I am forwarding this (quite long) interchange because it raises issues
which may be of interest to members of this list. The original exchange
was on the Co-ordination Science Discussion Group list (see the very end
for instructions on how to subscribe).
Nigel Gilbert
=======================================================================
DP DASH wrote:
>
> ** Co-ordination Science Discussion Group **
>
> To pick up the threads from the conversations initiated by DP and
> Dave:
>
> > The following is an extract from:
> >
> > David Hales (1998). An Open Mind is not an Empty Mind: Experiments in
> > the Meta-Noosphere. *Journal of Artificial Societies and Social
> > Simulation*, vol. 1, no. 4.
> >
> > <http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/1/4/2.html>
> >
> > -------------------
> > "Grazers" are very simple agents who live in a very simple
> > environment. They can move, feed (accumulate energy), die and
> > communicate with others in their territory. The environment they
> > inhabit consists of just four territories. Each territory can feed a
> > fixed number of grazers during each cycle (a "carrying capacity"). Any
> > number of agents can occupy a territory. Grazers have one decision to
> > make in each cycle: whether to move to a new territory [3] or "stay
> > put". Grazers try to maximise their energy (if it falls below a
> > minimum, they die). The desirability of a territory is a function of
> > its carrying capacity and the number of grazers that already occupy
> > it. The grazers do not have knowledge of the carrying capacities of
> > the territories, but they do have knowledge of the distribution of the
> > population in each territory and as "grazers" they have a natural
> > propensity to herd. They determine the desirability of each territory
> > based on the number of grazers already occupying it. A grazer makes a
> > decision with reference to a meme which tells it the ideal number of
> > grazers that should occupy a territory. It makes a rational decision
> > using its current meme [4]. This "herding" meme is represented by a
> > single integer in the range 1 to 10. If a grazer possessed a '1' meme
> > it would look for an empty territory (or the most empty if none were
> > empty). Grazers mutate their memes by increasing or decreasing them by
> > one.
> > ----------------
>
> DP wrote:
>
> > Some observations (and a question):
> >
> > The field of 'social simulation' seems to be following an interesting
> > line of inquiry. As a general approach in the field, a 'world' is
> > specified with much computational detail. Then the 'world' is
> > simulated (using computers) to reveal some of the 'non-trivial'
> > implications (or 'emergent properties') of the 'world'. When these
> > 'non trivial' implications are made known (fed back) in world,
> > apparently it constitutes some 'added value'.
>
> Dave wrote:
>
> When you say "(fed back) in world" do you mean fed back into the
> artificial world (in this case the world of the grazers?) or do
> you mean fed back into "our world" as observations of emergent
> properties? I presume you mean the former. If so what exactly
> you mean by "added value"? Do you mean that the feedback of
> emergent properties effects the grazers in some way which gives
> them (individually or at the populaton level) something extra?
> I'm really confused by exactly what you mean by "added value"
> here.
>
> DP now writes (28 Oct):
>
> I had left the expression "(fed back) in world" purposefully unclear,
> as I did not know whether there is any such feed back conceptualised
> within the area of Artificial Society (ASoc). Dave has indicated two
> possibilities:
>
> (i) The information (about the emergent characteristics) might be fed
> back into the artificial world, or
>
> (ii) The information might be fed back into 'our world'.
>
> Both possibilities might be 'valuable'. But the notion of 'added
> value' (as I had used it) referred to the latter type of feedback.
>
> Various activities go on in 'our world'. Sometimes there is the need
> to accomplish more than what is usually accomplished. From the
> perspective of co-ordination science, sometimes the relatively common
> act of keeping a street clean becomes enormously tedious to
> co-ordinate. In such a situation, if one is able to introduce (feed
> back) something into this 'our world' such that the act of keeping
> the street clean is made relatively simpler to accomplish, and if
> that achievement is not something 'miraculous' but replicable,
> improvable, etc., then we can recognise it as an 'added value'.
>
> In other words, 'added value' is the contribution of any
> research-like activity to 'our world'. This type of 'added value' is
> expected to be explicitly specifiable, demonstrable, capable of being
> compared and evaluated against clear criteria, and improvable through
> further research.
>
Dave now writes (4th Nov)
Yes, I understand your point. In a sense, I believe, artificial systems
experimentation (Artificial Life, Artificial Socieites, Artificial
Intelligence etc.) can be seen either as a "pure" or "applied". In it's
"pure" form it is concerned with the properties of algorithms (generally
complex adaptive ones) for their own sake. Certainly there is such work
within the "complex systems" area. See for example some of the papers
stored
at the SFI:-
http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/working-papers.html
On the other hand, there are highly practical "value added" (as you
might
say) attempts to model, and feed back knowledge into our real world.
There are also examples of this at the SFI archive but to get an ASoc
example, see:-
Troy J. Strader, Fu-Ren Lin and Michael J. Shaw (1998)
Simulation of Order Fulfillment in Divergent Assembly Supply Chains
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 1, no. 2,
<http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/1/2/5.html>
Where an attempt is made to compare different supply chain methods.
Some of the best work in this kind of applied area comes from :-
Kathleen M. Carley et al
Design Versus Cognition: The interaction of agent cognition
and organizational design on organizational performance
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 1, no. 3,
<http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/1/3/4.html>
Indeed Kathleen Carley has done lots of useful (value added) work.
You can find references to it in the above paper.
In this sense Artificial Societies can be used to Add Value. But I
don't believe that is their only use. I feel there is another kind
of value that can be got (feed back) from such societies. This is
the feed back of ideas into the construction of social theory. That
is, by taking abstracted societies and empirically investigating
them it is possible to construct abstract theories of those societies
and then use those theories to help in the construction of actual
social theory. The aim is to attempt to construct "general" kinds
of social theory applicable to many actual situtuations. This
mode of investigation is highly tentative.
> DP had written:
>
> > I have a question on this general approach. In 'research', sometimes
> > people take care to specify a 'world' (or 'theory of the world' as
> > Gerard, a colleague, puts it). But, simultaneously, there is also an
> > implicit or explicit formulation of what is achievable through
> > 'research' (or 'theory for research' as the same colleague puts it).
> > The 'theory for research' specifies what type of 'added value' is
> > worthwhile, achievable, testable, etc.
> >
> > The question is: What is the 'theory for research' in 'social
> > simulation'?
> >
>
> Dave had written:
>
> Since I'm not sure what you mean by "added value" I'm again
> not sure what is meant here. Could you clarify?
> If you are getting at possible ASoc methodologies by the
> phrase "theory of research" then I have attempted to address this issue
> (in some sense) in the following paper:-
>
> Hales, D. (1998) Artificial Societies, Theory Building and Memetics.
> Presented at the Memetics Symposium. Proceedings of the 15th
> International Conference on Cybernetics, International Association
> for Cybernetics (IAC), Namur: Belgium.
>
> This can be obtained from my personal home page (see below) or direct
> from the following URL:-
>
> http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/projects/res/daphal/papers/cyber35.ps
>
> It's a 300K postscript file. It might not be viewable on ghostview
> but should print out to a postscript printer.
>
> DP (28 Oct):
>
> Thanks to Dave for making this paper available. I was able to print
> out a copy. There are many thought-provoking ideas in it. To give an
> impression about what it covers, here are some excerpts:
>
> Title: Artificial Societies, Theory Building and Memetics
>
> Abstract: "... It is argued that artificial societies can aid memetic
> theory building ultimately producing theories and hypotheses that can
> be tested in the real world. A set of methodologies loosely based on
> the Popperian conception of theory refutation ... is presented. ..."
>
> 1. Artificial Societies
>
> " ... such models address 'possible societies', their general
> processes, dynamics, and emergent properties ..."
>
> 2. Artificial Societies and Cultural Evolution
>
> On various possible societies:
>
> " ... fixed agents interacting within some small spatial culture ...
> agents with beliefs about their environment ... dead agents become
> universal friends ...
>
> "... By modelling individual scientific papers as units of
> transmissible knowledge 'kenes' which compete for authors to get
> reproduced (cited in other papers) he [Gilbert] demonstrates the
> formation of subject clusters based around seminal papers ... "
>
> "... meta-memes, memes that directly effect the meme process at the
> individual level impacting on the agents' receptivity to memes."
>
> 3. Methodology for Artificial Societies?
>
> "Simulation modelling can be used as an aid to intuition" (Axelrod,
> 1997)
>
> "We consider a given macrostructure to be 'explained' by a given
> microspecification ..." (Epstein and Axtell, 1996)
>
> "We can therefore hope to develop an abstract theory of multiple
> agent systems and then transfer its insights to human social systems,
> without a priori commitment to existing particular social theory"
> (Doran, 1998).
>
> [Sections 4 - 7 discuss some of the the possible societies already
> investigated using the method of simulation. The argument that such
> investigations sharpen our intuition has been made again in the last
> section.]
>
> A Question/Comment:
>
> The above (methodological) argument in the field of ASoc revolves
> around the notion of 'sharpening of intuition'. Maybe, a field of
> inquiry can contribute to 'our world' by shrpening
> some people's intuition. But, my question is, can we aim for
> contributions greater than this? Especially, as we are trying to
> define a new area of inquiry, i.e., 'co-ordination science'?
>
Dave now writes (4th Nov)
Leading on from the above I would say, yes we can attempt to model
and improve co-ordination in actual real world systems and/or produce
abstract theories of coordination (consider the famous and on-going
prisoners dilemma computer experiments).
> >From my own perspective, there are already many practices that claim
> to 'sharpen intuition' in one way or another: e.g., Yoga &
> meditation, mathematics, political participation, 'systems practice'
> (a term popular in the UK), knowledge of history, systematic training
> in music, stories ..... For co-ordination science, this itself might
> be taken as a problematic situation. Too many of us with 'sharp
> intuitions' (in different areas of course) trying to accomplish
> things together and usually failing because the intuitions do not
> necessarily match!
The key point here is that ASoc work presents emperical experimentation
that can be REPRODUCED by others. That is, the sharpend intuition is
based on empirical investigations of the functioning of a complex
algorithm. Of course, the assumptions on which it is based we may
argue about. But if we agree on the assumptions we can test our
intuition empirically - meaning we get replicable results which we
can't argue with. In this sense you can consider such work to
be a form of computational thought experiment - with the computer
doing the thinking - calculating the implications of our assumptions.
And even if we never agree on assumptions it's still informative to
know what the implications of our respective assuptions are.
What do you think?
>
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--
David Hales (Rm 3.411) email: [log in to unmask]
Dept. of Computer Science tel: +44 1206-873333 ext 2136
University of Essex, UK fax: +44 1206-872788
Home Page: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/projects/res/daphal
Jrnl. of Memetics: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/
Jrnl. of Artificial Societies: http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/
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____________________________________________________________________
Prof G. Nigel Gilbert, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey
Guildford GU2 5XH, UK. Tel: +44 1483 259173 Fax: +44 1483 259551
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