On 7/23/06, Stephen Guerin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think you're going to end up in an irreconcilable paradox here. Take the case of conservation laws: if you want to use conventional statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, then your 'new' energy (whatever you want to call it) is going to have some conservation law attached to it. But information flow between agents is not conserved. For example, the information you extract from this specific email is not in any way affected by the number of people reading it.
Sure, I can impose conservation laws on (say) information flows because I am building the model and can impose any rule structure on it I like. But that would seem (IMHO) to represent too great a dislocation from reality for any ABM derived from that assumption to be particularly realistic.
Alternatively, I could accept that something like information is not conserved. But if I do this then I can't treat information as an analogue of energy and I don't get to use all those well-established stat mech and thermodynamics laws.
Robert
...
In other systems like the ant foraging ABM model, we're trying to generalize the
notions of "work" and "heat" beyond traditional mechanical processes. we've said
that work is performed on the agents at the micro level as the system becomes
complex and moves toward an organized state. For example, ants are informed by
the pheromone field; work is peformed on them as they lose degrees of freedom in
their movement and follow the gradient.
Ultimately, I'm claiming, unformally at this point, that complex systems are a
method for converting heat to work.
-Stephen
I think you're going to end up in an irreconcilable paradox here. Take the case of conservation laws: if you want to use conventional statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, then your 'new' energy (whatever you want to call it) is going to have some conservation law attached to it. But information flow between agents is not conserved. For example, the information you extract from this specific email is not in any way affected by the number of people reading it.
Sure, I can impose conservation laws on (say) information flows because I am building the model and can impose any rule structure on it I like. But that would seem (IMHO) to represent too great a dislocation from reality for any ABM derived from that assumption to be particularly realistic.
Alternatively, I could accept that something like information is not conserved. But if I do this then I can't treat information as an analogue of energy and I don't get to use all those well-established stat mech and thermodynamics laws.
Robert
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