Re: [Swarm-Modelling] lifecycle requirements

[Scott Christley]

On Nov 27, 2006, at 11:55 AM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

> It's not the collective that I'm trying to get at, it's the post-facto
> naming of the object that I'm after.  The collective gets together in
> some pattern, an external agent perceives this collective and _labels_
> the pattern as, say, a "whirlpool".  That external agent should  
> then be
> able to act upon that whirlpool without explicit knowledge of how  
> to act
> on any given constituent of the whirlpool.

This to me is one of the million dollar questions (among many).  If  
you are going from local interactions --> global phenomena, where  
local/global just means different scales, how do you reify that  
global phenomena so that it can have its own behaviors and  
interactions, without cheating by putting it into the model in the  
first place?  If you can "perceive" this collective then slapping a  
label onto it and interacting with it becomes easy.

I don't think this is something that can be approached semantically,  
it has to be syntactic recognition which then acquires semantics once  
the "perceiver" implicates it some casual relationship.  From a  
modeling perspective, you can take a bottom-up viewpoint and just let  
the global phenomena be a result of the local interactions, but from  
a computational perspective, you want to reify it as an object both  
for performance reasons and for the modeler to explore the model at a  
different scale.

Scott