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, gas, 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."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Textile_cone.JPG
"Natural biotic types
Some living things use naturally occurring cellular automata in their 
functioning.
Patterns of some seashells, like the ones in Conus and Cymbiola genus, are 
generated by natural CA.
The pigment cells reside in a narrow band along the shell's lip. Each cell 
secretes pigments according
to the activating and inhibiting activity of its neighbour pigment cells, 
obeying a natural version of
a mathematical rule.[citation needed] The cell band leaves the colored 
pattern on the shell as it grows slowly.
For example, the widespread species Conus textile bears a pattern resembling 
the Rule 30 CA described above.
Plants regulate their intake and loss of gases via a CA mechanism. Each stoma on 
the leaf acts as a cell."


--
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