Thanks, Eric,
Interesting.
When I saw your message, I was excited because I thought you might comment on
the role of serendipity in evolution. There are three ideas rattling around in
my head right now chafing against one another: Serendipity
The book I ordered that was recommended by Marcus was on information theory
as a mode of analysis for social sciences. So, I don't think it's
particularly relevant to Rosen. But we'll see. It should be here by
Monday. I will let you know.
Rosen died in 1998. Life Itself seems to have
> I am not at all sure where this leaves us with “natural programming.” As you
> point out, my concept of natural may be complete at odds with yours. Mine
> grows out of the following analogy: Artificial selection : natural selection
> : : artificial design : natural design. If artificial
“But serendipity by definition is a violation of design. The serendipitous
structure is one that makes something happen without being designed to do so.
Translating that into the CP domain, your problem is to write a program that
somehow promotes serendipity given that the serendipity
Hi Nick,
I'm thinking I should look at a newer book by Rosen and see if it seems. better
than "Life Itself". Do you think that the book you ordered (I'm not certain
what it was) would be good? Or, alternatively, what is the best recent book by
Rosen?
--John
Hi, David,
Serendipity! Your letter struck me like a thunderbolt, because I had dedicated
the morning to carefully rereading Rosen's first chapter. And for the first
time, I think I got it! Rosen doesn't put it that way, but I think I want to
say that his chapter is all about the
I would like to introduce a bit of a zig or zag into the conversation by
bringing up something a bit far afield and then relating it back to the thread.
In a direct message to Nick I mentioned that I was doing a workshop (January,
in Amsterdam, at Domain-Driven Design Europe) on ‘Natural System
On the contrary, the question can ONLY be answered by pointing at something.
Your abstracted, essentialist, linguistic tendencies will fail us every time. I
think I've mentioned Luc Steels' language games before. And you seem to be fond
of semiotics. So why isn't the question best answered by
