Would it be at all accurate to say you are looking for something akin to
an RNA-world? More a regulatory and mixing n-category gumbo than
simple recombination of DNA deck chairs? If so, one might look to
Caporale, Margulis, Nusslein-Volhard, Carroll, Edelman for more
biologically-inspired approaches. Nevertheless, a "systems biology"
reducible to a computing language environment is certainly non-trivial,
though I have some hope it will sweep the others aside eventually.
I suspect we should look more closely at what we might mean by
"on-the-fly". Sensitivity to world states defined as the presence or
absence of local dimensions and values those dimensions might take on
may not describe "on-the-fly" adequately. Rather, we are looking to
world states as other regulatory systems or n-categories (topoi?),
themselves operating "on-the-fly". I'm not at all sure that simple
rules and rule-rewrites are a viable path for describing such states.
Carl
Russ Abbott wrote:
I think Marcus gets to the problem. I want agents that can create new
agents that have new functionality -- or equivalently modify their own
functionality in new ways. I don't see how NetLogo lets you do that.
You need the ability to manipulate the rules themselves. Just creating
a class of agents that you call rules doesn't do that. It doesn't
provide a way to create new functionality.
As Marcus said, think of it as having an agent with a built-in Genetic
Programming system that it can use to generate and test possible
rules. When it finds good ones, it either creates a new agent with
those rules or it replaces its own rules with that new rule set. I
don't see how NetLogo lets you do that without building an awful lot
of new stuff.
-- Russ
On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Marcus G. Daniels
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> In this case the object labeled "rule" is still the same, but
only because the effect of the rule has been altered within the
agent, which for metaphorical purposes should be sufficient.
I'd say it comes down to whether or not predicate/action pairs can
be defined on the fly. So long as there a way to make new
functions that test for things and also can describe new
states of the world (of which one part is more predicate/action
pairs), then it should work fine for hybrid genetic programming /
ABM. I'd put this under the general category of `rewriting systems'.
There is an important practical difference between, say, forking
the GCC compiler every time a variant agent is proposed, versus
having lightweight just-in-time native code compilation from first
class programming language objects. You can crudely approximate
the latter with more and more ad-hoc hacks (like you mention) in
almost any kind of programming or modeling environment, but why
not use tools well suited to the job? In the end an ad-hoc
interpreter for will be clumsy and slow compared to the work of
programming language implementors who spend years on design,
tuning and optimization.
Marcus
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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
============================================================
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
