all, it matters not how
we got here, but who we are, now that we are
here. However, in evolutionary psychology, I
have always been soft on the value of
evolutionary study for understanding human
psychology because much of what we do makes more
sense in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.
But, I am not sure the same argument works for
the history of agent based modeling. I have
never heard any agent based modeler claim that
he or she gives a rat's ass about how we got
where we are in that domain. Might it
illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or
other? I dunno. I just dont know enough about it.
But all of this is aside from the question of
the value of Taxonomy. Evolutionary
considerations aside, are there natural kinds of
ABM;s And would a cladistic analysis of model
types be useful for programmers trying to decide
what sort of approach to use to a new
problem. In the ABSENSE of an interest in
history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell us?
that is the question I was asking.
Thanks again for helping me clarify,
NIck
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>Russ Abbott
To:
<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net;<mailto:friam@redfish.com>The
Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Hi Nick,
What's wrong with this argument?
My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern
English, which means English literature,
culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. She is interested in how people
thought about things in her period as well as
how those ways of thinking developed from
previous periods. We are continually arguing
about the value of that sort of study. If you
are interested in the history of ideas or
culture, it certainly has some value. But if you
are interested in the best current thinking
about a subject, why should you care how people
thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really
care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if
I want to know how the physical world works? I
would say, "No" what I really want to know is
what the best current physicist think.
Why isn't that same argument relevant to
ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we
currently think about ABMs, not the history of
the development of ABMs that got us there. If
that history makes it easier to understand the
current best thinking, so much the better. But
it is only in the service of the current best
thinking that history is useful when what one
wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.
-- Russ
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas
Thompson <<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote:
All,
For those of you who werent there, last friday,
we got into an intersting discussion about the
possibility of taxonomies of agent based
models. Are there only a few basic types? Are
many apparently different agent based models,
deployed for widely different purposes,
fundamentally only subtle variations?
Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They
argued that any such classification system must
be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me
argued that there MUST (note the use of modal
language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In
ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You
should know that Me has never written a program
longer than a seven line Word macro.
Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that
his position is shaped by his experience in
evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty
important. Taxonomic systems are mostly
devised to relate contemporary species, But for
evolutionary theorists, there is a natural
validator of taxonomic classifications, the
historical record of evolution. If we took
this analogy seriously, we would be led to try
and validate classifications of ABM's on the
history of their development, perhaps doing dna
analysis on the code fragments that make them
up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in
the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a
dark art of classification that uses a variety
of obscure incantations to lable relations
amongst species without, so far as I understand,
any reference to evolution. Yet, as I
understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there,
what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
<http://www.friam.org>http://www.friam.org
From: "Russ Abbott" <russ.abb...@gmail.com>
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Cc: friam@redfish.com
To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net
References: <380-2200910402532...@earthlink.net>
In-Reply-To: <380-2200910402532...@earthlink.net>
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 16:39:29 -0800
Reply-To: russ.abb...@gmail.com,
The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 7
Since my prejudice as a programmer is that
almost any abstraction is likely to be useful,
then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting
abstractions, they will very likely be useful.
How could they not? At worst a taxonomy will be
found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of
underlying design principles. In that case, we
wasted our time in building the taxonomy. But I
would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will
turn out to worth the effort. I can't imagine an
argument that says a priori that it won't be.
How could anyone possibly know that?
-- Russ
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas
Thompson <<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote:
Hi, Russ,
Thanks for your interesting response.
Well, the same argument could be made, could it
not, against trying to gather information about
human evolution. After all, it matters not how
we got here, but who we are, now that we are
here. However, in evolutionary psychology, I
have always been soft on the value of
evolutionary study for understanding human
psychology because much of what we do makes more
sense in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.
But, I am not sure the same argument works for
the history of agent based modeling. I have
never heard any agent based modeler claim that
he or she gives a rat's ass about how we got
where we are in that domain. Might it
illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or
other? I dunno. I just dont know enough about it.
But all of this is aside from the question of
the value of Taxonomy. Evolutionary
considerations aside, are there natural kinds of
ABM;s And would a cladistic analysis of model
types be useful for programmers trying to decide
what sort of approach to use to a new
problem. In the ABSENSE of an interest in
history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell us?
that is the question I was asking.
Thanks again for helping me clarify,
NIck
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>Russ Abbott
To:
<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net;<mailto:friam@redfish.com>The
Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Hi Nick,
What's wrong with this argument?
My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern
English, which means English literature,
culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. She is interested in how people
thought about things in her period as well as
how those ways of thinking developed from
previous periods. We are continually arguing
about the value of that sort of study. If you
are interested in the history of ideas or
culture, it certainly has some value. But if you
are interested in the best current thinking
about a subject, why should you care how people
thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really
care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if
I want to know how the physical world works? I
would say, "No" what I really want to know is
what the best current physicist think.
Why isn't that same argument relevant to
ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we
currently think about ABMs, not the history of
the development of ABMs that got us there. If
that history makes it easier to understand the
current best thinking, so much the better. But
it is only in the service of the current best
thinking that history is useful when what one
wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.
-- Russ
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas
Thompson <<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote:
All,
For those of you who werent there, last friday,
we got into an intersting discussion about the
possibility of taxonomies of agent based
models. Are there only a few basic types? Are
many apparently different agent based models,
deployed for widely different purposes,
fundamentally only subtle variations?
Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They
argued that any such classification system must
be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me
argued that there MUST (note the use of modal
language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In
ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You
should know that Me has never written a program
longer than a seven line Word macro.
Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that
his position is shaped by his experience in
evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty
important. Taxonomic systems are mostly
devised to relate contemporary species, But for
evolutionary theorists, there is a natural
validator of taxonomic classifications, the
historical record of evolution. If we took
this analogy seriously, we would be led to try
and validate classifications of ABM's on the
history of their development, perhaps doing dna
analysis on the code fragments that make them
up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in
the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a
dark art of classification that uses a variety
of obscure incantations to lable relations
amongst species without, so far as I understand,
any reference to evolution. Yet, as I
understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there,
what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
<http://www.friam.org>http://www.friam.org
From: Joshua Thorp <jth...@redfish.com>
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Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 18:02:28 -0700
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 8
I don't know anything about cladistics, so I
don't know whether this fits with it.
ABMs can have many different parents, often not
directly known. I'm not sure parentage in any
strict sense would be a particularly good
approach. Better would be to identify separate
patterns in how the ABMs work. Any ABM could
then be compared (even clustered) with other ABMs based on shared patterns.
High level patterns might include: how is time
simulated in an ABM? How are the energy or
other flows accounted for in the model? How is
the environment broken up, or represented? What
kinds of interactions can take place between
parts of the ABM (agents, environment, ?).
Does this fit with cladistics?
--joshua
On Jan 3, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
cladistic
From: "Phil Henshaw" <s...@synapse9.com>
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<495e417a.9030...@snoutfarm.com>
<cf913c71-785c-4f6f-aba8-cc84b2480...@backspaces.net>
<495e580d.9050...@snoutfarm.com>
<15fe0a4a0901021023m6904ca4dh84eee1d323005...@mail.gmail.com>
<495e62d2.20...@snoutfarm.com> <495e8363.4070...@swcp.com>
<006a01c96dc7$d1bffeb0$753ffc...@com> <495fa3f4.7080...@swcp.com>
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Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:47:07 -0500
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
Message: 9
Steve,
Phil -
This is a very timely reference. I often find
that "Survey" papers, especially from outside of
the field I am working in, but on a subject
overlapping said field can be very
illuminating. They help to provide a
common-sense perspective on the problem... help
to remove me from the "trees" enough to see the "forest", as it were.
[ph] Yes, just my thought, that it seems to be a
good survey by a management science person. The
paper has actually been cited 750 times since it
was published in 91. Clarifying the forest by
getting a good look at separate kinds of trees
is also one of the things I found interesting in
writing my short encyclopedia entry covering all
the approaches to complex systems science and
practice. I may have left out just a few
things
of course
but it did force me to look
at the subject from several different time tested orientations.
Your comment about the discontinuities are
often observably in the mode of explanation used
and not the physical process might be a corollary of Kierkegard's
Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
[ph] Well, that certainly applies to the
discontinuity between foresight and hindsight,
when in the one youre looking for choices and
in the other youre only looking for excuses
you might say. :-) Ill have to read
Gersick more carefully to understand what she
defines as the discontinuity displayed by
revolutionary change but what I was thinking
was more that once you see the finished form you
suddenly see the whole effect of the distributed
events coming together, that would have been all
undeveloped and incomprehensible before. Most
of them you also would never have seen before
because they were distributed, and so not
occurring where you were looking too, as well as
because they were undeveloped as a whole and so
would be naturally meaningless too. So even
if the distributed process was continuous and
developmental, you would necessarily miss most
of it happening, and then be distracted by the
false simplicity of hindsight to boot.
It is my (anecdotal) experience that many people
live through, or even participate in revolutions
without realizing it until (long?) after they
are over. Often the turmoil that is attendant
to the "Revolution" is not a new experience for
them, a series of tumultuous periods lead up to
it, and it is only the actual "breaking through"
that ultimately marks it as a "Revolution". To
the extent that that "breaking through" is an
emergent phenomena, it is often not visible at
the scale of the individual observer, especially
an observer who is steeped in the old way of
experiencing things. [ph] What that suggested
to me was that a parcel of hot air might be
locally experiencing a gradual decrease in air
pressure, and not much else, as it rose along
with an air mass as part of a large accumulating
column of air breaking through an inversion
layer to become a great erupting cumulus
cloud. Widely scattered things become
unobservably connected is the first step as far
as any part may be concerned. So for emerging
revolutionary change might it sometimes be
that neither the parts nor outside observers could know about it?
Phil
- Steve
<http://www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf>www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf
(500k)
Have any of you heard of the "Academy of Management Review" or Connie JG
Gersick?
She might have called it 'emergence' I think, but seems to have done a great
job of threading together six different theories of change between complex
system equilibriums, punctuated by disequilibrium, which she calls
"revolutionary change". The familiar ones are the models offered by TS
Kuhn, SJ Gould, and I Prigogine. She seems to come to the conclusion, yes,
there are discontinuities. My view has developed as being that, yes, there
are discontinuities, but often observably in the mode of explanation used
and not the physical process.
Does anyone else also see the need to have gaps between modes of explanation
for complex system features as a important reason for using the word
'complex' to describe them?
Phil Henshaw
============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
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From: "Phil Henshaw" <s...@synapse9.com>
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<495e417a.9030...@snoutfarm.com>
<cf913c71-785c-4f6f-aba8-cc84b2480...@backspaces.net>
<495e580d.9050...@snoutfarm.com>
<15fe0a4a0901021023m6904ca4dh84eee1d323005...@mail.gmail.com>
<495e62d2.20...@snoutfarm.com> <495e8363.4070...@swcp.com>
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Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:21:55 -0500
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
Message: 10
Thanks, yes that way of asking it does expose
the fact that I often deal with the issues of
poorly explained complex systems like those one
finds all over the place in societies and
ecologies. Science is a policy to understand
things better, though, with the knowns
ultimately nested in unknowns, so the posture is still basically similar.
For less defined systems the main system model
is not in a computer, though, but in the
experience of the people involved, reflected
mostly in their way of making snap judgments or
asking probing questions, say, about whether
its time to use the opposite rule as
before
You can have interacting systems
requiring alternating choices, for example, like
when driving on a road where youd expect a left
turn to follow a right turn and so forth, like a
period of adding followed by one of subtracting
to keep a balance, and not always make progress
by turning in the same direction as
before. It can be both necessary and rather
difficult to convince people with institutional
habits to consider remarkable concept like that
;-)
Phil Henshaw
From: Russ Abbott [mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 3:07 PM
To: s...@synapse9.com; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
When I first read this question, I thought that
it was somewhat off topic. It is asking about
policy rather than science. But the implication
of that perspective is that there is no science
of policy, i.e., that political science or
sociology isn't a science. But of course it
should be. In fact it should be one of the sciences of the complex.
-- Russ
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Phil Henshaw
<<mailto:s...@synapse9.com>s...@synapse9.com> wrote:
Doesn't the most dangerous knowledge often come from having a blind spot to
the danger? That's often the problem when people don't recognize the
meaning of changes in scale or kind, like looking for 'bigger' solutions
(the bigger bomb or bigger shovel approach) when the nature of the problem
changes unexpectedly with scale.
Would you include that in your problem statement?
Phil Henshaw
> -----Original Message-----
> From:
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>friam-boun...@redfish.com
[mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On
> Behalf Of Steve Smith
> Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:13 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
>
> I believe this is an important but subtle topic that deserves much more
> discussion.
>
> I believe that the sfComplex should host a series of live discussions,
> probably starting with a Panel presentation by a handful of people
> representing differing but well-considered points of view.
>
> I have been considering this since we opened our doors in June, but
> find
> that it is a very difficult topic. Perhaps the most difficult is the
> polarization that seems to come with it. I have a lot of strong
> opinions on this subject, some of which I've begun to try to share
> here. This thread (and the one it emerged from) have tapped a few of
> the ideas and opinions that need to be discussed.
>
> We would need a format and possibly a good moderator to help avoid the
> many opportunities for spinning out.
>
> Ideas, issues, topics are welcome.
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
<http://www.friam.org>http://www.friam.org
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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From: "Phil Henshaw" <s...@synapse9.com>
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"'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'"
<friam@redfish.com>, <nickthomp...@earthlink.net>
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Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:41:40 -0500
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 11
The basis of taxonomy is the developmental
sequences of the forms themselves, so in the
case of ABMs it would be finding who built on
whose ideas and model parts. Its
basically a time network map of parentage and
offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.
I asked what families of models there were at
the SASO-07 conference on self-organizing and
self-adapting software and controls. As I
recall there were a great many variations on the
pheromone wisdom of the crowd type of learning
systems and a lot of peer to peer organisms,
with a couple whacko things like amorphous
computing. What youd need maybe is someone
to create a relational network map and have the
authors of ABMs draw links with the ones it was based on somehow
??
Phil Henshaw
From: friam-boun...@redfish.com
[mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 7:39 PM
To: nickthomp...@earthlink.net
Cc: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Since my prejudice as a programmer is that
almost any abstraction is likely to be useful,
then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting
abstractions, they will very likely be useful.
How could they not? At worst a taxonomy will be
found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of
underlying design principles. In that case, we
wasted our time in building the taxonomy. But I
would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will
turn out to worth the effort. I can't imagine an
argument that says a priori that it won't be.
How could anyone possibly know that?
-- Russ
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas
Thompson <<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote:
Hi, Russ,
Thanks for your interesting response.
Well, the same argument could be made, could it
not, against trying to gather information about
human evolution. After all, it matters not how
we got here, but who we are, now that we are
here. However, in evolutionary psychology, I
have always been soft on the value of
evolutionary study for understanding human
psychology because much of what we do makes more
sense in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.
But, I am not sure the same argument works for
the history of agent based modeling. I have
never heard any agent based modeler claim that
he or she gives a rat's ass about how we got
where we are in that domain. Might it
illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or
other? I dunno. I just dont know enough about it.
But all of this is aside from the question of
the value of Taxonomy. Evolutionary
considerations aside, are there natural kinds of
ABM;s And would a cladistic analysis of model
types be useful for programmers trying to decide
what sort of approach to use to a new
problem. In the ABSENSE of an interest in
history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell us?
that is the question I was asking.
Thanks again for helping me clarify,
NIck
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:russ.abb...@gmail.com>Russ Abbott
To:
<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net;<mailto:friam@redfish.com>The
Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Hi Nick,
What's wrong with this argument?
My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern
English, which means English literature,
culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. She is interested in how people
thought about things in her period as well as
how those ways of thinking developed from
previous periods. We are continually arguing
about the value of that sort of study. If you
are interested in the history of ideas or
culture, it certainly has some value. But if you
are interested in the best current thinking
about a subject, why should you care how people
thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really
care about Aristotelian physics, for example, if
I want to know how the physical world works? I
would say, "No" what I really want to know is
what the best current physicist think.
Why isn't that same argument relevant to
ABMs? What one really wants to know is how we
currently think about ABMs, not the history of
the development of ABMs that got us there. If
that history makes it easier to understand the
current best thinking, so much the better. But
it is only in the service of the current best
thinking that history is useful when what one
wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.
-- Russ
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas
Thompson <<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote:
All,
For those of you who werent there, last friday,
we got into an intersting discussion about the
possibility of taxonomies of agent based
models. Are there only a few basic types? Are
many apparently different agent based models,
deployed for widely different purposes,
fundamentally only subtle variations?
Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine. They
argued that any such classification system must
be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned. Me
argued that there MUST (note the use of modal
language) be a natural taxonomy of abms. In
ABM's, there must be "natural kinds". You
should know that Me has never written a program
longer than a seven line Word macro.
Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that
his position is shaped by his experience in
evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty
important. Taxonomic systems are mostly
devised to relate contemporary species, But for
evolutionary theorists, there is a natural
validator of taxonomic classifications, the
historical record of evolution. If we took
this analogy seriously, we would be led to try
and validate classifications of ABM's on the
history of their development, perhaps doing dna
analysis on the code fragments that make them
up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor. But if history is uninteresting in
the ABM case, why is it so interesting in the evolutionary case.
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a
dark art of classification that uses a variety
of obscure incantations to lable relations
amongst species without, so far as I understand,
any reference to evolution. Yet, as I
understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there,
what would a cladistics of abm's look like? And should we care about it?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University (<mailto:nthomp...@clarku.edu>nthomp...@clarku.edu)
============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
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From: "Douglas Roberts" <d...@parrot-farm.net>
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To: s...@synapse9.com, "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
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<15fe0a4a0901031639l1900dfc0p33afe06554f54...@mail.gmail.com>
<004a01c96e1e$5dd95c10$198c14...@com>
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Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 21:04:55 -0700
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 12
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Phil Henshaw
<<mailto:s...@synapse9.com>s...@synapse9.com> wrote:
The basis of taxonomy is the developmental
sequences of the forms themselves, so in the
case of ABM's it would be finding who built on
whose ideas and model parts. It's
basically a time network map of parentage and
offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.
Well, I've been designing, developing, and using
ABMS for pert' near 18 years, but I must
confess that the the two sentences above
conveyed absolutely no meaning to my poor, befuddled brain.
I' serious: none.
Clearly it must be time for me to swarm over to
the Carnot-Cycle device and prise open the
magnetic strip- secured metallic thermal barrier
and extract a fused-silicon hermetically-sealed
pressure vessel containing
Brettanomyces-modified
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hordeum>Hordeum
vulgare carbohydrate, hopefully tinctured with a
moderate dosage of Humulus Lupulus-produced aromatic oils.
Then, once I'm done with that one, I might just
go get myself another beer from the refrigerator.
--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
<mailto:drobe...@rti.org>drobe...@rti.org
<mailto:d...@parrot-farm.net>d...@parrot-farm.net
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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From: "Marcus G. Daniels" <mar...@snoutfarm.com>
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Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:25:29 -0700
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Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 13
Nicholas Thompson wrote:
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is
a dark art of classification that uses a
variety of obscure incantations to lable
relations amongst species without, so far as I
understand, any reference to evolution. Yet,
as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
In both cases it boils down to selecting a set
of features and assigning them to a set of
character states. With DNA, the job is done
because the character states are A G C or T in
long strings. But can also consider an
encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have
claws, L=has lungs, !L has no lungs, V=has
vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no fur,
and so on. To make a taxonomy, similarity
techniques like neighbor-joining or distance
methods are often used. To go to the next step
and consider an evolutionary model, then things
get complex fast because, for example, it is
necessary to be able to say how a critter goes
from having no hair to having it, or develops
lungs and the relative impotance of those
things. On the other hand, it is not nearly
so hard if the transition you want to describe
is one of an adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.
I think a high-level description of conceptual
model features (like those Joshua suggested) as
character states would work for making
similarity trees without an evolutionary model
behind them. The main work there is deciding on the features.
And on the other extreme, one could probably
come up with some very crude evolutionary model
for local change of machine code based on
context and knowledge of common programming
idioms and/or the source language and
compiler. Even if you had that, though, one
thing that is assumed by most phylogenetics
programs is a multiple alignment. That is, for
any code fragment found anywhere in a given
program, the same fragment can be found in any
another aligned down to the opcode. Then
there's the small matter that horizontal gene
transfer happens all the time in software as 3rd
party libraries get pulled in and dropped and
software factoring is going on. In principle,
I bet with sufficient effort one could probably
recover the revision history of some large
project like GCC from various binaries of
different ages. But better just to go the
revision system and look at the history
directly. With GCC it goes back 20 years or something.
Marcus
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In-Reply-To: <15fe0a4a0901031316i1012ed1buc5cda1c3f80ae...@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:44:11 -0700
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
Message-ID: <49603e9b.5090...@snoutfarm.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 14
Russ Abbott wrote:
But if you are interested in the best current
thinking about a subject, why should you care
how people thought about it 4 centuries ago?
What if there are common processes behind
learning and insight and they are general and timeless?
From: "Douglas Roberts" <d...@parrot-farm.net>
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In-Reply-To: <49603a39.1050...@snoutfarm.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 21:48:11 -0700
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
Message: 15
Ok, Marcus. But what does that buy the
developer of a C^3I (Command, Control,
Communications, and Intelligence) war gaming
ABM? Or and ABM of the pork bellies market? Or
an ABM of celestial mechanics? Or an ABM of the
braking system of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner? Or
an ABM of a specific social network where the
intent is to model the onset of terroristic behavior within that society?
I fail to see how a taxonomy-based formal
description methodology aimed at classifying of
ABM categories would buy anything useful for
either the developer or the user of an ABM.
ABMS are designed and implemented to model the
interactions of real-world entities, at whatever
level of abstraction that will produce results
which can provide information that might be
useful for addressing the problem the ABM was
developed to solve. I seriously doubt that
there is a one-size-fits-all taxonomy classifier
for ABMs that will produce anything other than
"No shit!" rudimentary descriptive information about any given ABM.
But hey! I've been wrong before, and I seriously plan to be wrong again.
--Doug
On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Marcus G.
Daniels <<mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote:
Nicholas Thompson wrote:
But what then about cladistics. Cladistics is a
dark art of classification that uses a variety
of obscure incantations to lable relations
amongst species without, so far as I understand,
any reference to evolution. Yet, as I
understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
In both cases it boils down to selecting a set
of features and assigning them to a set of
character states. With DNA, the job is done
because the character states are A G C or T in
long strings. But can also consider an
encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have
claws, L=has lungs, !L has no lungs, V=has
vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no fur,
and so on. To make a taxonomy, similarity
techniques like neighbor-joining or distance
methods are often used. To go to the next step
and consider an evolutionary model, then things
get complex fast because, for example, it is
necessary to be able to say how a critter goes
from having no hair to having it, or develops
lungs and the relative impotance of those
things. On the other hand, it is not nearly
so hard if the transition you want to describe
is one of an adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.
I think a high-level description of conceptual
model features (like those Joshua suggested) as
character states would work for making
similarity trees without an evolutionary model
behind them. The main work there is deciding on the features.
And on the other extreme, one could probably
come up with some very crude evolutionary model
for local change of machine code based on
context and knowledge of common programming
idioms and/or the source language and
compiler. Even if you had that, though, one
thing that is assumed by most phylogenetics
programs is a multiple alignment. That is, for
any code fragment found anywhere in a given
program, the same fragment can be found in any
another aligned down to the opcode. Then
there's the small matter that horizontal gene
transfer happens all the time in software as 3rd
party libraries get pulled in and dropped and
software factoring is going on. In principle,
I bet with sufficient effort one could probably
recover the revision history of some large
project like GCC from various binaries of
different ages. But better just to go the
revision system and look at the history
directly. With GCC it goes back 20 years or something.
Marcus
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
<http://www.friam.org>http://www.friam.org
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