2008/8/3 Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I probably don't need to labor the rest of the story, because you have heard > it before. If there is a brick wall between the overall behavior of the > system and the design choices that go into it - if it is impossible to go > from 'I want the system to behave like [that]' to 'therefore I need to make > [this] choice of design at the low level' - then all the stuff about using > intuition to sense the right design would go out the window. This is why > the conversation yesterday about what John Conway actually did when he came > up with Game of Life was so important: the documentary evidence suggests > that what he and his team did was just blind search. Other people have > tried to assert that he used mathematical intuition. The complex systems > community would say that in almost all projects like the one Conway > undertook, there would be absolutely no choice whatsoever but to do a blind > search.
Might it be worth setting people a challenge? Set people the task of building a complex system with a certain property or maybe a few (nothing too bad, perhaps selecting a rule number from something akin to Wolframs numbering). They give reasons why they picked the rules they did and see if they do better than a RNG at picking the correct number. You appear to be going against a strong intuition here, so giving people a practical experiment they can play on themselves might be worthwhile. Will Pearson ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
