Steverino, I guess it depends on what your definitions of trees vs. forests are, as pertains to my particular interest areas.
In order to develop a viable set of requirements for any given simulation project, one must be able to perceive the top level view, as well as being capable of translating it into tree-sized chunks to be designed and implemented, which when running in a functional simulation will address the top-level requirements. On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as - Order matters, or - Complexity is, or - Taxonomies exist rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier. --Doug On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: > Nick - > > I think of Taxonomies as having two over-arching properties: > > > 1. They are derived/created/recognized only in hindsight. They > reflect extant properties of an *already* complex network of relations > rooted in some form of causality. Heritability under selection yields > canalisation and speciation which can ultimately (once fully enough > elaborated) be described by a taxonomy. > 2. They are "collective" and "aggregate" and in a sense "emergent". > The overall structure of a taxonomy exposes some otherwise hidden > properties > (like the varying context in which various stages of evolution were > executed, like simple symmetries, etc.) > > Taxonomies are most useful (IMO) to those who are (as you point out with > Doug as teacher of ABM 101) entering a field "naive", or who are trying to > understand something "forest-ey" rather than "tree-ey". Doug tends toward > the pragmatic, so I suspect him of being interested in trees more often than > forests. I, on the other hand, find trees most interesting for their > forestness. This might be why Doug has full-time (paid) work, while I > spend 40 hours a week trying to create/find 20 hours of paid work! > > - Steve > > >
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