Emerging Science of Complexity!

Subject: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Amos
Date: 29 Aug 01 - 08:09 PM

An interesting discourse on the emerging principles of complex behaviors in systems and how they can emerge from a very small set of rules, if you have the right rules, enough agents following them, and enough interactions going on to break out of order but not quite fall into chaos.
This excerpt is from The New Scientist on-line journal. (http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp?id=ns230516)
 

                                                                                          Principia Mathematica III
 

 

                                                                                          He was a child prodigy, publishing his first
                                                                                          paper at 15. Now Stephen Wolfram says he
                                                                                          has created a new kind of science based on
                                                                                          simple computer programs rather than
                                                                                          equations. It's a bold claim, but it has taken
                                                                                          him 20 years--ten of them thinking and
                                                                                          working late into the night, and publishing
                                                                                          nothing. By a nice irony, that intellectual
                                                                                          space was bought by the millions he made
                                                                                          out of Mathematica, a computer program
                                                                                          that makes complicated mathematics
                                                                                          doable for ordinary mortals. Now, at 41,
                                                                                          he's busy gearing himself up for the glare of
                                                                                          publicity as he prepares to publish the fruit
                                                                                          of all those years. Marcus Chown caught up
                                                                                          with Wolfram--at 3 am
 

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Murray MacLeod
Date: 29 Aug 01 - 08:36 PM

Looks like you typed that out at 3 am as well, Amos

Murray

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Chicken Charlie
Date: 29 Aug 01 - 08:44 PM

There's an old book, maybe called something like "The Incursive Universe" which deals with that idea. The computer game of "Life" was designed to model evolution with three simple rules for turning pixels off and on. Seems to me IBM or wherever it was invented finally had to tell their people they couldn't "play" it at work because it was slowing down the system. When I get home I'll check my notes and see if any of the foregoing is true, but something like it.

CC

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Murray MacLeod
Date: 29 Aug 01 - 09:00 PM

I am no mathematician, but it has always seemd amazing to me that the behavior of a relatively simple mechanism such as a swinging pendulum with a second pendulum swinging from the end can not be modelled mathematically.

Murray

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Bill D
Date: 29 Aug 01 - 09:15 PM

ummm...quote...wow...unquote

I can the lines of resistance forming already.

"nawww..we already have all the models we need for life & reality"

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: wysiwyg
Date: 30 Aug 01 - 12:48 AM

There's a word for that. Misocainea.

misocainea (mis-oh-KY-nee-uh, mi-soh-) noun

Hatred of anything new.

[Greek miso- (hate) + caino- (new).]

~Susan

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Amos
Date: 30 Aug 01 - 01:19 AM

Murray:

Actually aside from my little intro line the rest was pasted.

I think Wolfram's work is related to the work that came out of the Santa Fe Institute in its earliest years on the topic of automata, complex systems and phase states. As I recall, one of the arguments was that systems below a certain point gravitate toward frozen states. Systems where the complexity has gone to far enter the chaotic phase where dissipation and chaos ensue. But the phase change in between these two is the endlessly adapting dynamic set of interactions described by or as life. The only serious problem I have with this notion is that it tries to imply that life itself can be explained as a chemical phenomena in that viable phase state. Period. A tad too mechanistic for my preference even when you throw in unpredictability and adaptation. But that's just me. And a few million othe rpeople.

A

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Wolfgang
Date: 30 Aug 01 - 05:59 AM

Every couple of years a maverick scientist appears who promises to completely revolutionise the basis of science. Their writings are (in some German scientists saying) 'at the boundary between chemistry and madness'. In most cases, after a couple of years of scrutiny, it is found that it was much more on the side of madness than chemistry.

Once in a while, very seldom, one of them proves to be right (of course, the younger the scientists, the more eager they are to adopt the new thinking; some of the older scientists will die still thinking that the new approach is wrong) and his thinking only to look mad at the first glance (Planck, Einstein,...) but to be on the sound side of chemistry.

Wolfram's work looks very promising to me at the first glance (main reason: his thinking doesn't use completely new speculative concepts without empirical foundation, as e.g. Sheldrake, but 'just' a new approach and methodology).

I'm looking forward to the next ten years of testing this idea. We'll see whether his thinking will be proved to have a fatal flaw, or to open a new more or less large branch of science, or to be the basis for a new approach in all sciences unifying physics (as a special case) with the life sciences.

I welcome this approach for the same reasons Amos has problems with it: Utter complexity coming from the interaction of a few simple 'programs' may make arguments about 'mind', 'soul' or whatever being undispensable to explain complex human behaviour more difficult to defend.

Wolfgang

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Kim C
Date: 30 Aug 01 - 02:52 PM

It all makes my head hurt. I'm just an unfrozen caveman - I don't understand how all those little people live inside that TV box.

Subject: RE: Emerging Science of Complexity!
From: Tiger
Date: 31 Aug 01 - 06:42 PM

"The Game of Life" was explained (and I think developed) by John Gardner, who used to write the Mathematics column for "Scientific American"

It describes successive generations of simple 'life forms' living on a 2-D matrix. With each generation, members die, survive, or procreate based upon a system of rules involving the number of other members in proximity. Too complicated to explain here - if anyone needs to know you can find it on the web.

Gardner suggested it modeled some aspects of human society, e.g., overcrowding and loneliness. It spawned years of dialogue, follow-on articles, computer programs - really a fascinating exercise.

I'd be happy to talk more about it if anyone's interested.