Re: Callling all cladisticists
Posted by
Phil Henshaw-2 on
Jan 04, 2009; 3:41am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Callling-all-cladisticists-tp2106906p2107980.html
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… ??
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:
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,
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
-----
Original Message -----
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:
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?
Emeritus Professor of
Psychology and Ethology,
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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