Classification of ABM's

[Nick Thompson]

Thaniks everybody.  Interesting responses.  

Doug, I cannot shake the intuition that the reason you cannot see value of
the taxonmy is that you already have one in your head that makes writing
one down unnecessary.  I am not sure quite what that means, let alone how I
would show it to you.

But let's imagine I were to do a study of you as you discussed a new ABM
project with a client, or discussed with you colleagues how you were going
to approach the problem, after the client had left.  In those discussions,
wouldnt you reach for exemplars or typical approaches or basic elements as
you planned your way into the work?  Then I would leap up and point my
finger and say, AHA!  you DO have a taxonomy.  

Perhaps the taxonomy is not in the models themselves but in the problems
that the models are brought to bear on.  

Or, here is another way to smoke out a taxonomy.  Imagine a bright eyed and
bushy tailed group of college seniors who have come to learn agent based
modeling from you.  Now granted DOING a lot of them would be most of the
course.  But would you have nothing to say of a conceptual nature to guide
students concerning how to approach different sorts of problems with
different sorts of models?

Thanks for humoring me, here.

Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])

> [Original Message]
> From: <[hidden email]>
> To: <[hidden email]>
> Date: 1/3/2009 9:48:28 PM
> Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 67, Issue 8
>
> Send Friam mailing list submissions to
> [hidden email]
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> [hidden email]
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> [hidden email]
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Friam digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. great paper on revolutionary change in systems (Phil Henshaw)
>    2. Re: great paper on revolutionary change in systems (Steve Smith)
>    3. Re: What to do with knowledge (Russ Abbott)
>    4. Callling all cladisticists (Nicholas Thompson)
>    5. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Russ Abbott)
>    6. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Nicholas Thompson)
>    7. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Russ Abbott)
>    8. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Joshua Thorp)
>    9. Re: great paper on revolutionary change in systems (Phil Henshaw)
>   10. Re: What to do with knowledge (Phil Henshaw)
>   11. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Phil Henshaw)
>   12. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Douglas Roberts)
>   13. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Marcus G. Daniels)
>   14. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Marcus G. Daniels)
>   15. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Douglas Roberts)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:22:11 -0500
> From: "Phil Henshaw" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
> To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'"
> <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <006a01c96dc7$d1bffeb0$753ffc10$@com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf (500k)
> Have any of you heard of the "Academy of Management Review" or Connie JG
> Gersick?  
>
> She might have called it 'emergence' I think, but seems to have done a

great
> job of threading together six different theories of change between complex
> system equilibriums, punctuated by disequilibrium, which she calls
> "revolutionary change".  The familiar ones are the models offered by TS
> Kuhn, SJ Gould, and I Prigogine.  She seems to come to the conclusion,
yes,
> there are discontinuities.   My view has developed as being that, yes,
there
> are discontinuities, but often observably in the mode of explanation used
> and not the physical process.  
>
> Does anyone else also see the need to have gaps between modes of
explanation

> for complex system features as a important reason for using the word
> 'complex' to describe them?
>
> Phil Henshaw??
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 10:44:20 -0700
> From: Steve Smith <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 12:06:33 -0800
> From: "Russ Abbott" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
> To: [hidden email], "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
> Group" <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID:
> <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> When I first read this question, I thought that it was somewhat off topic.
> It is asking about policy rather than science. But the implication of that
> perspective is that there is no science of policy, i.e., that political
> science or sociology isn't a science. But of course it should be. In fact

it
> should be one of the sciences of the complex.
>
> -- Russ
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Phil Henshaw <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> > Doesn't the most dangerous knowledge often come from having a blind
spot to
> > the danger?   That's often the problem when people don't recognize the
> > meaning of changes in scale or kind, like looking for 'bigger' solutions
> > (the bigger bomb or bigger shovel approach) when the nature of the
problem

> > changes unexpectedly with scale.
> >
> > Would you include that in your problem statement?
> >
> > Phil Henshaw
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
> > > Behalf Of Steve Smith
> > > Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:13 PM
> > > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> > > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
> > >
> > > I believe this is an important but subtle topic that deserves much

more

> > > discussion.
> > >
> > > I believe that the sfComplex should host a series of live discussions,
> > > probably starting with a Panel presentation by a handful of people
> > > representing differing but well-considered points of view.
> > >
> > > I have been considering this since we opened our doors in June, but
> > > find
> > > that it is a very difficult topic.  Perhaps the most difficult is the
> > > polarization that seems to come with it.   I have a lot of strong
> > > opinions on this subject, some of which I've begun to try to share
> > > here.  This thread (and the one it emerged from) have tapped a few of
> > > the ideas and opinions that need to be discussed.
> > >
> > > We would need a format and possibly a good moderator to help avoid the
> > > many opportunities for spinning out.
> > >
> > > Ideas, issues, topics are welcome.
> > >
> > > - Steve
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ============================================================
> > > 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
> >
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > 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
> >
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:39:56 -0700
> From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: [hidden email]
> Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>  All,
>
> For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting

discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.  Are
there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle
variations?  
>
> Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST (note
the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there
must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
program longer than a seven line Word macro.  
>
>       Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But
for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of
ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on
the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so
interesting in the evolutionary case.  
>
> But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to
evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.  
>
> So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics
of abm's look like?  And should we care about it?

>
> Nick
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> Clark University ([hidden email])
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:16:01 -0800
> From: "Russ Abbott" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: [hidden email], "The Friday Morning Applied
> Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID:
> <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hi Nick,
>
> What's wrong with this argument?
>
> My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English
> literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She

is
> interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how
> those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually
> arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested in
the
> history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are
> interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
care
> how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
> Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical
world
> works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
current
> physicist think.
>
> Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
> know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
> development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier to
> understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only
in

> the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what
> one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.
>
> -- Russ
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <
> [hidden email]> wrote:
>
> >   All,
> >
> > For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an

intersting
> > discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.
Are
> > there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
> > models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only
subtle
> > variations?
> >
> > Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
> > classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for
the
> > narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST
(note
> > the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's,
there
> > must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
> > program longer than a seven line Word macro.
> >
> >       Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
his
> > experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
> > Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species,
But for
> > evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
> > classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
> > analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications
of
> > ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis
on the
> > code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
> > endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so
> > interesting in the evolutionary case.
> >
> > But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
classification
> > that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst
> > species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution.
Yet,
> > as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
> >
> > So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a
cladistics of

> > abm's look like?  And should we care about it?
> >
> > Nick
> >
> >
> > Nicholas S. Thompson
> > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> > Clark University ([hidden email])
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > 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
> >
> -------------- next part --------------
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 17:25:32 -0700
> From: "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: [hidden email]
> Cc: [hidden email]
> Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Hi, Russ,
>
> Thanks for your interesting response.  
>
> Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to

gather information about human evolution.  After all, it matters not how we
got here, but who we are, now that we are here.  However, in evolutionary
psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for
understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense
in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.  
>
> But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based
modeling.  I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she
gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain.  Might it
illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other?  I dunno.  I just dont
know enough about it.  
>
> But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy.
Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s  And
would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying
to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem.  In the ABSENSE of
an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell
us?  

>
> that is the question I was asking.  
>
> Thanks again for helping me clarify,
>
> NIck
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> Clark University ([hidden email])
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Russ Abbott
> To: [hidden email];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity

Coffee Group
> Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
>
>
> Hi Nick,
>
> What's wrong with this argument?
>
> My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English
literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is
interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how
those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually
arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested in
the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you
are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world
works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
current physicist think.
>
> Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier to
understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in
the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what
one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.  
>
> -- Russ
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>  All,
>
> For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting
discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.  Are
there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle
variations?  
>
> Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST (note
the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there
must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
program longer than a seven line Word macro.  
>
>       Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But
for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of
ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on
the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so
interesting in the evolutionary case.  
>
> But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to
evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.  
>
> So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics
of abm's look like?  And should we care about it?

>
> Nick
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> Clark University ([hidden email])
>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> 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
> -------------- next part --------------
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 16:39:29 -0800
> From: "Russ Abbott" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: [hidden email]
> Cc: [hidden email]
> Message-ID:
> <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Since my prejudice as a programmer is that almost any abstraction is

likely
> to be useful, then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting
abstractions,
> they will very likely be useful. How could they not? At worst a taxonomy
> will be found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of underlying design
> principles. In that case, we wasted our time in building the taxonomy.
But I
> would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will turn out to worth the
effort.
> I can't imagine an argument that says *a priori* that it won't be. How
could

> anyone possibly know that?
>
> -- Russ
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson <
> [hidden email]> wrote:
>
> >  Hi, Russ,
> >
> > Thanks for your interesting response.
> >
> > Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to
> > gather information about human evolution.  After all, it matters not

how we
> > got here, but who we are, now that we are here.  However, in
evolutionary
> > psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study
for
> > understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more
sense
> > in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.
> >
> > But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent
based
> > modeling.  I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or
she
> > gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain.  Might
it
> > illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other?  I dunno.  I just
dont
> > know enough about it.
> >
> > But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy.
> > Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s  And
> > would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers
trying
> > to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem.  In the
ABSENSE of
> > an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can
tell

> > us?
> >
> > that is the question I was asking.
> >
> > Thanks again for helping me clarify,
> >
> > NIck
> >  Nicholas S. Thompson
> > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> > Clark University ([hidden email])
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > *From:* Russ Abbott <[hidden email]>
> > *To: *[hidden email];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
> > Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> > *Sent:* 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
> > *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> >
> > Hi Nick,
> >
> > What's wrong with this argument?
> >
> > My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means

English
> > literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
She is
> > interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as
how
> > those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are
continually
> > arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested
in the
> > history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are
> > interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
care
> > how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
> > Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical
world
> > works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
current
> > physicist think.
> >
> > Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
> > know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
> > development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier
to
> > understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is
only in
> > the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when
what

> > one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.
> >
> > -- Russ
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <
> > [hidden email]> wrote:
> >
> >>   All,
> >>
> >> For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an

intersting
> >> discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.
Are
> >> there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent
based
> >> models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only
subtle
> >> variations?
> >>
> >> Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
> >> classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only
for the
> >> narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST
(note
> >> the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's,
there
> >> must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
> >> program longer than a seven line Word macro.
> >>
> >>       Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
his
> >> experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
> >> Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species,
But for
> >> evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
> >> classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
> >> analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications
of
> >> ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis
on the
> >> code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
> >> endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it
so
> >> interesting in the evolutionary case.
> >>
> >> But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
> >> classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
> >> relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any
reference to
> >> evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
> >>
> >> So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a
cladistics

> >> of abm's look like?  And should we care about it?
> >>
> >> Nick
> >>
> >>
> >> Nicholas S. Thompson
> >> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
> >> Clark University ([hidden email])
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ============================================================
> >> 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
> >>
> >
> >
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 18:02:28 -0700
> From: Joshua Thorp <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: [hidden email], The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
> Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Cc: [hidden email]
> Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed";
> DelSp="yes"
>
> I don't know anything about cladistics, so I don't know whether this  
> fits with it.
>
> ABMs can have many different parents,  often not directly known. I'm  
> not sure parentage in any strict sense would be a particularly good  
> approach.  Better would be to identify separate patterns in how the  
> ABMs work.  Any ABM could then be compared (even clustered) with other  
> ABMs based on shared patterns.
>
> High level patterns might include: how is time simulated in an ABM?  
> How are the energy or other flows accounted for in the model?  How is  
> the environment broken up, or represented?  What kinds of interactions  
> can take place between parts of the ABM (agents, environment, ?).
>
> Does this fit with cladistics?
>
> --joshua
>
> On Jan 3, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
>
> > cladistic
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:47:07 -0500
> From: "Phil Henshaw" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
> To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'"
> <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <003701c96e16$bca92f70$35fb8e50$@com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Steve,
>
>  
>
> Phil -
>
> This is a very timely reference.  I often find that "Survey" papers,
> especially from outside of the field I am working in, but on a subject
> overlapping said field can be very illuminating.   They help to provide a
> common-sense perspective on the problem... help to remove me from the
> "trees" enough to see the "forest", as it were.
>
> [ph] Yes, just my thought, that it seems to be a good survey by a

management
> science person.  The paper has actually been cited 750 times since it was
> published in 91.    Clarifying the forest by getting a good look at
separate

> kinds of trees is also one of the things I found interesting in writing my
> short encyclopedia entry covering all the approaches to complex systems
> science and practice.   I may have left out just a few things. of course.
> but it did force me to look at the subject from several different time
> tested orientations.  
>
>
> Your comment about the discontinuities are
>
> often observably in the mode of explanation used
> and not the physical process might be a corollary of Kierkegard's
> Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
> [ph] Well, that certainly applies to the discontinuity between foresight

and
> hindsight, when in the one you're looking for choices and in the other
> you're only looking for excuses. you might say.  :-)      I'll have to
read
> Gersick more carefully to understand what she defines as the discontinuity
> displayed by "revolutionary change" but what I was thinking was more that
> once you see the finished form you suddenly see the whole effect of the
> distributed events coming together, that would have been all undeveloped
and

> incomprehensible before.   Most of them you also would never have seen
> before because they were distributed, and so not occurring where you were
> looking too, as well as because they were undeveloped as a whole and so
> would be naturally meaningless too.     So even if the distributed process
> was continuous and developmental, you would necessarily miss most of it
> happening, and then be distracted by the false simplicity of hindsight to
> boot.
>  
>
> It is my (anecdotal) experience that many people live through, or even
> participate in revolutions without realizing it until (long?) after they

are
> over.  Often the turmoil that is attendant to the "Revolution" is not a
new
> experience for them, a series of tumultuous periods lead up to it, and it
is
> only the actual "breaking through" that ultimately marks it as a
> "Revolution".   To the extent that that "breaking through" is an emergent
> phenomena, it is often not visible at the scale of the individual
observer,
> especially an observer who is steeped in the old way of experiencing
things.
>
>
> [ph] What that suggested to me was that a parcel of hot air might be
locally
> experiencing a gradual decrease in air pressure, and not much else, as it
> rose along with an air mass as part of a large accumulating column of air
> breaking through an inversion layer to become a great erupting cumulus
> cloud.    Widely scattered things become unobservably connected is the
first
> step as far as any part may be concerned.   So for emerging "revolutionary
> change"  might it sometimes be that neither the parts nor outside
observers

> could know about it?
>
> Phil
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
>  
>
> www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf (500k)
> Have any of you heard of the "Academy of Management Review" or Connie JG
> Gersick?  
>  
> She might have called it 'emergence' I think, but seems to have done a

great
> job of threading together six different theories of change between complex
> system equilibriums, punctuated by disequilibrium, which she calls
> "revolutionary change".  The familiar ones are the models offered by TS
> Kuhn, SJ Gould, and I Prigogine.  She seems to come to the conclusion,
yes,
> there are discontinuities.   My view has developed as being that, yes,
there
> are discontinuities, but often observably in the mode of explanation used
> and not the physical process.  
>  
> Does anyone else also see the need to have gaps between modes of
explanation

> for complex system features as a important reason for using the word
> 'complex' to describe them?
>  
> Phil Henshaw  
>  
>  
>  
> ============================================================
> 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
>  
>
>  
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:21:55 -0500
> From: "Phil Henshaw" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
> To: <[hidden email]>, "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
> Coffee Group'" <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <004501c96e1b$9b1189c0$d1349d40$@com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Thanks, yes that way of asking it does expose the fact that I often deal
> with the issues of poorly explained complex systems like those one finds

all

> over the place in societies and ecologies.    Science is a policy to
> understand things better, though, with the knowns ultimately nested in
> unknowns, so the posture is still basically similar.    
>
>  
>
> For less defined systems the main "system model" is not in a computer,
> though, but in the experience of the people involved, reflected mostly in
> their way of making snap judgments or asking probing questions, say, about
> whether it's time to use the opposite rule as before.     You can have
> interacting systems requiring alternating choices, for example, like when
> driving on a road where you'd expect a left turn to follow a right turn

and
> so forth, like a period of adding followed by one of subtracting to keep a
> balance, and not always make progress by turning in the same direction as
> before.     It can be both necessary and rather difficult to convince
people

> with institutional habits to consider remarkable concept like that.   ;-)
>
>  
>
> Phil Henshaw  
>
>  
>
> From: Russ Abbott [mailto:[hidden email]]
> Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 3:07 PM
> To: [hidden email]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
>
>  
>
> When I first read this question, I thought that it was somewhat off topic.
> It is asking about policy rather than science. But the implication of that
> perspective is that there is no science of policy, i.e., that political
> science or sociology isn't a science. But of course it should be. In fact

it
> should be one of the sciences of the complex.
>
> -- Russ
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Phil Henshaw <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Doesn't the most dangerous knowledge often come from having a blind spot
to

> the danger?   That's often the problem when people don't recognize the
> meaning of changes in scale or kind, like looking for 'bigger' solutions
> (the bigger bomb or bigger shovel approach) when the nature of the problem
> changes unexpectedly with scale.
>
> Would you include that in your problem statement?
>
> Phil Henshaw  
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
> > Behalf Of Steve Smith
> > Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:13 PM
> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>
> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
> >
>
> > I believe this is an important but subtle topic that deserves much more
> > discussion.
> >
> > I believe that the sfComplex should host a series of live discussions,
> > probably starting with a Panel presentation by a handful of people
> > representing differing but well-considered points of view.
> >
> > I have been considering this since we opened our doors in June, but
> > find
> > that it is a very difficult topic.  Perhaps the most difficult is the
> > polarization that seems to come with it.   I have a lot of strong
> > opinions on this subject, some of which I've begun to try to share
> > here.  This thread (and the one it emerged from) have tapped a few of
> > the ideas and opinions that need to be discussed.
> >
> > We would need a format and possibly a good moderator to help avoid the
> > many opportunities for spinning out.
> >
> > Ideas, issues, topics are welcome.
> >
> > - Steve
>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > 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
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>
>  
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:41:40 -0500
> From: "Phil Henshaw" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: <[hidden email]>, "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
> Coffee Group'" <[hidden email]>, <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <004a01c96e1e$5dd95c10$198c1430$@com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms
> themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on whose
> ideas and model parts.    It's basically  a time network map of parentage
> and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.    
>
>  
>
> I asked what families of models there were at the SASO-07 conference on
> self-organizing and self-adapting software and controls.   As I recall

there
> were a great many variations on the pheromone 'wisdom of the crowd' type
of

> learning systems and a lot of peer to peer organisms, with a couple whacko
> things like amorphous computing.    What you'd need maybe is someone to
> create a relational network map and have the authors of ABM's draw links
> with the ones it was based on somehow. ??  
>
>  
>
> Phil Henshaw  
>
>  
>
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On

Behalf
> Of Russ Abbott
> Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 7:39 PM
> To: [hidden email]
> Cc: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
>
>  
>
> Since my prejudice as a programmer is that almost any abstraction is
likely
> to be useful, then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting
abstractions,
> they will very likely be useful. How could they not? At worst a taxonomy
> will be found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of underlying design
> principles. In that case, we wasted our time in building the taxonomy.
But I
> would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will turn out to worth the
effort.

> I can't imagine an argument that says a priori that it won't be. How could
> anyone possibly know that?
>
> -- Russ
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson
> <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hi, Russ,
>
>  
>
> Thanks for your interesting response.  
>
>  
>
> Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to
> gather information about human evolution.  After all, it matters not how

we

> got here, but who we are, now that we are here.  However, in evolutionary
> psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for
> understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense
> in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.  
>
>  
>
> But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based
> modeling.  I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she
> gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain.  Might it
> illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other?  I dunno.  I just dont
> know enough about it.  
>
>  
>
> But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy.
> Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s  And
> would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying
> to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem.  In the ABSENSE

of

> an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell
> us?  
>
>  
>
> that is the question I was asking.  
>
>  
>
> Thanks again for helping me clarify,
>
>  
>
> NIck
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
>
> Clark University ([hidden email])
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> From: Russ Abbott <mailto:[hidden email]>  
>
> To: [hidden email];The Friday <mailto:[hidden email]>
> Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>
> Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
>
>  
>
> Hi Nick,
>
> What's wrong with this argument?
>
> My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English
> literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She

is
> interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how
> those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually
> arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested in
the
> history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are
> interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
care
> how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
> Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical
world
> works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
current
> physicist think.
>
> Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
> know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
> development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier to
> understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only
in

> the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what
> one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.  
>
> -- Russ
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson
> <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>  All,
>
>  
>
> For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting
> discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.  Are
> there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
> models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle
> variations?  
>
>  
>
> Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
> classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for

the
> narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST
(note
> the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there
> must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
> program longer than a seven line Word macro.  
>
>  
>
>       Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his
> experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
> Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But
for
> evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
> classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
> analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of
> ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on
the
> code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor.
> But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting
in
> the evolutionary case.  
>
>  
>
> But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
classification
> that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst
> species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution.  Yet,
> as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.  
>
>  
>
> So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics
of

> abm's look like?  And should we care about it?
>
>  
>
> Nick
>
>  
>
>  
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
>
> Clark University ([hidden email])
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>
>  
>
>  
>
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 12
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 21:04:55 -0700
> From: "Douglas Roberts" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: [hidden email], "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
> Group" <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID:
> <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Phil Henshaw <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> >  The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms
> > themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on

whose
> > ideas and model parts.    It's basically  a time network map of
parentage

> > and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.
> >
> >
> >
>
> Well, I've been designing, developing, and using ABMS for pert' near 18
> years, but  I must confess that the the two sentences above conveyed
> absolutely no meaning to my poor, befuddled brain.
>
> I' serious: none.
>
> Clearly it must be time for me to swarm over to the Carnot-Cycle device

and
> prise open the magnetic strip- secured metallic thermal barrier and
extract
> a fused-silicon hermetically-sealed pressure vessel containing
> Brettanomyces-modified *Hordeum
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hordeum>vulgare

> *carbohydrate, hopefully tinctured with a moderate dosage of Humulus
> Lupulus-produced aromatic oils.
>
> Then, once I'm done with that one, I might just go get myself another beer
> from the refrigerator.
>
> --
> Doug Roberts, RTI International
> [hidden email]
> [hidden email]
> 505-455-7333 - Office
> 505-670-8195 - Cell
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 13
> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:25:29 -0700
> From: "Marcus G. Daniels" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> >
> > But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
> > classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
> > relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any
> > reference to evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not
> > arbitrary.
> In both cases it boils down to selecting a set of features and assigning
> them to a set of character states.  With DNA, the job is done because
> the character states are A G C or T in long strings.   But can also
> consider an encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have claws, L=has
> lungs, !L has no lungs, V=has vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no
> fur, and so on.    To make a taxonomy, similarity techniques like
> neighbor-joining or distance methods are often used.   To go to the next
> step and consider an evolutionary model, then things get complex fast
> because, for example, it is necessary to be able to say how a critter
> goes from having no hair to having it, or develops lungs and the
> relative impotance of those things.    On the other hand, it is not
> nearly so hard if the transition you want to describe is one of an
> adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.
>
> I think a high-level description of conceptual model features (like
> those Joshua suggested) as character states would work for making
> similarity trees without an evolutionary model behind them.   The main
> work there is deciding on the features.  
>
> And on the other extreme, one could probably come up with some very
> crude evolutionary model for local change of machine code based on
> context and knowledge of common programming idioms and/or the source
> language and compiler.  Even if you had that, though, one thing that is
> assumed by most phylogenetics programs is a multiple alignment.  That
> is, for any code fragment found anywhere in a  given program, the same
> fragment can be found in any another aligned down to the opcode.   Then
> there's the small matter that horizontal gene transfer happens all the
> time in software as 3rd party libraries get pulled in and dropped and
> software factoring is going on.   In principle, I bet with sufficient
> effort one could probably recover the revision history of some large
> project like GCC from various binaries of different ages.   But better
> just to go the revision system and look at the history directly.  With
> GCC it goes back 20 years or something.
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 14
> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:44:11 -0700
> From: "Marcus G. Daniels" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Russ Abbott wrote:
> > But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a
> > subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries

ago?

> What if there are common processes behind learning and insight and they
> are general and timeless?
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 15
> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 21:48:11 -0700
> From: "Douglas Roberts" <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
> To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
> <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID:
> <[hidden email]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Ok, Marcus.  But what does that buy the developer of a C^3I (Command,
> Control, Communications, and Intelligence) war gaming ABM?  Or and ABM of
> the pork bellies market?  Or an ABM of celestial mechanics?  Or an ABM of
> the braking system of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner?  Or an ABM of a specific
> social network where the intent is to model the onset of terroristic
> behavior within that society?
>
> I fail to see how a taxonomy-based formal description methodology aimed at
> classifying of ABM categories would buy anything useful for either the
> developer or the user of an ABM.
>
> ABMS are designed and implemented to model the interactions of real-world
> entities, at whatever level of abstraction that will produce results which
> can provide information that might be useful for addressing the problem

the

> ABM was developed to solve.  I seriously doubt that there is a
> one-size-fits-all taxonomy classifier for ABMs that will produce anything
> other than "No shit!" rudimentary descriptive information about any given
> ABM.
>
> But hey!  I've been wrong before, and I seriously plan to be wrong again.
>
> --Doug
>
> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Marcus G. Daniels

<[hidden email]>wrote:
>
> > Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
> >> classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
> >> relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any
reference to
> >> evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.
> >>
> > In both cases it boils down to selecting a set of features and assigning
> > them to a set of character states.  With DNA, the job is done because
the
> > character states are A G C or T in long strings.   But can also
consider an
> > encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have claws, L=has lungs, !L has
no
> > lungs, V=has vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no fur, and so on.
To
> > make a taxonomy, similarity techniques like neighbor-joining or distance
> > methods are often used.   To go to the next step and consider an
> > evolutionary model, then things get complex fast because, for example,
it is
> > necessary to be able to say how a critter goes from having no hair to
having
> > it, or develops lungs and the relative impotance of those things.    On
the
> > other hand, it is not nearly so hard if the transition you want to
describe
> > is one of an adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.
> >
> > I think a high-level description of conceptual model features (like
those
> > Joshua suggested) as character states would work for making similarity
trees
> > without an evolutionary model behind them.   The main work there is
deciding
> > on the features.
> > And on the other extreme, one could probably come up with some very
crude
> > evolutionary model for local change of machine code based on context and
> > knowledge of common programming idioms and/or the source language and
> > compiler.  Even if you had that, though, one thing that is assumed by
most
> > phylogenetics programs is a multiple alignment.  That is, for any code
> > fragment found anywhere in a  given program, the same fragment can be
found
> > in any another aligned down to the opcode.   Then there's the small
matter
> > that horizontal gene transfer happens all the time in software as 3rd
party
> > libraries get pulled in and dropped and software factoring is going on.
In
> > principle, I bet with sufficient effort one could probably recover the
> > revision history of some large project like GCC from various binaries of
> > different ages.   But better just to go the revision system and look at
the

> > history directly.  With GCC it goes back 20 years or something.
> >
> > Marcus
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > 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
> >
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[Jochen Fromm-4]

Phylogenetic trees and cladistics are useful to
understand any evolutionary or complex adaptive
system. I am not sure if a phylogenetic tree for
ABMs itself makes sense. Of course we can try
to categorize them by a taxonomy. On the
NetLogo models pages we find the following
categories:

* Art
* Biology & Evolution
* Chemistry & Physics
* Computer Science
* Earth Science
* Networks
* Social Science

David Eppstein has proposed 3 basic categories
for Cellular Automata (contraction impossible
expansion impossible, both expansion and
contraction possible). We could propose
a similar classification scheme for ABM,
according to different types of motion
(movement, expansion or fluctuation):

* Migrating population (Segregation, Swarms, Traffic)
* Expanding population (Epidemics)
* Expanding & Shrinking population (Culture, Evolution, War)

One could also divide according to different
environments:

* abstract environment (grid, lattice, network)
* 2D modeling
* 3D modeling

or by different interaction types:

* Direct Interaction (Swarms, Evolution)
* Indirect Interaction (Ants)
* Interaction wih Language

Or one could distinguish different techniques,
as Owen said, or different objectives (what
kind of abstract entity or problem do we
want to model), which leads us back to the
NetLogo model categories.

-J.



============================================================
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[Douglas Roberts-2]

I'm afraid taxonomy, mentally encapsulated or otherwise, has little to do with the way I develop an ABM, Nick.  Rather, good software engineering practices provide the tools for success.  CMMI provides a reasonable software engineering methodology that emphasizes feedback between the following project phases.  CMMI is a good replacement of the old, rigid "Waterfall" SW engineering approach. Not that i am a huge fan of rigid, formal SW engineering approaches, but CMMI at least encourages feedback between the following standard SW project engineering stages:

1. Develop a requirements doc that states what the problem is, and what the simulation will be required to produce for results.
2. Develop a design.  An ABM design, if the the requirements describe real-world entities that interact with each other in meaningful ways.  The ABM modeling approach naturally covers many real world application areas (duh, the universe is populated with enteracting enties, duh), but not all systems are best suted to ABM appproaches for one reason or another.
   
3. Select an implementation environment, unless it was specified in the requirements. 
   
4. Code
5. Test
6. V&V

The "magic" involved with being able to develop a successful ABM, or any other kind of simulation derives from the ability to develop a realistic requirements document, followed by appropriately defining the correct levels of abstraction between the real-world entities to be modeled, and their corresponding simulation agents.

Extracting a realistic requirements definition from the client, or as it frequently turns out, helping the client develop one is the most important phase of any SW project.  If you allow a fuzzy, ill-defined, vague, contridictory requirements definition to stand, the project will fail.

--Doug

--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

- Hide quoted text -

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Thaniks everybody.  Interesting responses.

Doug, I cannot shake the intuition that the reason you cannot see value of
the taxonmy is that you already have one in your head that makes writing
one down unnecessary.  I am not sure quite what that means, let alone how I
would show it to you.

But let's imagine I were to do a study of you as you discussed a new ABM
project with a client, or discussed with you colleagues how you were going
to approach the problem, after the client had left.  In those discussions,
wouldnt you reach for exemplars or typical approaches or basic elements as
you planned your way into the work?  Then I would leap up and point my
finger and say, AHA!  you DO have a taxonomy.

Perhaps the taxonomy is not in the models themselves but in the problems
that the models are brought to bear on.

Or, here is another way to smoke out a taxonomy.  Imagine a bright eyed and
bushy tailed group of college seniors who have come to learn agent based
modeling from you.  Now granted DOING a lot of them would be most of the
course.  But would you have nothing to say of a conceptual nature to guide
students concerning how to approach different sorts of problems with
different sorts of models?

Thanks for humoring me, here.

Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Steve Smith]

Nick -

I think of Taxonomies as having two over-arching properties:

1. They are derived/created/recognized only in hindsight.   They reflect extant properties of an *already* complex network of relations rooted in some form of causality.   Heritability under selection yields canalisation and speciation which can ultimately (once fully enough elaborated) be described by a taxonomy. 
   
2. They are "collective" and "aggregate" and in a sense "emergent".   The overall structure of a taxonomy exposes some otherwise hidden properties (like the varying context in which various stages of evolution were executed, like simple symmetries, etc.)

Taxonomies are most useful (IMO) to those who are (as you point out with Doug as teacher of ABM 101) entering a field "naive", or who are trying to understand something "forest-ey" rather than "tree-ey".   Doug tends toward the pragmatic, so I suspect him of being interested in trees more often than forests.  I, on the other hand, find trees most interesting for their forestness.   This might be why Doug has full-time (paid) work, while I spend 40 hours a week trying to create/find 20 hours of paid work!

- Steve

Thaniks everybody.  Interesting responses.  

Doug, I cannot shake the intuition that the reason you cannot see value of
the taxonmy is that you already have one in your head that makes writing
one down unnecessary.  I am not sure quite what that means, let alone how I
would show it to you. 

But let's imagine I were to do a study of you as you discussed a new ABM
project with a client, or discussed with you colleagues how you were going
to approach the problem, after the client had left.  In those discussions,
wouldnt you reach for exemplars or typical approaches or basic elements as
you planned your way into the work?  Then I would leap up and point my
finger and say, AHA!  you DO have a taxonomy.  

Perhaps the taxonomy is not in the models themselves but in the problems
that the models are brought to bear on.  

Or, here is another way to smoke out a taxonomy.  Imagine a bright eyed and
bushy tailed group of college seniors who have come to learn agent based
modeling from you.  Now granted DOING a lot of them would be most of the
course.  But would you have nothing to say of a conceptual nature to guide
students concerning how to approach different sorts of problems with
different sorts of models? 

Thanks for humoring me, here. 

Nick 



Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, 
Clark University ([hidden email])




  

[Original Message]
From: [hidden email]
To: [hidden email]
Date: 1/3/2009 9:48:28 PM
Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 67, Issue 8

Send Friam mailing list submissions to
	[hidden email]

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
	http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
	[hidden email]

You can reach the person managing the list at
	[hidden email]

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Friam digest..."


Today's Topics:

   1. great paper on revolutionary change in systems (Phil Henshaw)
   2. Re: great paper on revolutionary change in systems (Steve Smith)
   3. Re: What to do with knowledge (Russ Abbott)
   4. Callling all cladisticists (Nicholas Thompson)
   5. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Russ Abbott)
   6. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Nicholas Thompson)
   7. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Russ Abbott)
   8. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Joshua Thorp)
   9. Re: great paper on revolutionary change in systems (Phil Henshaw)
  10. Re: What to do with knowledge (Phil Henshaw)
  11. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Phil Henshaw)
  12. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Douglas Roberts)
  13. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Marcus G. Daniels)
  14. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Marcus G. Daniels)
  15. Re: Callling all cladisticists (Douglas Roberts)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:22:11 -0500
From: "Phil Henshaw" [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'"
	[hidden email]
Message-ID: <006a01c96dc7$d1bffeb0$753ffc10$@com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf (500k) 
Have any of you heard of the "Academy of Management Review" or Connie JG
Gersick?  

She might have called it 'emergence' I think, but seems to have done a
    

great
  

job of threading together six different theories of change between complex
system equilibriums, punctuated by disequilibrium, which she calls
"revolutionary change".  The familiar ones are the models offered by TS
Kuhn, SJ Gould, and I Prigogine.  She seems to come to the conclusion,
    

yes,
  

there are discontinuities.   My view has developed as being that, yes,
    

there
  

are discontinuities, but often observably in the mode of explanation used
and not the physical process.   

Does anyone else also see the need to have gaps between modes of
    

explanation
  

for complex system features as a important reason for using the word
'complex' to describe them?

Phil Henshaw??





------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 10:44:20 -0700
From: Steve Smith [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
	[hidden email]
Message-ID: [hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

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------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 12:06:33 -0800
From: "Russ Abbott" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
To: [hidden email], "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
	Group"	[hidden email]
Message-ID:
	[hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

When I first read this question, I thought that it was somewhat off topic.
It is asking about policy rather than science. But the implication of that
perspective is that there is no science of policy, i.e., that political
science or sociology isn't a science. But of course it should be. In fact
    

it
  

should be one of the sciences of the complex.

-- Russ


On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Phil Henshaw [hidden email] wrote:

    

Doesn't the most dangerous knowledge often come from having a blind
      

spot to
  

the danger?   That's often the problem when people don't recognize the
meaning of changes in scale or kind, like looking for 'bigger' solutions
(the bigger bomb or bigger shovel approach) when the nature of the
      

problem
  

changes unexpectedly with scale.

Would you include that in your problem statement?

Phil Henshaw


      

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge

I believe this is an important but subtle topic that deserves much
        

more
  

discussion.

I believe that the sfComplex should host a series of live discussions,
probably starting with a Panel presentation by a handful of people
representing differing but well-considered points of view.

I have been considering this since we opened our doors in June, but
find
that it is a very difficult topic.  Perhaps the most difficult is the
polarization that seems to come with it.   I have a lot of strong
opinions on this subject, some of which I've begun to try to share
here.  This thread (and the one it emerged from) have tapped a few of
the ideas and opinions that need to be discussed.

We would need a format and possibly a good moderator to help avoid the
many opportunities for spinning out.

Ideas, issues, topics are welcome.

- Steve





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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
        

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

      

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Message: 4
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:39:56 -0700
From: "Nicholas Thompson" [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: [hidden email]
Message-ID: [hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

 All, 

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting
    

discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.  Are
there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle
variations?   
  

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
    

classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST (note
the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there
must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
program longer than a seven line Word macro.  
  

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
    

his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. 
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But
for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of
ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on
the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so
interesting in the evolutionary case.  
  

But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
    

classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to
evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.  
  

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics
    

of abm's look like?  And should we care about it?
  

Nick 


Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, 
Clark University ([hidden email])
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Message: 5
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:16:01 -0800
From: "Russ Abbott" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: [hidden email], 	"The Friday Morning Applied
	Complexity Coffee Group" [hidden email]
Message-ID:
	[hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English
literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She
    

is
  

interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how
those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually
arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested in
    

the
  

history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are
interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
    

care
  

how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical
    

world
  

works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
    

current
  

physicist think.

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier to
understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only
    

in
  

the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what
one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.

-- Russ


On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <
[hidden email]> wrote:

    

  All,

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an
      

intersting
  

discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. 
      

Are
  

there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only
      

subtle
  

variations?

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for
      

the
  

narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST
      

(note
  

the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's,
      

there
  

must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
program longer than a seven line Word macro.

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
      

his
  

experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species,
      

But for
  

evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications
      

of
  

ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis
      

on the
  

code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so
interesting in the evolutionary case.

But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
      

classification
  

that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst
species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution. 
      

Yet,
  

as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a
      

cladistics of
  

abm's look like?  And should we care about it?

Nick


Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])





============================================================
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

      

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Message: 6
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 17:25:32 -0700
From: "Nicholas Thompson" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]
Message-ID: [hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Hi, Russ, 

Thanks for your interesting response.  

Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to
    

gather information about human evolution.  After all, it matters not how we
got here, but who we are, now that we are here.  However, in evolutionary
psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for
understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense
in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.  
  

But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based
    

modeling.  I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she
gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain.  Might it
illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other?  I dunno.  I just dont
know enough about it.  
  

But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy. 
    

Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s  And
would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying
to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem.  In the ABSENSE of
an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell
us?  
  

that is the question I was asking.  

Thanks again for helping me clarify, 

NIck 
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, 
Clark University ([hidden email])




----- Original Message ----- 
From: Russ Abbott 
To: [hidden email] Friday Morning Applied Complexity
    

Coffee Group
  

Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists


Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English
    

literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She is
interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how
those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually
arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested in
the history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you
are interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
care how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical world
works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
current physicist think. 
  

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
    

know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier to
understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only in
the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what
one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.  
  

-- Russ 



On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson
    

[hidden email] wrote:
  

 All, 

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting
    

discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.  Are
there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle
variations?   
  

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
    

classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for the
narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST (note
the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there
must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
program longer than a seven line Word macro.  
  

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
    

his experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important. 
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But
for evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of
ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on
the code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so
interesting in the evolutionary case.  
  

But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
    

classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any reference to
evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.  
  

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics
    

of abm's look like?  And should we care about it?
  

Nick 


Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, 
Clark University ([hidden email])




============================================================
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
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------------------------------

Message: 7
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 16:39:29 -0800
From: "Russ Abbott" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]
Message-ID:
	[hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Since my prejudice as a programmer is that almost any abstraction is
    

likely
  

to be useful, then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting
    

abstractions,
  

they will very likely be useful. How could they not? At worst a taxonomy
will be found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of underlying design
principles. In that case, we wasted our time in building the taxonomy.
    

But I
  

would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will turn out to worth the
    

effort.
  

I can't imagine an argument that says *a priori* that it won't be. How
    

could
  

anyone possibly know that?

-- Russ


On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson <
[hidden email]> wrote:

    

 Hi, Russ,

Thanks for your interesting response.

Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to
gather information about human evolution.  After all, it matters not
      

how we
  

got here, but who we are, now that we are here.  However, in
      

evolutionary
  

psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study
      

for
  

understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more
      

sense
  

in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.

But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent
      

based
  

modeling.  I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or
      

she
  

gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain.  Might
      

it
  

illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other?  I dunno.  I just
      

dont
  

know enough about it.

But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy.
Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s  And
would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers
      

trying
  

to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem.  In the
      

ABSENSE of
  

an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can
      

tell
  

us?

that is the question I was asking.

Thanks again for helping me clarify,

NIck
 Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])





----- Original Message -----
*From:* Russ Abbott [hidden email]
*To: *[hidden email];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
Coffee Group [hidden email]
*Sent:* 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists

Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means
      

English
  

literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
      

She is
  

interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as
      

how
  

those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are
      

continually
  

arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested
      

in the
  

history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are
interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
      

care
  

how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical
      

world
  

works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
      

current
  

physicist think.

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier
      

to
  

understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is
      

only in
  

the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when
      

what
  

one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.

-- Russ


On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson <
[hidden email]> wrote:

      

  All,

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an
        

intersting
  

discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models. 
        

Are
  

there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent
        

based
  

models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only
        

subtle
  

variations?

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only
        

for the
  

narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST
        

(note
  

the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's,
        

there
  

must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
program longer than a seven line Word macro.

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by
        

his
  

experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species,
        

But for
  

evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications
        

of
  

ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis
        

on the
  

code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
endeavor.  But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it
        

so
  

interesting in the evolutionary case.

But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any
        

reference to
  

evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a
        

cladistics
  

of abm's look like?  And should we care about it?

Nick


Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])





============================================================
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

        

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Message: 8
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 18:02:28 -0700
From: Joshua Thorp [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: [hidden email],	The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
	Coffee Group [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]
Message-ID: [hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed";
	DelSp="yes"

I don't know anything about cladistics, so I don't know whether this  
fits with it.

ABMs can have many different parents,  often not directly known. I'm  
not sure parentage in any strict sense would be a particularly good  
approach.  Better would be to identify separate patterns in how the  
ABMs work.  Any ABM could then be compared (even clustered) with other  
ABMs based on shared patterns.

High level patterns might include: how is time simulated in an ABM?   
How are the energy or other flows accounted for in the model?  How is  
the environment broken up, or represented?  What kinds of interactions  
can take place between parts of the ABM (agents, environment, ?).

Does this fit with cladistics?

--joshua

On Jan 3, 2009, at 5:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

    

cladistic
      

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Message: 9
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:47:07 -0500
From: "Phil Henshaw" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] great paper on revolutionary change in systems
To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'"
	[hidden email]
Message-ID: <003701c96e16$bca92f70$35fb8e50$@com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Steve,

 

Phil -

This is a very timely reference.  I often find that "Survey" papers,
especially from outside of the field I am working in, but on a subject
overlapping said field can be very illuminating.   They help to provide a
common-sense perspective on the problem... help to remove me from the
"trees" enough to see the "forest", as it were.

[ph] Yes, just my thought, that it seems to be a good survey by a
    

management
  

science person.  The paper has actually been cited 750 times since it was
published in 91.    Clarifying the forest by getting a good look at
    

separate
  

kinds of trees is also one of the things I found interesting in writing my
short encyclopedia entry covering all the approaches to complex systems
science and practice.   I may have left out just a few things. of course.
but it did force me to look at the subject from several different time
tested orientations.   


Your comment about the discontinuities are 

often observably in the mode of explanation used
and not the physical process might be a corollary of Kierkegard's
Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
[ph] Well, that certainly applies to the discontinuity between foresight
    

and
  

hindsight, when in the one you're looking for choices and in the other
you're only looking for excuses. you might say.  :-)      I'll have to
    

read
  

Gersick more carefully to understand what she defines as the discontinuity
displayed by "revolutionary change" but what I was thinking was more that
once you see the finished form you suddenly see the whole effect of the
distributed events coming together, that would have been all undeveloped
    

and
  

incomprehensible before.   Most of them you also would never have seen
before because they were distributed, and so not occurring where you were
looking too, as well as because they were undeveloped as a whole and so
would be naturally meaningless too.     So even if the distributed process
was continuous and developmental, you would necessarily miss most of it
happening, and then be distracted by the false simplicity of hindsight to
boot.
  

It is my (anecdotal) experience that many people live through, or even
participate in revolutions without realizing it until (long?) after they
    

are
  

over.  Often the turmoil that is attendant to the "Revolution" is not a
    

new
  

experience for them, a series of tumultuous periods lead up to it, and it
    

is
  

only the actual "breaking through" that ultimately marks it as a
"Revolution".   To the extent that that "breaking through" is an emergent
phenomena, it is often not visible at the scale of the individual
    

observer,
  

especially an observer who is steeped in the old way of experiencing
    

things.
  

[ph] What that suggested to me was that a parcel of hot air might be
    

locally
  

experiencing a gradual decrease in air pressure, and not much else, as it
rose along with an air mass as part of a large accumulating column of air
breaking through an inversion layer to become a great erupting cumulus
cloud.    Widely scattered things become unobservably connected is the
    

first
  

step as far as any part may be concerned.   So for emerging "revolutionary
change"  might it sometimes be that neither the parts nor outside
    

observers
  

could know about it?

Phil

- Steve



 

www.synapse9.com/ref/GersickCJG1991RevolutionaryChangeTheories.pdf (500k) 
Have any of you heard of the "Academy of Management Review" or Connie JG
Gersick?  
 
She might have called it 'emergence' I think, but seems to have done a
    

great
  

job of threading together six different theories of change between complex
system equilibriums, punctuated by disequilibrium, which she calls
"revolutionary change".  The familiar ones are the models offered by TS
Kuhn, SJ Gould, and I Prigogine.  She seems to come to the conclusion,
    

yes,
  

there are discontinuities.   My view has developed as being that, yes,
    

there
  

are discontinuities, but often observably in the mode of explanation used
and not the physical process.   
 
Does anyone else also see the need to have gaps between modes of
    

explanation
  

for complex system features as a important reason for using the word
'complex' to describe them?
 
Phil Henshaw  
 
 
 
============================================================
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
  

 

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Message: 10
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:21:55 -0500
From: "Phil Henshaw" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge
To: [hidden email],	"'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
	Coffee Group'" [hidden email]
Message-ID: <004501c96e1b$9b1189c0$d1349d40$@com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Thanks, yes that way of asking it does expose the fact that I often deal
with the issues of poorly explained complex systems like those one finds
    

all
  

over the place in societies and ecologies.    Science is a policy to
understand things better, though, with the knowns ultimately nested in
unknowns, so the posture is still basically similar.    

 

For less defined systems the main "system model" is not in a computer,
though, but in the experience of the people involved, reflected mostly in
their way of making snap judgments or asking probing questions, say, about
whether it's time to use the opposite rule as before.     You can have
interacting systems requiring alternating choices, for example, like when
driving on a road where you'd expect a left turn to follow a right turn
    

and
  

so forth, like a period of adding followed by one of subtracting to keep a
balance, and not always make progress by turning in the same direction as
before.     It can be both necessary and rather difficult to convince
    

people
  

with institutional habits to consider remarkable concept like that.   ;-)

 

Phil Henshaw  

 

From: Russ Abbott [[hidden email]] 
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 3:07 PM
To: [hidden email]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge

 

When I first read this question, I thought that it was somewhat off topic.
It is asking about policy rather than science. But the implication of that
perspective is that there is no science of policy, i.e., that political
science or sociology isn't a science. But of course it should be. In fact
    

it
  

should be one of the sciences of the complex. 

-- Russ 



On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Phil Henshaw [hidden email] wrote:

Doesn't the most dangerous knowledge often come from having a blind spot
    

to
  

the danger?   That's often the problem when people don't recognize the
meaning of changes in scale or kind, like looking for 'bigger' solutions
(the bigger bomb or bigger shovel approach) when the nature of the problem
changes unexpectedly with scale.

Would you include that in your problem statement?

Phil Henshaw  



    

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 4:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
      

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What to do with knowledge

      

I believe this is an important but subtle topic that deserves much more
discussion.

I believe that the sfComplex should host a series of live discussions,
probably starting with a Panel presentation by a handful of people
representing differing but well-considered points of view.

I have been considering this since we opened our doors in June, but
find
that it is a very difficult topic.  Perhaps the most difficult is the
polarization that seems to come with it.   I have a lot of strong
opinions on this subject, some of which I've begun to try to share
here.  This thread (and the one it emerged from) have tapped a few of
the ideas and opinions that need to be discussed.

We would need a format and possibly a good moderator to help avoid the
many opportunities for spinning out.

Ideas, issues, topics are welcome.

- Steve
      

============================================================
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
      

============================================================
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

 

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Message: 11
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:41:40 -0500
From: "Phil Henshaw" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: [hidden email],	"'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
	Coffee Group'"	[hidden email], [hidden email]
Message-ID: <004a01c96e1e$5dd95c10$198c1430$@com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms
themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on whose
ideas and model parts.    It's basically  a time network map of parentage
and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.    

 

I asked what families of models there were at the SASO-07 conference on
self-organizing and self-adapting software and controls.   As I recall
    

there
  

were a great many variations on the pheromone 'wisdom of the crowd' type
    

of
  

learning systems and a lot of peer to peer organisms, with a couple whacko
things like amorphous computing.    What you'd need maybe is someone to
create a relational network map and have the authors of ABM's draw links
with the ones it was based on somehow. ??   

 

Phil Henshaw  

 

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On
    

Behalf
  

Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 7:39 PM
To: [hidden email]
Cc: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists

 

Since my prejudice as a programmer is that almost any abstraction is
    

likely
  

to be useful, then since taxonomies tend to reveal interesting
    

abstractions,
  

they will very likely be useful. How could they not? At worst a taxonomy
will be found to be uninteresting and unrevealing of underlying design
principles. In that case, we wasted our time in building the taxonomy.
    

But I
  

would bet that developing ABM taxonomies will turn out to worth the
    

effort.
  

I can't imagine an argument that says a priori that it won't be. How could
anyone possibly know that?

-- Russ 



On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson
[hidden email] wrote:

Hi, Russ, 

 

Thanks for your interesting response.  

 

Well, the same argument could be made, could it not, against trying to
gather information about human evolution.  After all, it matters not how
    

we
  

got here, but who we are, now that we are here.  However, in evolutionary
psychology, I have always been soft on the value of evolutionary study for
understanding human psychology because much of what we do makes more sense
in terms of where we came from than it does in terms of where we are.  

 

But, I am not sure the same argument works for the history of agent based
modeling.  I have never heard any agent based modeler claim that he or she
gives a rat's ass about how we got where we are in that domain.  Might it
illuminate how we got "stuck" in some way or other?  I dunno.  I just dont
know enough about it.  

 

But all of this is aside from the question of the value of Taxonomy.
Evolutionary considerations aside, are there natural kinds of ABM;s  And
would a cladistic analysis of model types be useful for programmers trying
to decide what sort of approach to use to a new problem.  In the ABSENSE
    

of
  

an interest in history, is there anything useful that taxamonies can tell
us?  

 

that is the question I was asking.  

 

Thanks again for helping me clarify, 

 

NIck 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, 

Clark University ([hidden email])

 

 

 

 

----- Original Message ----- 

From: Russ Abbott [hidden email]  

To: [hidden email] Friday [hidden email]
Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Sent: 1/3/2009 2:16:02 PM 

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists

 

Hi Nick,

What's wrong with this argument?

My wife teaches what's known as Early Modern English, which means English
literature, culture, etc. in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. She
    

is
  

interested in how people thought about things in her period as well as how
those ways of thinking developed from previous periods. We are continually
arguing about the value of that sort of study.  If you are interested in
    

the
  

history of ideas or culture, it certainly has some value. But if you are
interested in the best current thinking about a subject, why should you
    

care
  

how people thought about it 4 centuries ago? Do I really care about
Aristotelian physics, for example, if I want to know how the physical
    

world
  

works? I would say, "No" what I really want to know is what the best
    

current
  

physicist think. 

Why isn't that same argument relevant to ABMs?  What one really wants to
know is how we currently think about ABMs, not the history of the
development of ABMs that got us there.  If that history makes it easier to
understand the current best thinking, so much the better. But it is only
    

in
  

the service of the current best thinking that history is useful when what
one wants is to know the current state-of-the-art.  

-- Russ 



On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson
[hidden email] wrote:

 All, 

 

For those of you who werent there, last friday, we got into an intersting
discussion about the possibility of taxonomies of agent based models.  Are
there only a few basic types?  Are many apparently different agent based
models, deployed for widely different purposes, fundamentally only subtle
variations?   

 

Two positions were taken, Theirs and Mine.  They argued that any such
classification system must be essentially arbitrary and useful only for
    

the
  

narrow purposes for which it was disigned.  Me argued that there MUST
    

(note
  

the use of modal language) be a natural taxonomy of abms.  In ABM's, there
must be "natural kinds".   You should know that Me has never written a
program longer than a seven line Word macro.  

 

      Knowing Me pretty well, I surmise that his position is shaped by his
experience in evolutionary theory where taxonomy is pretty important.
Taxonomic systems are mostly devised to relate contemporary species, But
    

for
  

evolutionary theorists, there is a natural validator of taxonomic
classifications, the historical record of evolution.   If we took this
analogy seriously, we would be led to try and validate classifications of
ABM's on the history of their development, perhaps doing dna analysis on
    

the
  

code fragments that make them up? Sounds like a singularly useless
    

endeavor.
  

But if history is uninteresting in the ABM case, why is it so interesting
    

in
  

the evolutionary case.  

 

But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
    

classification
  

that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable relations amongst
species without, so far as I understand, any reference to evolution.  Yet,
as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.  

 

So, I am wondering, you cladisticists out there, what would a cladistics
    

of
  

abm's look like?  And should we care about it?

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, 

Clark University ([hidden email])

 

 

 


============================================================
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

 

 

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Message: 12
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 21:04:55 -0700
From: "Douglas Roberts" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: [hidden email], "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
	Group"	[hidden email]
Message-ID:
	[hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Phil Henshaw [hidden email] wrote:

    

 The basis of taxonomy is the developmental sequences of the forms
themselves, so in the case of ABM's it would be finding who built on
      

whose
  

ideas and model parts.    It's basically  a time network map of
      

parentage
  

and offspring, which naturally branches and cross fertilizes.



      

Well, I've been designing, developing, and using ABMS for pert' near 18
years, but  I must confess that the the two sentences above conveyed
absolutely no meaning to my poor, befuddled brain.

I' serious: none.

Clearly it must be time for me to swarm over to the Carnot-Cycle device
    

and
  

prise open the magnetic strip- secured metallic thermal barrier and
    

extract
  

a fused-silicon hermetically-sealed pressure vessel containing
Brettanomyces-modified *Hordeum
    

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hordeum>vulgare
  

*carbohydrate, hopefully tinctured with a moderate dosage of Humulus
Lupulus-produced aromatic oils.

Then, once I'm done with that one, I might just go get myself another beer
from the refrigerator.

-- 
Doug Roberts, RTI International
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell
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Message: 13
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:25:29 -0700
From: "Marcus G. Daniels" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
	[hidden email]
Message-ID: [hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Nicholas Thompson wrote:
    

But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of 
classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable 
relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any 
reference to evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not 
arbitrary. 
      

In both cases it boils down to selecting a set of features and assigning 
them to a set of character states.  With DNA, the job is done because 
the character states are A G C or T in long strings.   But can also 
consider an encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have claws, L=has 
lungs, !L has no lungs, V=has vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no 
fur, and so on.    To make a taxonomy, similarity techniques like 
neighbor-joining or distance methods are often used.   To go to the next 
step and consider an evolutionary model, then things get complex fast 
because, for example, it is necessary to be able to say how a critter 
goes from having no hair to having it, or develops lungs and the 
relative impotance of those things.    On the other hand, it is not 
nearly so hard if the transition you want to describe is one of an 
adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.

I think a high-level description of conceptual model features (like 
those Joshua suggested) as character states would work for making 
similarity trees without an evolutionary model behind them.   The main 
work there is deciding on the features.  

And on the other extreme, one could probably come up with some very 
crude evolutionary model for local change of machine code based on 
context and knowledge of common programming idioms and/or the source 
language and compiler.  Even if you had that, though, one thing that is 
assumed by most phylogenetics programs is a multiple alignment.  That 
is, for any code fragment found anywhere in a  given program, the same 
fragment can be found in any another aligned down to the opcode.   Then 
there's the small matter that horizontal gene transfer happens all the 
time in software as 3rd party libraries get pulled in and dropped and 
software factoring is going on.   In principle, I bet with sufficient 
effort one could probably recover the revision history of some large 
project like GCC from various binaries of different ages.   But better 
just to go the revision system and look at the history directly.  With 
GCC it goes back 20 years or something.

Marcus



------------------------------

Message: 14
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:44:11 -0700
From: "Marcus G. Daniels" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
	[hidden email]
Message-ID: [hidden email]
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Russ Abbott wrote:
    

But if you are interested in the best current thinking about a 
subject, why should you care how people thought about it 4 centuries
      

ago? 
  

What if there are common processes behind learning and insight and they 
are general and timeless?



------------------------------

Message: 15
Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 21:48:11 -0700
From: "Douglas Roberts" [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Callling all cladisticists
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group"
	[hidden email]
Message-ID:
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Ok, Marcus.  But what does that buy the developer of a C^3I (Command,
Control, Communications, and Intelligence) war gaming ABM?  Or and ABM of
the pork bellies market?  Or an ABM of celestial mechanics?  Or an ABM of
the braking system of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner?  Or an ABM of a specific
social network where the intent is to model the onset of terroristic
behavior within that society?

I fail to see how a taxonomy-based formal description methodology aimed at
classifying of ABM categories would buy anything useful for either the
developer or the user of an ABM.

ABMS are designed and implemented to model the interactions of real-world
entities, at whatever level of abstraction that will produce results which
can provide information that might be useful for addressing the problem
    

the
  

ABM was developed to solve.  I seriously doubt that there is a
one-size-fits-all taxonomy classifier for ABMs that will produce anything
other than "No shit!" rudimentary descriptive information about any given
ABM.

But hey!  I've been wrong before, and I seriously plan to be wrong again.

--Doug

On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 9:25 PM, Marcus G. Daniels
    

[hidden email]wrote:
  

Nicholas Thompson wrote:

      

But what then about cladistics.  Cladistics is a dark art of
classification that uses a variety of obscure incantations to lable
relations amongst species without, so far as I understand, any
        

reference to
  

evolution.  Yet, as I understand it, cladistics is not arbitrary.

        

In both cases it boils down to selecting a set of features and assigning
them to a set of character states.  With DNA, the job is done because
      

the
  

character states are A G C or T in long strings.   But can also
      

consider an
  

encoding like C=has claws, !C does not have claws, L=has lungs, !L has
      

no
  

lungs, V=has vertebrae, !V not vertebrae, F=fur, !F no fur, and so on. 
      

To
  

make a taxonomy, similarity techniques like neighbor-joining or distance
methods are often used.   To go to the next step and consider an
evolutionary model, then things get complex fast because, for example,
      

it is
  

necessary to be able to say how a critter goes from having no hair to
      

having
  

it, or develops lungs and the relative impotance of those things.    On
      

the
  

other hand, it is not nearly so hard if the transition you want to
      

describe
  

is one of an adenine changing to guanine, which is chemistry.

I think a high-level description of conceptual model features (like
      

those
  

Joshua suggested) as character states would work for making similarity
      

trees
  

without an evolutionary model behind them.   The main work there is
      

deciding
  

on the features.
And on the other extreme, one could probably come up with some very
      

crude
  

evolutionary model for local change of machine code based on context and
knowledge of common programming idioms and/or the source language and
compiler.  Even if you had that, though, one thing that is assumed by
      

most
  

phylogenetics programs is a multiple alignment.  That is, for any code
fragment found anywhere in a  given program, the same fragment can be
      

found
  

in any another aligned down to the opcode.   Then there's the small
      

matter
  

that horizontal gene transfer happens all the time in software as 3rd
      

party
  

libraries get pulled in and dropped and software factoring is going on.
      

In
  

principle, I bet with sufficient effort one could probably recover the
revision history of some large project like GCC from various binaries of
different ages.   But better just to go the revision system and look at
      

the
  

history directly.  With GCC it goes back 20 years or something.

Marcus


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[Douglas Roberts-2]

Steverino,

I guess it depends on what your definitions of trees vs. forests are, as pertains to my particular interest areas.

In order to develop a viable set of requirements for any given simulation project, one must be able to perceive the top level view, as well as being capable of translating it into tree-sized chunks to be designed and implemented, which when running in a functional simulation will address the top-level requirements.

On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as

• Order matters, or
• Complexity is, or
  
• Taxonomies exist

rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier.

--Doug

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 4:27 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick -

I think of Taxonomies as having two over-arching properties:

1. They are derived/created/recognized only in hindsight.   They reflect extant properties of an *already* complex network of relations rooted in some form of causality.   Heritability under selection yields canalisation and speciation which can ultimately (once fully enough elaborated) be described by a taxonomy. 
   
2. They are "collective" and "aggregate" and in a sense "emergent".   The overall structure of a taxonomy exposes some otherwise hidden properties (like the varying context in which various stages of evolution were executed, like simple symmetries, etc.)

Taxonomies are most useful (IMO) to those who are (as you point out with Doug as teacher of ABM 101) entering a field "naive", or who are trying to understand something "forest-ey" rather than "tree-ey".   Doug tends toward the pragmatic, so I suspect him of being interested in trees more often than forests.  I, on the other hand, find trees most interesting for their forestness.   This might be why Doug has full-time (paid) work, while I spend 40 hours a week trying to create/find 20 hours of paid work!

- Steve

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[Steve Smith]

Doug -

On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as

• Order matters, or
• Complexity is, or
  
• Taxonomies exist

rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier.

Which is why I give you high marks for pragmatism!  

I have my own pragmatic side, which is why anybody ever pays me to do anything, but it is tempered (or sullied) by a certain sense of seeking and appreciating structure where I find (imagine?) it.

Following Jack Horner's (Hi Jack!  Welcome to the Fun-House.) Rubles-worth on Cladistics, I appreciate the simple adoption of classification schemes for their pragmatic value and agree that this may lead to "many" which are "equal" or at least whose value is entirely contextually dependent.  I also appreciate the distinction between methods which (try to) reflect descent and modification and those who don't.  

Mendeleev's development of the Periodic Table (preceded by Dobriener's Triads and Newland's Octaves) was a "simple" taxonomy which has paid of richly, predicting function from structure long before the underlying "causes" were understood.   I can pretend to know their various motives in conjuring these "patterns" in the first place, but in the final analysis, they turned out to be quite useful.

I share Doug's frustration with abstracting the abstractions ad absurdium, though perhaps not as acutely...  

I suspect that there is a evolutionary/survival value in  the almost obsessive-compulsive need some of us have to try to find structure in (impose on?) everything!    I don't know if it has been discussed here, but a theory was recently put forward that Ausperger-Autistic Spectrum Disorders might have origins in a similar manner... a "latent" or "vestigal" survival trait that is near the surface, ready to be expressed at the drop of a significant change in circumstances.   I'm not sure exactly where OCD or Autism is a hands-down survival quality for the individual, but it might very well be an important feature in the ensemble of characteristics in a group.  Idiot-Savants and all that.

- Steverino



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[Douglas Roberts-2]

Steve(orino)

I find it interesting that we are having this conversation while comfortably seated  about 16 minutes from each other, and all the rest of FRIAM remains thuddingly silent.  Do you suppose we said something to offend them?

--Doug

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 8:44 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Doug -

On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as

• Order matters, or
• Complexity is, or
  
• Taxonomies exist

rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier.

Which is why I give you high marks for pragmatism!  

I have my own pragmatic side, which is why anybody ever pays me to do anything, but it is tempered (or sullied) by a certain sense of seeking and appreciating structure where I find (imagine?) it.

Following Jack Horner's (Hi Jack!  Welcome to the Fun-House.) Rubles-worth on Cladistics, I appreciate the simple adoption of classification schemes for their pragmatic value and agree that this may lead to "many" which are "equal" or at least whose value is entirely contextually dependent.  I also appreciate the distinction between methods which (try to) reflect descent and modification and those who don't.  

Mendeleev's development of the Periodic Table (preceded by Dobriener's Triads and Newland's Octaves) was a "simple" taxonomy which has paid of richly, predicting function from structure long before the underlying "causes" were understood.   I can pretend to know their various motives in conjuring these "patterns" in the first place, but in the final analysis, they turned out to be quite useful.

I share Doug's frustration with abstracting the abstractions ad absurdium, though perhaps not as acutely...  

I suspect that there is a evolutionary/survival value in  the almost obsessive-compulsive need some of us have to try to find structure in (impose on?) everything!    I don't know if it has been discussed here, but a theory was recently put forward that Ausperger-Autistic Spectrum Disorders might have origins in a similar manner... a "latent" or "vestigal" survival trait that is near the surface, ready to be expressed at the drop of a significant change in circumstances.   I'm not sure exactly where OCD or Autism is a hands-down survival quality for the individual, but it might very well be an important feature in the ensemble of characteristics in a group.  Idiot-Savants and all that.

- Steverino

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[Steve Smith]

Doug-

Steve(orino)

I find it interesting that we are having this conversation while comfortably seated  about 16 minutes from each other, and all the rest of FRIAM remains thuddingly silent.  Do you suppose we said something to offend them?

No, we just like the sounds of our own rattling/crotchety voices...   though we should be sharing a brew (or hot toddy) and holding the conversation in person instead.

I'm sitting here stoking my woodstove, waiting for the snow to cover my woodpile, and trying to stretch to one more level of abstraction before I go back to figuring out how to keep the cash flow positive without boring myself to death.

For you entertainment, Jack Horner, who just joined us, is almost exactly 1/2 way between us geographically.   He's probably halfway through genning up a set of conclusive ABM taxonomies single-handedly... he actually *does* stuff like that for fun, and he's shockingly good at it.   But I'm pretty sure nobody ever pays him to do such, though they have been known to publish it in various well-respected Journals (a currency of it's own sort).

He also writes a monthly "Practical Science" Column for the Rio Grande Sun, if you are ever inclined to read it.  I met the Editor at his house two weeks ago, he is practically your neighbor I think!

- Steve or Ino

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[Douglas Roberts-2]

Ditto here, except it's a 200+ year old kiva fireplace. We should have a FRIAM neighborhood toddy fest before too much more time goes by.

Welcome to the group, Jack.

Cheers,

--Doug (noeeno)

On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Doug-

Steve(orino)

I find it interesting that we are having this conversation while comfortably seated  about 16 minutes from each other, and all the rest of FRIAM remains thuddingly silent.  Do you suppose we said something to offend them?

No, we just like the sounds of our own rattling/crotchety voices...   though we should be sharing a brew (or hot toddy) and holding the conversation in person instead.

I'm sitting here stoking my woodstove, waiting for the snow to cover my woodpile, and trying to stretch to one more level of abstraction before I go back to figuring out how to keep the cash flow positive without boring myself to death.

For you entertainment, Jack Horner, who just joined us, is almost exactly 1/2 way between us geographically.   He's probably halfway through genning up a set of conclusive ABM taxonomies single-handedly... he actually *does* stuff like that for fun, and he's shockingly good at it.   But I'm pretty sure nobody ever pays him to do such, though they have been known to publish it in various well-respected Journals (a currency of it's own sort).

He also writes a monthly "Practical Science" Column for the Rio Grande Sun, if you are ever inclined to read it.  I met the Editor at his house two weeks ago, he is practically your neighbor I think!

- Steve or Ino

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--
Doug Roberts, RTI International
[hidden email]
[hidden email]
505-455-7333 - Office
505-670-8195 - Cell

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[glen e. p. ropella-2]

Thus spake Steve Smith circa 01/04/2009 03:27 PM:
> Taxonomies are most useful (IMO) to those who are (as you point out with Doug as
> teacher of ABM 101) entering a field "naive", or who are trying to understand
> something "forest-ey" rather than "tree-ey".

I suppose I disagree slightly with both this statement and Doug's
general position that a classification system is only relatively useful.

Classification systems are critical for delegation.  The software
engineering methods Doug introduced into the conversation are a classic
example.  We classify things and behaviors not only to understand and
teach, but to put the free cycles of those around us to work on our
problems.  Without such classification methods, e.g. OOP, we can't build
large complicated structures.

But for the academics on the list, any such classification that obtains
after being used for awhile is NOT "true".  Useful, yes.  True, no.  And
the usefulness of it is context dependent.

That's why we end up settling on more abstract methods that allow us to
create a classification "on the fly".  Systems engineering is a set of
methods for doing just that.  It's a set of methods for classifying a
domain (and problem in that domain) whenever we want to.  (It also
includes changing the classification when we learn that our original
class structure - of objects and behaviors - is broken.)

Once we have the temporary, context dependent classification, we can
delegate work to the drones we have at our disposal.  (BTW, "drone" is a
role, not type.  Brilliant people can act as drones just by acting
outside their field of expertise.)

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com


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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Steve,

Well,… there are rather practical sides to some kinds of top level views.     You might notice, possibly, that wherever energy transfer is involved derivative continuity in developmental processes will be too.   That tells you nothing at all bye itself, but might give you a great observation tool.   I use it something like a change process magnifying glass.     Where a natural system subject of interest displays continuities of energy flow, or any other similarly conserved property only changed by addition or subtraction, it may give you a clear view of the sequence of assembly (adding and subtracting steps) for the complex systems involved.     Seeing how it’s done naturally might give you ideas, or even help you replicate things of similar kinds.

 

Phil Henshaw  

NY NY  www.synapse9.com

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 10:44 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's

 

Doug -

On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as

• Order matters, or
• Complexity is, or
• Taxonomies exist

rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier.

Which is why I give you high marks for pragmatism!  
clip…

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[scaganoff]

Phil,

your statement in bold below peaked my interest because there seems to be a tenuous analogy with symmetry or conservation laws as described by Noether's theorem. This theorem relates symmetries in a physical system to conservation laws. E.g. rotational symmetry in space is related to conservation of angular momentum.

So does your observation relating energy transfer to derivative continuity have a deeper basis behind it?

Also with respect to ABM classification, Noether's theorem only holds for certain classes of physical problem and hence could form a basis for classification. Similarly for your observation?

After all, there are two classes of <insert phenomenon here> - those that fall into two classes and those that don't  :-)

Regards,
Saul Caganoff 

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Phil Henshaw <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

Well,… there are rather practical sides to some kinds of top level views.     You might notice, possibly, that wherever energy transfer is involved derivative continuity in developmental processes will be too.   That tells you nothing at all bye itself, but might give you a great observation tool.   I use it something like a change process magnifying glass.     Where a natural system subject of interest displays continuities of energy flow, or any other similarly conserved property only changed by addition or subtraction, it may give you a clear view of the sequence of assembly (adding and subtracting steps) for the complex systems involved.     Seeing how it's done naturally might give you ideas, or even help you replicate things of similar kinds.

 

Phil Henshaw  

NY NY  www.synapse9.com

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 10:44 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's

 

Doug -

On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as

• Order matters, or
• Complexity is, or
• Taxonomies exist

rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier.

Which is why I give you high marks for pragmatism!  
clip…

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--
Saul Caganoff
Enterprise IT Architect
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scaganoff

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Saul,

On first glance it appears that Noether’s theorem is quite similar to mine, but just does not take it to the next level.   My similar theorem starts from extrapolating the three conservation laws for energy flow as a hierarchy applying to all derivative levels, apparently like Noether seems to do.   Taking that another step finds that the whole hierarchy of separate laws becomes one unified law of continuity in energy flows.    The particular usefulness of that is to then work backwards from the n’th derivative to observe that the form of equation for the  beginning or ending of any energy flow is a developmental sequence which has all derivatives real and of the same sign for a finite period as a necessity for avoiding infinite accelerations and energy densities.   

 

So, finding rates of change that are all of the same sign then indicates where one might find a conserved process that is beginning or ending.    What I find most useful is the unprovable extension of the principle, that anything displaying continuity of change is a conserved process, and measures of it may have useful conservation laws of their own at least temporarily.    For example, a complex system’s total mass (however estimated) often behaves as if a strictly conserved quantity, changing only by smoothly differentiable progressions of change.   That’s basically how business development or the health of newborn infants is gauged, using stable rates of changing scale as a stand-in for complex system developmental health.    Sometimes the conserved properties of systems display emergent or transient derivative continuities, ones that weren’t there before.   One well documented example is in my plankton punctuated equilibrium study, where the speciation event was shown to be comprised of a series of emerging eruptions of developmental change in the organism’s profile area.

 

Yes, it may well be true that being able to classify things need not be particularly informative.  As you say, Nothier’s theorem only holds for certain classes of problems, but I think that suggestion is that that class may be most generally for the class of problems that involve continuity.      It’s just a guess, but maybe the way the Wikipedia entry states the restrictions of Nothier’s theorem to systems following Lagrangian dynamics and so excludes dissipative processes indicates that the theorem might have been developed with unnecessary shortcuts that reduce its generality.

 

Theorem http://www.synapse9.com/drtheo.pdf

Background an applying to physical systems http://www.synapse9.com/physicsofchange.htm  

 

Best,

 

Phil Henshaw  

NY NY  www.synapse9.com

 

From: Saul Caganoff [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 6:44 AM
To: [hidden email]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's

 

Phil,

your statement in bold below peaked my interest because there seems to be a tenuous analogy with symmetry or conservation laws as described by Noether's theorem. This theorem relates symmetries in a physical system to conservation laws. E.g. rotational symmetry in space is related to conservation of angular momentum.

So does your observation relating energy transfer to derivative continuity have a deeper basis behind it?

Also with respect to ABM classification, Noether's theorem only holds for certain classes of physical problem and hence could form a basis for classification. Similarly for your observation?

After all, there are two classes of <insert phenomenon here> - those that fall into two classes and those that don't  :-)

Regards,
Saul Caganoff 

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Phil Henshaw <[hidden email]> wrote:

Steve,

Well,… there are rather practical sides to some kinds of top level views.     You might notice, possibly, that wherever energy transfer is involved derivative continuity in developmental processes will be too.   That tells you nothing at all bye itself, but might give you a great observation tool.   I use it something like a change process magnifying glass.     Where a natural system subject of interest displays continuities of energy flow, or any other similarly conserved property only changed by addition or subtraction, it may give you a clear view of the sequence of assembly (adding and subtracting steps) for the complex systems involved.     Seeing how it's done naturally might give you ideas, or even help you replicate things of similar kinds.

 

Phil Henshaw  

NY NY  www.synapse9.com

 

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 10:44 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's

 

Doug -

On the other hand, top (top, top, top) level views which result in such profound observations such as

• Order matters, or
• Complexity is, or
• Taxonomies exist

rarely hold much interest for me, unless they make the job of designing functional complex systems easier.

Which is why I give you high marks for pragmatism!  
clip…

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--
Saul Caganoff
Enterprise IT Architect
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/scaganoff

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[Owen Densmore]

On Jan 6, 2009, at 7:24 AM, Phil Henshaw wrote:

> Saul,
>
> On first glance it appears that Noether's theorem is quite similar  
> to mine,
> but just does not take it to the next level.

I'm sure you don't mean to put yourself in the same class as Emmy  
Noether, right?  She's of the same historic stature as most of the  
early 1900's best scientists, and her symmetry discoveries surely  
should have won her a Nobel.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

Its hard to imagine a "next level" for her work in this context!  
Start here:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem
and let us know where to extrapolate to get to your theorem.

> My similar theorem starts
> from extrapolating the three conservation laws for energy flow as a
> hierarchy applying to all derivative levels, apparently like Noether  
> seems
> to do.   Taking that another step finds that the whole hierarchy of  
> separate
> laws becomes one unified law of continuity in energy flows.    The
> particular usefulness of that is to then work backwards from the n'th
> derivative to observe that the form of equation for the  beginning  
> or ending
> of any energy flow is a developmental sequence which has all  
> derivatives
> real and of the same sign for a finite period as a necessity for  
> avoiding
> infinite accelerations and energy densities.

Can you formalize this in the same way Emmy did?  That certainly would  
put your work on the map big time!

Sorry if I appear reactionary, but my Quantum Electrodynamics teacher  
spent many a patient hour letting us get a peak of just how ground-
breaking her work was and how it was used by generations of physicists  
as a means of tackling problems that were otherwise intractable.

I'm not sure of the details of Murray Gell-Mann's work leading to the  
Nobel, but I suspect Emmy was needed to pave the way.

    -- Owen


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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Owen,
You say:

Clip...
>
> I'm sure you don't mean to put yourself in the same class as Emmy
> Noether, right?  She's of the same historic stature as most of the
> early 1900's best scientists, and her symmetry discoveries surely
> should have won her a Nobel.
[ph] Well, equally, I'm sure you don't mean that pretense is important in
scientific questions either, right?   I had not known of Noether's theorem
before Saul mentioned the similarity between my prior comment to Steve and
her extension of the conservation laws.   It does seem similar to the one I
did that I was referring to, and my general theorem would seem, initially,
to have Noether's theorem as a limited case.  

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
>
> Its hard to imagine a "next level" for her work in this context!
> Start here:
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem
> and let us know where to extrapolate to get to your theorem.
>
Clip...
>
> Can you formalize this in the same way Emmy did?  That certainly would
> put your work on the map big time!
[ph] I did, extending the linkage of the conservation laws for undefined and
open systems 14 years ago and refreshed it last fall, told you and others
about it, and submitted it to Complexity again.  Not a sole responded with
any comment or question.  Over the years I've mentioned it to hundreds of
physicists and mathematicians and believe I have never gotten any comment
except one friend of a friend reportedly saying "it doesn't go anywhere"
about 12 years ago.   It presents continuity as an envelope of developmental
possibilities, and serves as a guide to locating and investigating them.

 
> Sorry if I appear reactionary, but my Quantum Electrodynamics teacher
> spent many a patient hour letting us get a peak of just how ground-
> breaking her work was and how it was used by generations of physicists
> as a means of tackling problems that were otherwise intractable.
[ph] no not reactionary at all, just uninquisitive.

>
> I'm not sure of the details of Murray Gell-Mann's work leading to the
> Nobel, but I suspect Emmy was needed to pave the way.
[ph] I have not yet spent the time needed to understand the range of
Noether's work, but I'd surely concur there are indeed lots and lots of
people whose major insights wait and wait for some linkage with other things
to be of either general use or get the recognition they deserve.  I think
that's even an important feature of how complex systems work, how their
development seems to rely on strings of wonderful found objects that seem to
connect unusually well.  I think that's a lot of what the mystery is.

Best,

Phil Henshaw  
NY NY  www.synapse9.com
>
>     -- Owen




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[Steve Smith]

Phil Henshaw wrote:

Owen, 
You say:

Clip...
  

I'm sure you don't mean to put yourself in the same class as Emmy
Noether, right?  She's of the same historic stature as most of the
early 1900's best scientists, and her symmetry discoveries surely
should have won her a Nobel.
    

[ph] Well, equally, I'm sure you don't mean that pretense is important in
scientific questions either, right?   I had not known of Noether's theorem
before Saul mentioned the similarity between my prior comment to Steve and
her extension of the conservation laws.   It does seem similar to the one I
did that I was referring to, and my general theorem would seem, initially,
to have Noether's theorem as a limited case.   

  

This reminds me of the difference in idiom between the person who says "Did you notice that I look a lot like Russel Crowe?" and the one who says "Did you notice that Russel Crowe looks a lot like me?"   It is (more) conventional to compare ourselves to those (through popularity or recognized work) rather than them to us.   I believe that both are  correct and  somewhat factually symmetric, but illuminate a critical difference in perspective.

I admit that when I discover that something I'm working on has been well covered by someone previous to me, that I have a mix of satisfaction (I *knew* I was on the right path), of jealousy (it's not *fair* that someone already took credit for this discovery), and hope (maybe my approach, unsullied by the "conventional" has something new to offer that was missed the first time).

I sense that those of us (active?) on this list range across the spectrum from folks who thoroughly study "previous work" as we proceed, and those who proceed without necessarily being so thorough.  Sometimes it is the ignorance of previous work that allows us to find something new, rather than being limited by what might have been minor mistakes or lack of perspective in previous work.  On the other hand, we can spend our entire lives simply re-inventing (discovering) things that were long-since well understood.

One of my areas of interest is in the emergence of new concepts in Science as well as the convergence of Scientific Disciplines.   It is common for researchers in one field to not be aware of previous work in another and to reproduce it under slightly differing contexts, terminology and assumptions.   Ultimately someone in one field or the other (or in a unifying or spanning field like nonlinear systems, operations research, modeling and simulation, etc.) to recognize the overlap of work and do the (then) hard work of resolving one against the other.   This is why being a research librarian or working in a patent office might be a great way to become a great inventor/discoverer.

Our recent discussions about Cladistics are apropos of this topic.   In the process of classifying sets of systems or artifacts, one often discovers interesting overlaps and redundancies.


- Steve


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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Steve,

I guess it wasn’t clear what I meant, and you seem to be sorting over and over what is the correct pretence is for relating one body of work to another.  I think bodies of work are like species in a jungle, all part of the same jungle.    I think the two extensions of the conservation laws, mine and Noether’s, are quite different.   Certainly how hers has been used is greatly different from how I use mine.     If anyone has questions… or finds a glitch… etc. I’d of course be interested.

 

Phil Henshaw  

NY NY  www.synapse9.com

 

From: Steve Smith [mailto:[hidden email]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:40 PM
To: [hidden email]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's

 

Phil Henshaw wrote:

Owen, 

You say:

Clip...

I'm sure you don't mean to put yourself in the same class as Emmy

Noether, right?  She's of the same historic stature as most of the

early 1900's best scientists, and her symmetry discoveries surely

should have won her a Nobel.

[ph] Well, equally, I'm sure you don't mean that pretense is important in

scientific questions either, right?   I had not known of Noether's theorem

before Saul mentioned the similarity between my prior comment to Steve and

her extension of the conservation laws.   It does seem similar to the one I

did that I was referring to, and my general theorem would seem, initially,

to have Noether's theorem as a limited case.   

This reminds me of the difference in idiom between the person who says "Did you notice that I look a lot like Russel Crowe?" and the one who says "Did you notice that Russel Crowe looks a lot like me?"   It is (more) conventional to compare ourselves to those (through popularity or recognized work) rather than them to us.   I believe that both are  correct and  somewhat factually symmetric, but illuminate a critical difference in perspective.

I admit that when I discover that something I'm working on has been well covered by someone previous to me, that I have a mix of satisfaction (I *knew* I was on the right path), of jealousy (it's not *fair* that someone already took credit for this discovery), and hope (maybe my approach, unsullied by the "conventional" has something new to offer that was missed the first time).

I sense that those of us (active?) on this list range across the spectrum from folks who thoroughly study "previous work" as we proceed, and those who proceed without necessarily being so thorough.  Sometimes it is the ignorance of previous work that allows us to find something new, rather than being limited by what might have been minor mistakes or lack of perspective in previous work.  On the other hand, we can spend our entire lives simply re-inventing (discovering) things that were long-since well understood.

One of my areas of interest is in the emergence of new concepts in Science as well as the convergence of Scientific Disciplines.   It is common for researchers in one field to not be aware of previous work in another and to reproduce it under slightly differing contexts, terminology and assumptions.   Ultimately someone in one field or the other (or in a unifying or spanning field like nonlinear systems, operations research, modeling and simulation, etc.) to recognize the overlap of work and do the (then) hard work of resolving one against the other.   This is why being a research librarian or working in a patent office might be a great way to become a great inventor/discoverer.

Our recent discussions about Cladistics are apropos of this topic.   In the process of classifying sets of systems or artifacts, one often discovers interesting overlaps and redundancies.


- Steve

============================================================
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