Emergence Biology 361 = Computer Science 361 Bryn Mawr College Spring 2006

Some Blog Thoughts I think it's very important to keep our tendency for sentimentality and our viewpoint as humans as far away from this analysis as possible ... LisaSpitalewitz How can you have a designer if there is no free will? What would determine its decisions? ... DavidRosen It seems like intention should be teased out of the definition of purpose, that way purpose can be seen as something imposed on an agent/system (by some kind of second order entity), rather than inherent within it ... Laura Cyckowski I find myself quite interested in the importance of the observer. The observer is also important to one's understanding of much of physics ... Flora Sheperd I still think that adding some randomness in the rules has some huge potential to account for free will along with other unprovable things. ... Kathy Maffei I recently found an interesting 'proof' concerning free will. Surprisingly enough, it was written by our friend, John Conway ... SunnySingh Paul said in class on Monday that at some point the universe was computable - there were few enough particles and little enough space, I suppose, that you could follow what happened from microsecond to microsecond. My question is this: when did it stop being computable? Where was the breaking point? ... LindsayGold As it stands, and as Professor Grobstein phrased his challenge, the burden of disproof is on us. What can CA/digital determinism not account for? ... The fact that a 1D CA can model reality is interesting, but it is so unwieldy that it is impractical. Sure we can model Langton's Ant on it, but we don't because it is so difficult. The agent-based modeling provides great convenience over the CA ... AngadSingh An interesting difference between the CA environments we've seen and our ant world is the ability to change our environment during the middle of an ant run ... LauraKasakoff I've found something that I found interesting with the ant ... Leslie McTavish

Last week's assignment?

• Work through NetLogo documentation
• Create a World of Langton's Ant, with modifications?
• Create an "exploring" ant?
• Create a "free will" ant?

Moving on from one agent influencing/being influenced by an environment

• Multiple agents that influence one another
  • Thinking About Segregation and Integration
  • based on Segregation from the NetLogo Models Library
  • no "intention" inside agent, nor any change inside agent (nor any change, in this case, in environment)
  • does depend on "randomness"
  • interesting/surprising properties from agent/agent interaction alone (can also happen with environment interactions as per cellular automata, Game of Life, see also Fur from the NetLogo Models Library)
  • sandpiles, self-organized criticality, Per Bak How Nature Works
    • Sand, from the Netlogo Models Library
    • Sandpile CA, by Ted Wong
• Multiple agents that influence/are influenced by the environment ("stigmergy")
  • Slime, from the Netlogo Models Library
  • Termites
  • changes in state of agent? in rules inside agent? "learning"?

Do some more learning about/playing with Netlogo models. What is, is not gained by increased model complexity? What additional complexities might one want to introduce, why?

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