[Is it turtles all the way down?] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS ForumA New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum
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Is it turtles all the way down?
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Posted by: Catherine Boucher
Q&A with Stephen Wolfram
8:00am, April 24, 2004, Eden Vale AB
Abstract:
A chance for lively in-depth Q&A with Stephen Wolfram, sure to range over a broad array of topics. Ask about the basic science of NKS, its applications and implications, as well as future initiatives and the organizational structure of NKS
Posted by: Jason Cawley
In the Q&A with SW, there was a question about hierarchy, is it turtles all the way down? Nested levels of different formal relations - is hierarchy important and how does it fit into NKS views of computational systems?
That is a fine question. One of the reasons we want to study formal systems is that they are independent of their specific components. They tells us things about relations among elements, but don’t depend on what those elements are made of.
You can wire NKS systems together in any number of ways, to simulate systems with multiple levels. Seth Chandler showed one example of this, using a variant of cellular automata, one at each node of a network (GCANs). A center cell of the internal state at each node is passed as inputs to the neighboring nodes. For more on Seth’s talk, you can start here -
http://forum.wolframscience.com/sho...s=&threadid=345
Any NKS system has something that determines the next step. But where that something comes from is fixed only by choice of the system type or rule. It does not need to come exclusively from the same level of a hierarchy or data structure.
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