Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!uci-ics!orion.oac.uci.edu!ucsd!sdcsvax!beowulf!demers
From: demers@beowulf.ucsd.edu (David E Demers)
Newsgroups: comp.theory.self-org-sys
Subject: Re: self org principles
Message-ID: <7821@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu>
Date: 8 Feb 90 01:04:33 GMT
References: <4880f240.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM>
Sender: nobody@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu
Reply-To: demers@beowulf.UCSD.EDU (David E Demers)
Organization: EE/CS Dept. U.C. San Diego
Lines: 38

In article <4880f240.20b6d@apollo.HP.COM> nelson_p@apollo.HP.COM (Peter Nelson) writes:
>
>  to it have appeared at this site.  Is self-org-sys real
>  new or just real quiet?
>
Hmm.  We have had 135 here.  I don't know anything about
Usenet propogation, but someone can probably explain it.
>  behavior.   The reference he was probably wondering about
>  was "Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral
>  Model" by Craig Reynolds at Symbolics.  The article was 
>  published in Computer Graphics, Vol 21, Number 4, July 1987
>  (SIGGRAPH Conference Proceedings)

Also discussed in the proceedings of the Artificial Life
conference from 1987 (Chris Langton, editor.)

>  I am curious to learn more about such self-organizing-systems.

>  If I wanted to create 
>  a CA program that would produce a particular shape, say a 
>  star or a triangle, is there any systematic way to go 
>  about it?                         

Lindenmayer systems are capable of generating structures
greatly resembling real plants.  See the Artificial Life
proceedings for a good article plus lots of color plates of
examples, as well as more references to this and other
similar work.  The second ALife conference is going on
right now at Santa Fe, and I wish I were there...

As I recall, one of the features of the Lindenmayer work is
use of context-sensitive grammars for generation of
strings which represent the structures.  Thus branching
may occur if a certain symbol appears in a particular
substring only.


Dave