Seeing Around Corners with the Man Who Would Shake up Science

[Andrew Scott Chesnick]

  Hello-
  The new Wolfram book on the chaotic systems and dynamics can also be
applied to the small and large groups of society. This subject is
covered in a very interesting article on the simulation and models of
human behavior in the April 2002 issue of |The Atlantic Monthly|.

  The article is definitely worth taking a look at and adds a new angle
to the old sage comment by Tip O'Neil  "all politics are local", meaning
the core, grass roots of all, pain folks as well as creative artists,
just as in politics (no one becomes president , unless the local folks
have voted for them!) begin at the small personnel level. It all then
becomes a giant cosmic size game of "Go".
Note: However there is a finite number of games of "Go".

  The antiparanoids among us at least can find some comfort in this,
there are no large plots against us... absolutely no one really cares
enough to actually plot against us.
  There are no big plots just a whole bunch of little ones...

Regards Scott

From: The Atlantic Monthly | April 2002
_Seeing Around Corners _
  by Jonathan Rauch
" 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."

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch.htm

There are examples animations of these computer models
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/04/rauch-movies.htm

Regards

A.Scott Chesnick
Staff Scientist
US National institues of Health
In Vivo Center for Nuclear magnetic Resonance Imaging Reseach
Bethesda, Md. 20892
USA