Phil Henshaw wrote: > That would somewhat model the occurrence of 'emergent cells' > of new systems of relationships that are 'feeding on' rather than being > 'determined by' their environments. > To my way of thinking, a `type correct' computer program behaves somewhat like a fit individual in a biological system. But it's not very realistic since type consistency is global property of a program. If you fiddle with a subcomponent of a Java program, for example, the compiler will tell you if you did something wrong and not let you run the program. In a biological system the corresponding subcomponent might not get exercised enough to change the fitness of the individual much. Fitness is both a function of the environment and the individual. For example, given a large population of individuals and few of them are in the situation in the environment where changes to a part of there genome would kill them, it doesn't matter if that change is, in principle, inferior. By `in principle' I mean there are easy to imagine environments where it would be inferior. In a computer program I mean that a code path has operands and operators that are incompatible.
For me, it's initially easier to write some kinds of computer programs that are not type safe (e.g. to use scripting languages) because I don't have to think about how all of the pieces fit together. It's like not pounding all of the nails all of the way down. Attention can be focused in writing a new part of a program and once the logic is worked out, the details of the interface can be decided to safely connect it to the rest. The larger program or set of programs can even be running while this logic is worked out. I think this kind of flexibility is pretty important for evolution and missing in a lot of ABM and ABM tools. ============================================================ 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
