Re: [FRIAM] The Paper Architect.

Excellent post, Jon. I continue to find oddballs with surprising stories to tell. I won't take the scholarly path you've taken to log it here. But I'd like to think I *patronize* them to some extent. I'm still waiting for the new guy, Josh, to show up at the salon again. He overheard my conversa

[FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Friends, Beware. As usual, I am trying to get you to think for me. My grandson is working on a regeneration project in his freshman biolab (Planaria) and his sources and texts are replete with cognitive language like "signal" and "memory" etc., which implies that as the worm regenerates

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

No, CAs are not a good model for stygmergy IMHO. Stygmergy is as Wikipedia says a mechanism of indirect coordination through the environment. For example: ants which exploit a food source by following a pheromone trail. Or termites which build a nest. In Cellular Automata there is no clear disti

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Nick, A reminder on Micheal Levin's work on regeneration, inheritance and connection to bioelectric fields: https://youtu.be/XheAMrS8Q1c?t=428 zoomed to experiment but I encourage you to watch the whole talk. Stigmergy is coordination through indirect communication. Ant foraging, termite nest

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Thanks, Jochen, for answering. Let me try to stretch the point and see if I can bring you on board. In the first place, mimimally, stygmergy need not involve sociality. So, If I go out on a hike and cut blazes on trees on my way out so I can find my way home, that is stygmergy in good st

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

For the development of organisms I would rather look at Lindenmayer Systems and self-similar fractals. They describe how a complex organism can grow out of simple rules. The human body has a self-similar structure: the body has 4 limbs, and each limb has five toes or fingers. There are plenty of

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

< In Cellular Automata there is no clear distinction between agent and environment. They are just a grid of states which evolves step by step by updating the cells with a transition rule or function.> And yet agency emerged. Marcus .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Interesting point. What do the others think? I think if you start with an "X" at the top and consider the X as your agent and the space to the left and right as the environment then yes, we would have a kind of stygmergy model for an agent which interacts in a two dimensional world (one space an

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Yes, some types of CA can be stygmergic. The separation between the environment and the agent is clear in that the "agent" is the per-cell algorithm (some CAs have multiple algorithms, a spectrum from a global algorithm updating all cells to a different algorithm for each cell). The "environment

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

This excellent blog post about planaria and their insane regenerative abilities turned up on hackernews barely two weeks ago, https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10007 -- rec -- On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 3:42 PM uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote: > Yes, some types of CA can be stygmergic. The separation between th

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Game of Life has been shown to be universal https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/822575/turing-machine-universality-of-the-game-of-life I would expect there are many “intermediate lambda” CAs that behave this way, and so could implement any simulation manifesting stigmergy. From: Friam

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

To be clear though, this requires a flexible understanding of "agent" or whatever's doing the indirect coordinating "through" the environment. I.e. "stygmergy" isn't very well defined. On 10/19/21 12:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > Game of Life has been shown to be universal > >   > > https://u

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

What I was driving at is that nature doesn’t give a damn whether we categorize certain globs of stuff as “agents” or “environment” or “transactions”. Stigmergy could be going all the time in some subtle way we can’t discern because we are looking at the pieces the wrong way. > On Oct 19, 2021

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Aren't we all immersed in stygmergy continuously while we're alive and maybe before and after? This is a possible interpretation of Nick's comment that everything is stygmergy. --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Tue, Oct 19, 2021, 8:29 PM

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Ugh. I was making fun of myself. If everything is stigmergy then the word has no interesting use. I am in danger of confusing it with niche construction. The concept offers an alternative to Lamarckian mechanisms for an organism to direct its own evolution. It's like the inheritance of acqu

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

I don’t actually get what is interesting about the term. In computer science it would be a “blackboard system” or simply “memory”. From: Friam On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 2021 8:34 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] sty

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Do you find the term "niche construction" equally uninteresting? On Tue, Oct 19, 2021 at 9:56 PM Marcus Daniels wrote: > I don’t actually get what is interesting about the term. In computer > science it would be a “blackboard system” or simply “memory”. > > > > *From:* Friam *On Behalf Of *N

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

But it's a specific kind of memory: a) shared and b) abused or misused. There should be a decoupling of the objectives of the writer from the objectives of the reader. A good example is a hermit crab using a soup can as its shell. Or an urban kid mistaking modern bananas for "natural" food. The

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Some people find it surprising this could occur in silico? Another old example is https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War On Oct 19, 2021, at 10:15 PM, ⛧ glen wrote: But it's a specific kind of memory: a) shared and b) abused or misused. There should be a decoupling of the objectives of th

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

I love stigmergy! It is everywhere--even, or especially, this forum. Here's an extended abstract that I submitted to a conference. (It was reviewed positively but re

Re: [FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

Yes. Stigmergy always reminds me of ants looking for food using pheromone trails. The classic swarm intelligence example described in the book of Eric Bonabeau, Guy Theraulaz and Marco Dorigo. In this case stigmergy can be considered as a phenomenon where agents collectively use the environment