This article from The Atlantic. A FEW YEARS AFTER Philip Rosedale graduated from college with a degree in physics, he joined RealNetworks, then an audio-streaming company. It was a top-down, command-and-control kind of place, where difficult software projects were outlined in advance and executed according to carefully conceived plans. Rosedale hated it. As a teenager…
Simon died this day in 2001. Check out these two books – Models of a Man (as with most edited books this is uneven, but there is still much to recommend it) and Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America, an excellent intellectual biography. Speaking of Simon, I have a paper coming out entitled…
This post from PlayStation “Lifestyle” gamingplaystationStigmergy
This article is really creating a buzz (sorry!!) The idea has some resonance to an aspect of Hayek’s social epistemology (see the article that I just today uploaded). In much the same way that synapses are strengthened while unused linkages weaken and wither away, so too are paths to salient social knowledge strengthened or weakened –…
Love the witty title of Dave Reeves’ blog post.
Here’s an interview conducted by Howard Rheingold with Mark Elliott who like myself has been promoting the virtues of stigmergy. The application of the concept to city planning and consultation is especially interesting since it’s a world I have recently come into contact with.
Check out this new paper from Swarm Intelligence.
Stigmergy yet again – well, there is no escaping it. While I wouldn’t call stigmergy a new paradigm (that’s too pompous – in any event, paradigms only have shape in a historical sense), stigmergy is one of the most fruitful mechanisms around that speaks to distributed cognition. Check out this paper nicely titled “Standing on the…
Check out this installation supported by the Welcome Trust. People walking along Euston Road will encounter an unusually arresting reflection of themselves in a new light installation, ‘Reflex’, created by rAndom International. The work inhabits the windows of the Wellcome Trust as though it were a living organism. Reacting to viewers, passers-by and traffic on…
Here are some terrific stigmergic simulations by architectural student Yang Chenghan that I chanced across: The first is a 3D simulation deploying 45-70 agents (source code) The second a 2D simulation deploying 20-30 agents (source code) Here are some great synthetic stigmergic stills Yang has created.
manwithoutqualities 