Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-10-06 11:39 PM: > In fact, it is not clear to me that Rosen's Life Itself was > not an attempt to create that very formalization. Have you ever looked at > Rosen????
I know you were talking to Owen (am I hijacking the thread, here?); but I'd like to say that I _do_ think Rosen's work on _complexity_ is a start towards the ability to create complex (computational) formalisms -- where Rosen's claim is that all current (computational) formalisms are _simple_ because of the way we define and implement them. The trouble with Rosen's work and its extensions is that, in order to construct such formalisms, we _must_ include construction loops. And when we include construction loops in computational systems, we get ambiguity (multivalence... multiple, equally correct, answers to the same question). In the most strict situations, the ambiguity is realized as things like "deadlocks" (where multiple blocking processes are waiting for the same resource) and (I speculate) race conditions (where multiple concurrent processes race to see which will get its way in the end). So, while we can build these formalisms, they are unsatisfying to the little engineering homunculus in our heads because they violate a sacred requirement: they don't reduce to a single outcome. No SANE computer scientist would want to build an ambiguous computing device. Right?!?! ;-) Or perhaps I should say no sane computer _engineer_ would want to... By all rights, a computer SCIENTIST would love to create such things and study them. I qualify "formalism" with "computational" because we do have non-algorithm, mathematical, philosophical, and logical formalisms that express complexity in this sense. But they require us to toss out the axiom of regularity (which says that sets can't be members of themselves). This makes any computation we formulate in such a wacko formalism open to running forever (infinite regress, race conditions, deadlocks, etc.) or coming up with multiple different results. Also note that all the standard computer programming languages are "turing complete", which, according to Rosen's work, means any program written in them will be a _simple_... not complex ... system. In any case, sorry for the distraction. It's not at all clear how these formalisms relate to "emergence" UNLESS we define emergence as a measure of complexity. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ 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
