Tony Smith
Meme Media
Melbourne, Australia
Registered: Oct 2003
Posts: 167 |
Re: A false dichotomy
Your questions are very relevant to where I am with this right now, Mike.
> But couldn't we also think of (order) as that moment where patterns in a CA converge?
I'm totally happy with thinking of patterns converging in the terms of attractor basins that others have long been working with. This was integral to my first ever post to NKS forum which on rereading emphasises how long I've been stumbling close to the idea of synergy between chaos and order. Only in the past couple of days I've starting thinking in the with the curse of hindsight blindingly obvious term of "tributaries" to describe convergent patterns, exemplified by the first part of a recent animation.
> Sure you can start out with some simple initial conditions, and come up with lots of patterns that diverge outwards from the beginning.
In the kind of strictly deterministic (model/"toy") systems that are easy to explore on computers there is no future divergence from exactly matched configurations, however systems which are statistically similar at one point of their iteration can diverge wildly later.
> But we notice patterns that also come to an end, do we not?
This is one of the things that has kept me interested in my current project. The most complicated localised orderly processes all have finite life spans. They typically require base structure formation which always occurs at 1 cell per 2 iterations (1/2 speed) enhanced by secondary processes which run at 2/3 or even 4/5 and thus eventually overtake and the 1/2 speed "engine" and terminate. Examples caught "in the wild" include:In the wild, slightly simpler structures almost all have finite lifespans, some after relatively long and "interesting" (from an outside perspective) lives but many more after little lives. (There are also both finite and seemingly ever-growing emergent patterns that are immortal, but typically only four per viable seed pattern.)
> Maybe they'll start back up again, sure.
That implies a very deep question: Are they the same pattern, or a new pattern, or better still reincarnated? And how much divergence of detail does reincarnated stand?
__________________
Tony Smith
Complex Systems Analyst
TransForum developer
Local organiser
Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged
|