Monday, June 21, 2004
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
Mitchell Resnick
Bradford books
The main characteristic of the peer to peer system is that nobody, or nothing is in charge to supervise the organization of the exchange occurring in the system. Any high level structure is therfore not decided in the beginning by a god-like creator, but is the product, the emergence, of the interaction between the various elements.
In fact, almost any complex phenomenon occurring in the natural world (including human societies) is the result of the interaction of simpler, equivalent, elements. The main problem, for us, human, is that our brain is not wired to understand plainly such phenomena. We need to imagine a boss a god, a center... That’s why the behavior of anthill of termites’ colonies continue to present for us an almost miraculous, magical aspect.
That’s why we have so much difficulties to master phenomena such as traffic jams, economical fluctuations, urban guerrillas and riots. That’s why also it’s so hard to design a peer to peer organization: by definition, it’s impossible to tell the various members of the system the way they should behave.
The understanding of these decentralized, “bottom-up” systems (to use Chris Langton’s words), are critical to understand a wide range of phenomena, from the predator-prey relationship in a forest to the way to organize a successful party. it’s therefore obvious that the lack of appropriate conceptual tools will greatly impair our action in the world.
This is where Mitchell Resnick his coming. Resnick is the inventor of a new programming language, named “starlogo”. The goal of starlogo is to develop the intuition about decentralized systems. In other words, starlogo is not a programming language like Cobol, C or even Lisp. Its goal is not to produce applications, but to help the user to broaden his conceptual horizon. Starlogo is above all an educational tool, and it is sufficiently simple and friendly to be learnt by children.
“Turtles, termites and traffic jams” was written in 1994. This is the fist exposion of starlogo, at a time where this language could only run on very powerful computers. Today, it is available for free and run on any computer having a Java virtual machine.
“turtles, termites and traffic jams” is a new kind of book; half philoophy and science, half programming manual. Here you don’t have just to read about new and exciting ideas: you can do them, play with them.
starlogo is an invluable tool for any people who wants to understand the working of emergent, collective systems,
One can download a java version of starlogo at :
http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/
there is also a variant of starlogo, netlogo, here:
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
NB: both java starlogo and Netlogo present substancial difference with the original Starlogo presented in the book.
Bradford books
The main characteristic of the peer to peer system is that nobody, or nothing is in charge to supervise the organization of the exchange occurring in the system. Any high level structure is therfore not decided in the beginning by a god-like creator, but is the product, the emergence, of the interaction between the various elements.
In fact, almost any complex phenomenon occurring in the natural world (including human societies) is the result of the interaction of simpler, equivalent, elements. The main problem, for us, human, is that our brain is not wired to understand plainly such phenomena. We need to imagine a boss a god, a center... That’s why the behavior of anthill of termites’ colonies continue to present for us an almost miraculous, magical aspect.
That’s why we have so much difficulties to master phenomena such as traffic jams, economical fluctuations, urban guerrillas and riots. That’s why also it’s so hard to design a peer to peer organization: by definition, it’s impossible to tell the various members of the system the way they should behave.
The understanding of these decentralized, “bottom-up” systems (to use Chris Langton’s words), are critical to understand a wide range of phenomena, from the predator-prey relationship in a forest to the way to organize a successful party. it’s therefore obvious that the lack of appropriate conceptual tools will greatly impair our action in the world.
This is where Mitchell Resnick his coming. Resnick is the inventor of a new programming language, named “starlogo”. The goal of starlogo is to develop the intuition about decentralized systems. In other words, starlogo is not a programming language like Cobol, C or even Lisp. Its goal is not to produce applications, but to help the user to broaden his conceptual horizon. Starlogo is above all an educational tool, and it is sufficiently simple and friendly to be learnt by children.
“Turtles, termites and traffic jams” was written in 1994. This is the fist exposion of starlogo, at a time where this language could only run on very powerful computers. Today, it is available for free and run on any computer having a Java virtual machine.
“turtles, termites and traffic jams” is a new kind of book; half philoophy and science, half programming manual. Here you don’t have just to read about new and exciting ideas: you can do them, play with them.
starlogo is an invluable tool for any people who wants to understand the working of emergent, collective systems,
One can download a java version of starlogo at :
http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/
there is also a variant of starlogo, netlogo, here:
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
NB: both java starlogo and Netlogo present substancial difference with the original Starlogo presented in the book.
