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From: marek@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Marek W Lugowski)
Newsgroups: comp.theory.cell-automata
Subject: Missing the anthill for the ants? (was Re: RESEND Life Wars, Ants)
Summary: look at paths!
Keywords: not-ants :)
Message-ID: <1991Feb17.101444.17544@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 91 15:14:31 GMT
References: <9543@latcs1.oz.au>
Organization: Computer Science, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Lines: 36

All this talk of ants and my recent experiments with Computational Metabolism
(C. Langton's _Artificial Life_, pp. 343-368), a tiling in motion, make me
wonder about the utility of looking at ants through the prism of their final,
or evolved, states.  After all, these states are only fixed attractors with
respect to the local conditions and the chaotic space.  How much is there
of interest, computationally, in such attractors?  What can you learn from
reaching them about any computation of interest, other than discrimination a
la pattern recognition/categorization in the way of Widrow-Hoff or a steepest
descent algorithm as found in simplest neural nets?  That's boring...

What I think is of interest is the path taken through the chaotic
space.  You may think of it as an informationally sensitive carrier
wave, a la FM-modulation.  There is enough richness specified in this
path to encode a lot more than simple partition of the input space in
a static recognition problem.  For this you don't even need evolution
to get started: I found out that for my tiles, which are no ants
believe you me :), for different initial arrangements, under a
particularly nasty set of rules that has the tiles leaping out of
their little selves to wrap each species (color) around each other
(you have to see the pictures...), I get stunningly different and
beautifully chaotic paths to ...you guessed it, an attractor, one
that, of course, I suspected anyway, since my rules don't change and I
designed them for a square gworld and ran on a torus one.  Now, if I
could only learn how to modulate the path to effect an effective
computation = controlled chaos...

In summary, worry about paths in chaotic space and modulating them (and
representing the process as a grammar, unfolding) instead of computing
arrivals.

Any thoughts, disagreements?

				-- Marek

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