Fwd: Langton's ant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Owen Densmore]

Interesting "complexity" stunt I hadn't heard of:

   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_ant

.. from twitter (https://twitter.com/CompSciFact)

Anyone in touch with Chris nowadays? He's one of the pioneers, at SFI in the early days, but I haven't read any of his works and would like to.  Any recommended readings?

   -- Owen

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[Pamela McCorduck]

He came to a book party of mine in San Francisco for "Edge of Chaos," and looked very well. This would've been maybe ten years ago. I may have smothered him with kisses, I was so glad to see him. I think he's pretty much left A-Life, and for that matter, science. 

On Dec 10, 2013, at 12:09 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting "complexity" stunt I hadn't heard of:

   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_ant

.. from twitter (https://twitter.com/CompSciFact)

Anyone in touch with Chris nowadays? He's one of the pioneers, at SFI in the early days, but I haven't read any of his works and would like to.  Any recommended readings?

   -- Owen

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[Steve Smith]

Owen -

Thanks for this sweet oddity.  I heard of it "back in the day" but never looked closely.  By that time CA had lost some of their cachet in the community.   The CA encoding of the Ants and Turmites *is* particularly motivated IMO... that the complexity of the "ground" is lower than the complexity of the "agent", but both are very simple and relate directly to eachother.

Last time I talked to Chris was on the steps at St. Johns... maybe 1999!?!   Last I heard he was in Sausalito or Marin living on a houseboat or a sailboat, but that was at least third hand and now years stale.

I met Chris in 1983 when he first presented his Loops at the CA conference in Los Alamos.  That was an amazing pivotal moment, that conference.  Was anyone else in that world at the time?  It was mostly "young turks" (Packard, Farmer, Toffolli, Wolfram, HIllis, Burks, Crutchfield, Margolus) with a few of the "seasoned veterans" (Ed Fredkin, Forrest Carter, JH Conway,  et al) and tweeners like Stu Kauffman and Bill Gosper.   I of course, had no idea where I was at the time, I was so busy spinning around trying to absorb it all!  I was a total outsider.

My own contribution at the time, along with Stuart Hameroff, could have been a *lot* more informed by Carter's work in molecular computing, but somehow I missed that until later when Feynman gave his "plenty of room at the bottom" lecture at LANL the next year...

- Steve

Interesting "complexity" stunt I hadn't heard of:

   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_ant

.. from twitter (https://twitter.com/CompSciFact)

Anyone in touch with Chris nowadays? He's one of the pioneers, at SFI in the early days, but I haven't read any of his works and would like to.  Any recommended readings?

   -- Owen

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[Steve Smith]

Pamela -

He came to a book party of mine in San Francisco for "Edge of Chaos," and looked very well. This would've been maybe ten years ago. I may have smothered him with kisses, I was so glad to see him. I think he's pretty much left A-Life, and for that matter, science. 

That is good to hear...   I orbited Chris via the A-Life work until the late 90's and always enjoyed the specific energy and perspective he seemed to bring to everything.  His inability to appease "the system" was a natural hazard of the very things that made him so amazing to me... so it wasn't surprising when he dropped out.  

I do halfway expect him to pop up out of nowhere with some amazing new insight or idea, however.

Or not.

- Steve


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[Steve Smith]

Dood -

Were you doodling on that while the rest of us were prattling on or is that a "found" item?

Very apropos (and kewl) in any case!
 
- Steve

http://www.m0ose.com/javascripts/vants_small.html

Cody Smith

On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting "complexity" stunt I hadn't heard of:

   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_ant

.. from twitter (https://twitter.com/CompSciFact)

Anyone in touch with Chris nowadays? He's one of the pioneers, at SFI in the early days, but I haven't read any of his works and would like to.  Any recommended readings?

   -- Owen

_______________________________________________
Wedtech mailing list
[hidden email]
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/wedtech_redfish.com

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[hidden email]
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[Arlo Barnes]

Looks like a http://js1k.com/ entry from the source.

James Taylor at SF Prep once described the wick-stretching segment of VAnts as the ant 'knitting' the wick, and ever since I have been waiting for someone capable with both computation and knitting to make a fabric-arts piece. Maybe Bathsheba Grossman? Or a hobbyist. I bet programmatic fiber arts is going to take off with the advents of controllable knitting/sewing/et cetera machines.

-Arlo James Barnes

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[cody dooderson]

I wrote that a few years ago for a js1k entry. It was adapted from like a 2 line netlogo script that Talya wrote

Cody Smith

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Arlo Barnes <[hidden email]> wrote:

Looks like a http://js1k.com/ entry from the source.

James Taylor at SF Prep once described the wick-stretching segment of VAnts as the ant 'knitting' the wick, and ever since I have been waiting for someone capable with both computation and knitting to make a fabric-arts piece. Maybe Bathsheba Grossman? Or a hobbyist. I bet programmatic fiber arts is going to take off with the advents of controllable knitting/sewing/et cetera machines.

-Arlo James Barnes

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[Jochen Fromm-5]

Langton's ant is a classic. What is Chris doing now? Does he have a homepage, a Twitter account or Google+ profile? And what about the other SFI legends like John Holland, W. Brian Arthur and Murray Gellmann? Are they still alive? 

-J.

Sent from Android

-------- Original message --------

From: Pamela McCorduck

Date:10/12/2013 19:15 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Langton's ant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

He came to a book party of mine in San Francisco for "Edge of Chaos," and looked very well. This would've been maybe ten years ago. I may have smothered him with kisses, I was so glad to see him. I think he's pretty much left A-Life, and for that matter, science. 

On Dec 10, 2013, at 12:09 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting "complexity" stunt I hadn't heard of:

   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langtons_ant

.. from twitter (https://twitter.com/CompSciFact)

Anyone in touch with Chris nowadays? He's one of the pioneers, at SFI in the early days, but I haven't read any of his works and would like to.  Any recommended readings?

   -- Owen

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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[Arlo Barnes]

He has a Wikipedia article, a Wikiquote page, and a/an NNDB page. The latter says he started the Swarm development group, which is now apparently the Center for the Study of Complex Systems (their web design looks rather similar to that of the Institute, and none of the three sections of their 'People' page mention Langton, although they do mention John Holland). Other pages about Chris Langtons seem to refer to other people, including an athlete.

Murray Gellmann is alive and presumably well, and I am glad to have met him.

Incidentally, if we are talking about famous people in complexity, the link and quote (a redux of a redux of a quote from Jonathan Swift about fractal fleas) that Stephen Guerin posted earlier is a good read; although Lewis Fry Richardson is not part of the circles we are talking about, having died in 1953, he appears to have been the one to originate the coastline length / fractal dimension thing, while researching whether countries with longer borders were more likely to be involved in wars with their neighbors.

-Arlo James Barnes

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