http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3800709.html
philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The
John Searle? "Flower Child?" Hempel and Oppenheim, "Flower Child?".
thought to a formalism.
when the plain fact is that they just dont have the taste for it.
Nicholas S. Thompson
> [Original Message]
> From: Owen Densmore <
[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
[hidden email]>
> Date: 10/10/2009 11:26:11 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
>
> On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
> > What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or
> > not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge?
> >
> > In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable
> > consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-
> > matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out
> > that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized
> > as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me
> > that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo.
> >
> > So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached
> > the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what?
> >
> > -- Robert
>
>
> My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some sort
> of formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes
> of computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I could
> discover simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among them.
>
> As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class ..
> one that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life is
> often used as such an environment. It has several trivial initial
> conditions that are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system
> and predict the result before running it. But this is not true in
> general. Finding the conditions separating the two would be useful.
>
> A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an
> event distribution scheme for an early window system that would work
> well in a multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One
> of our team spent time resolved that its computational class was non-
> polynomial. We started over.
>
> I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child
> philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The
> difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.
>
> -- Owen
>
>
>
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