-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Colleagues at my former institutution have asked me to provide a > reading or other ...... representation .... that can be consumed in > less than an hour that would give a sense of what it is "we" do in > Friam, in Santa Fe, etc. Hopefully not words ABOUT it but an example > OF it, if you see what I mean, but we might have to settle for words. > If you had ONE SHOT at turning a colleague into a complexitist, what > would you do with him/her.
I would probably sit down with them and play a couple tiling games, one periodic and one aperiodic. Or if that were infeasible, I'd probably set up some game-theoretic human-in-the-loop games. Anything involving collaborative (stigmergic) construction would be good, especially if it usually produces counter-intuitive results. > A related question in my mind: if agent-based-models come closest to > capturing the essense of complexity thinking, WHY? _If_ they do (and I'm not convinced they do with all the pitfalls of modeling and simulation in the way), it is exactly because of the potential for collaborative construction in ABSs. It's collaborative construction that provides the umbrella for things like stigmergy, scaffolding, co-evolution, implicit selection functions, dynamic landscapes, and relatively easy demonstrations of interesting generator-phenomena mappings. Of course, this focus on synthesis misses the other half of "complexity" to some extent, patterns and analysis. Finding an inverse map from phenomena to generator and the techniques involved is at least half of the domain. And in this, the construction (especially modeling and simulation) is just a cognitive aid. For the analysis half, ABM is NOT the best way to capture complexity. For that, I'd say studying fractals is the best way to get the point across. Cellular automata might be a close second. - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com Liberty is the only thing you can't have unless you give it to others. - -- William Allen White -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFH+3QWpVJZMHoGoM8RAi1pAJ9xdWehcvjkhi5L0CVN6aAYOEJMdQCfbeW2 0ikrg1b0wmZOXt0Ln+DAMb4= =jHTW -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ============================================================ 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
