_______________________________________________________________________ stephen.gue...@simtable.com <stephen.gue...@simtable.com> CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com 1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505 office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828 twitter: @simtable
On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 12:10 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net> wrote: > SG, > > > > There are now THREE issues lurking here between us. > > > > IS THE CRITERION FOR A SYSTEM ARBITRARY: You say yes; I say no. We’ve > already covered that ground. > In my post, I said it is *not* arbitrary. It's a function of what the researcher is trying to use it for or explain. > > > IS A HURRICANE A SYSTEM: For me, that is the question of whether the > collection of thunderstorms we call a hurricane interact with one another > more than they interact with their collective surroundings. Another way to > put this question is in terms of redundancy. If we were to go about > describing the movements of the thunderstorms of a hurricane, would we get > a simpler, less redundant description if we referred their movements to the > center of the hurricane. I think the answer to this question is clearly > YES. > Yes you could model the movement in a simpler way by modeling the movement of the center point. And that was my second model of a hurricane as a random walker biased by a global wind vector and Coriolis curve term. And I said that was not a complex system. > > > IS A HURRICANE COMPLEX? For me, complexity means “multi-layered” . So, a > *complex > *system is one composed of other systems. A hurricane is a system of > thunderstorms which themselves are a system of thermals (handwaving, > here). Thus a hurricane is at least a three-level system. So, yes. It is > complex. > I agree about complex systems as having multiple layers - a macro scale and a micro scale. I would say there's one system. If I was trying to model a hurricane in my first example of an emergent vortex dissipating temperature and pressure gradients, I would model the air with a combination of air particles and patches of air - at LANL they would describe these as particle in a box models or hybrid lagrangian and eulerian models. I would not introduce thunderstorms at the micro level. But there's many ways to skin a hurricane :-) Some would say the micro level air particles and air cell components which I would model as finite state machines (agents with a lower case "a") are systems in their own right and have boundaries. I don't see the benefit of calling them systems as their aren't multiple interacting components within them. But don't feel like arguing too hard here. > > > Eric Smith? > > > Yes, where are you Eric Smith <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIFJLMyUwrg>?
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