Wolframs book...On the order on cellular automata

[Andrew Scott Chesnick]

I saw your posting on Wolfram's book/ new science.
I haven't finished reading it but it does make one think from another
perspective.
The general critque being "Now what?" or "a well-written summary of
ideas
that have been around for a long time".

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/11/science/11WOLF.html?pagewanted=print&position=top

 Even though the books says that our human consciousness maybe just an
artifact and
not real, the real question being is it the observation of the pattern
or the pattern itself that gives rise totrue thought?
  This would not, as the saying goes, appear to be "rocket science" or
is it?
   When you woke up this morning little did we realize and little did we
know that we all are in
fact taking part in a very large experiment of a very grand scale on the
physics of self-organization,
a decidedly unnerving discovery...the components of the system and their
interactions themselves
-- rather than any external cause -- give rise to the nonlinear behavior
of the system as a whole.
    Suddenly the words...
"Good-bye... and thanks for all the fish"
or "All politics are local." T.O'Neal
"Three chairs, one for solitude, two for companionship, and three for
society."-Henry David Thoreau
  When all the dolphins suddenly disappeared from Earth in The
"Hitchhikers Guide"  showing the
validity of knowing ones existence,Thoreau conveys that transcendental
thought is more than
mere tree-hugging, pervasive mumbo jumbo and the late Speaker of the
House Tip O'Neal quote
all share something in common.
  Cellular automata seems even more accurate when put into the
perspectives of the theory of complex
human behavior and these rules of simple patterns being independently
applied.
  Now by just studying the patterns of your dowager aunt's lace doilies
we can now predict the
future. SUCH is the happy, practical, and deterministic state of affairs
now by using the
well-established equations that describe how the molecules of a gas
move, we can now
predict all human behavior.
 We will get some distinctly eerie results emerging from little patterns
of molecules all lining
up like a synchronized swim team in the pre Paleozoic ooze..and all of
mamillian life is
just due to an expeirment by the plant kingdom to fix nitrogen gone bad.

(My guess this is why men and dogs like to pee against trees.)
I thought you may enjoy these articles pasted below from The Atlantic
Monthly.
Computer simulations of simple patterns, rules and results.
The Atlantic Monthly.Computer simulations of simple patterns, rules and
results.
This paragraph sounded very Pynchonesque.
"
               THOUGH a decidedly unnerving discovery, this
                was very much of a piece with the results of
                mathematical models of many physical and
                biological systems that exhibit the phenomena
                popularized under the heading "chaos theory." In
                any complex interacting system with many parts,
                each of which affects the others, tiny fluctuations
                can grow in huge but unpredictable ways. Scientists
                refer to these as nonlinear phenomena -- phenomena
                in which seemingly negligible changes in one variable
                can have disproportionately great consequences.
                Nonlinear properties have been discovered in the
                mathematical equations that describe weather,
                chemical reactions, and populations of biological
                organisms. Some combinations of variables for these
                equations give rise to sudden "phase shifts," in
                which the solution to the equation jumps abruptly
                from one value to another; others set off truly
                chaotic situations in which for a time the solution to
                the equation fluctuates wildly and without any
                seeming pattern, and then suddenly calms down."

Regards Scott

P.S. A few more examples..

Also the web page of the International Society for Artificial Life
(ISAL).
http://www.alife.org/

Computer models of social scientists
www.theatlantic.com/rauch.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98aug/roadrage.htm

  " Seeing Around Corners
The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both

 more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing
long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers
will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail—
but we might  learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie
ahead, and where to look  for interventions that might work.
                                  by Jonathan Rauch

 BERTRAND Russell once observed that animal behaviorists
studying the problem-solving abilities of chimpanzees consistently
seemed to detect in their experimental subjects the "national
characteristics"
of the scientists themselves. A divergence in the findings of the
practical-minded
Americans and the theoretically inclined Germans was particularly
apparent.
Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible
display
of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance.
Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the
solution out of their inner consciousness. In science, Germans tend to
come up with things  like the uncertainty principle. Americans tend to
come up with things like the atomic bomb.

 "'Road Rage' versus  Reality," by Michael
  Fumento (August  1998)  A media coinage that rests more
on the  infectious appeal of alliteration than on the weight of
evidence.

  "The Lessons of  ValuJet 592," by
  William  Langewiesche  (March 1998)  As a reconstruction of  this
terrible crash  suggests, in complex systems some accidents may be
"normal" -- and trying  to prevent them all  could even make  operations
more  dangerous.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98mar/valujet1.htm

    Computer Models for Traffic Flow  "This applet demonstrates the
simulation of traffic  flow by several  computer models,  some of them
cellular  automata, some based on partial differential equations or
  differential-difference  equations." Posted by  a physicist at
Otto-von-Guericke  University,  Magdeburg, Germany.

Cellular Automaton Traffic Simulators
http://rcswww.urz.tu-dresden.de/~helbing/RoadApplet/