Hello Jacob,
In addition to the problem of not really knowing what "affordances" were
engaged in an archaeological context, there are two major problems which
confront computational modeling (for instance artificial culture). One, which
you have mentioned, is the difficulty of coding and computing such complexity.
What do you leave in and what do you leave out? There is a tendency in the
artificial xxxx fields to take a minimalist approach: put in the
smallest amount
that provides the most insightful results. (The "KISS" or "keep it
simple stupid"
approach. The second, which is the holy grail of this kind of
simulation is the
question of how to build a system in which emergences will build upon
emergences.
It is easy to get one emergent global pattern of behavior from the
interaction of
a system of simple rules, but it is difficult to construct a
simulation which produces
multiple "levels" of emergence. This is the really fascinating
problem. There
have been three or four conferences on the subject. I had the good fortune
of participating in one. I think it is at the heart of evolution in
the natural world
and the fascinating field of evolutionary computation. Perhaps this seems at a
great distance from "dirt and shovel archaeology" but I believe the
processes at
work are the same for cultural evolution (one of archaeology's interests) and
evolutionary computation.
Just some quick thoughts. Now I must return to the "hammer and nail" world
of putting on a roof!
Cheers,
Nick
|