permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>]

Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

> Someone in another forum mentioned "intelligent automata" and I remembered 
> hearing about
> Stephen Wolfram's cellular automata theory. The Wikipedia entry for this 
> contains suggestions that
> this system may accurately describe natural processes throughout the universe.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata
> This may then have some bearing, though very remote, to permaculture 
> relationships and guilds. A while back
> I thought a lot about heirarchies of relationships in a natural system on a 
> piece of land,
> or 100 square feet, for that matter; the implications that the most basic, 
> elementary ecological relationships
> in a system have for the whole system and for contiguous systems. The 
> language used by microorganisms,
> invertebrates, insects, mammals and plants to communicate consisting of chemical, electrical, light, sound, pH, moisture 
> and nutrient signals create complex relationships between the elements of any given natural system. This must play a 
> large part in determining the biodiversity, robustness and overall health of any given site. Taking an inventory of
> the components of such systems and all observable site features could be helpful to a permaculture designer when 
> involved in site restoration as well as site development with increased diversity and production capability in mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata

"In the 1970s a two-state, two-dimensional cellular automaton named Game of Life became very widely known, particularly 
among the early computing community. Invented by John Conway, and popularized by Martin Gardner in a Scientific American 
article, its rules are as follows: If a black cell has 2 or 3 black neighbors, it stays black. If a white cell has 3 
black neighbors, it becomes black. In all other cases, the cell stays or becomes white. Despite its simplicity, the 
system achieves an impressive diversity of behavior, fluctuating between apparent randomness and order. One of the most 
apparent features of the Game of Life is the frequent occurrence of gliders, arrangements of cells that essentially move 
themselves across the grid. It is possible to arrange the automaton so that the gliders interact to perform 
computations, and after much effort it has been shown that the Game of Life can emulate a universal Turing machine. 
Possibly because it was viewed as a largely recreational topic, little follow-up work was done outside of investigating 
the particularities of the Game of Life and a few related rules.

In 1969, however, German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse published his book Calculating Space, proposing that the physical 
laws of the universe are discrete by nature, and that the entire universe is just the output of a deterministic 
computation on a giant cellular automaton. This was the first book on what today is called digital physics.

In 1983 Stephen Wolfram published the first of a series of papers systematically investigating a very basic but 
essentially unknown class of cellular automata, which he terms elementary cellular automata (see below). The unexpected 
complexity of the behavior of these simple rules led Wolfram to suspect that complexity in nature may be due to similar 
mechanisms. Additionally, during this period Wolfram formulated the concepts of intrinsic randomness and computational 
irreducibility, and suggested that rule 110 may be universal—a fact proved by Matthew Cook in the 1990s.

Wolfram left academia in the mid-late 1980s to create Mathematica, which he then used to extend his earlier results to a 
broad range of other simple, abstract systems. In 2002 he published his results in the 1280-page text A New Kind of 
Science, which extensively argued that the discoveries about cellular automata are not isolated facts but are robust and 
have significance for all disciplines of science. Despite much confusion in the press and academia, the book did not 
argue for a fundamental theory of physics based on cellular automata, and although it did describe a few specific 
physical models based on cellular automata, it also provided models based on qualitatively different abstract systems.

In his 2005 book, The Lifebox, The Seashell and The Soul, Dr Rudy Rucker expanded upon Wolfram's theories toward a 
theory of Universal Automatism. This used cellular automata a model to explain how simple rules can generate complex 
results."


--
Lawrence F. London, Jr.
Venaura Farm
lfl@intrex.net
http://market-farming.com
http://market-farming.com/venaurafarm
http://venaurafarm.blogspot.com/
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech