UH Biocomputation Group - Artificial Lifehttp://biocomputation.herts.ac.uk/2015-10-27T19:52:02+00:00Artificial Life: Insights in Simplexity and Complicity2015-10-27T19:52:02+00:002015-10-27T19:52:02+00:00Rene te Boekhorsttag:biocomputation.herts.ac.uk,2015-10-27:/2015/10/27/artificial-life-insights-in-simplexity-and-complicity.html<p class="first last">Rene te Boekhorst's journal club session on simplexity and complicity in artificial life.</p>
<p>In the nineties mathematician Ian Stewart and biologist Jack Cohen
teamed up to write "The Collapse of Chaos" (Penguin, 1994). This
insightful and at places very funny book explores the shortcomings of
classical reductionist science, especially the so called Grand Unifying
Theories (or "Theory of Everything") of physics. One of the claims the
authors make is that GUTs do not take context into account and
therefore are at a loss to explain how on the one hand simple "rules"
can lead to highly complex and unpredictable outcomes (even in fully
deterministic systems) and on the other hand complexity can lead to
simple, global patterns. They illustrate this with examples from real
science (mainly physics and biology) but also with (virtual) dialogues
with extra-terrestrials and Ada Lovelace, the Victorian founder of
computation.</p>
<p>Many of the points Stewart and Cohen make in the book can be found back
in condensed form in the attached paper by Ian Stewart (Mathematical
Recreations, 1994), which I think is a highly readable and again very
funny account of some of the main issues surrounding the Theory of
Anything. He illustrates these with a famous "tool-for-thought", a
simulation by Chris Langton called "Langton's Ant".
These and other topics concerning complexity and simplicity are
important themes of the Artificial Life module taught by me and Neil
Davey for undergraduate students at the UH. I will use some of the
practicals (<a class="reference external" href="https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/">NetLogo</a> simulations, including Langton's Ant) of the module
and final year projects inspired by them to instigate a discussion
about complex systems.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://biocomputation.herts.ac.uk/files/20151027-attachment.pdf">(Attachment)</a></p>
<p><strong>Date:</strong> 30/10/2015 <br />
<strong>Time:</strong> 16:00 <br />
<strong>Location</strong>: LB252</p>