Russ -
I *think* I know what you are getting at, but I don't think we are there
yet in this discussion.
I think we've come full circle to the challenges we encountered in the
early days of Artificial Life. The first year or two of ALife
conferences had a lot of focus on "what IS life?" It is a bit too early
in the morning for me to give this proper consideration but as I
remember it, there were many examples of systems with life-like or more
to the point proto-life-like properties. I doubt I can put my hands on
my proceedings from ALife I and ALife II easily and couldn't pull them
up online beyond this:
http://alife.org/conferences-isal-past?page=2
I think your intuition that "unless all of physics would be" is correct,
especially when caveated by your own reference to dissipative systems
which go on to imply far-from-equilibrium and irreversible systems.
A precursor to the ALife work was that of Tibor Ganti:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoton
which invoked "metabolism" and "self-replication" as qualities of
proto-life.
It seems like Autocatalytics Sets are useful and near-minimal abstractions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalytic_set
I feel like my maunderings here are vaguely circular when concatenated
with your own but I hope someone more incisive than I takes an interest
in this discussion and tightens these ideas up a little.
- Steve
On 5/24/17 10:25 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
I'll buy the ones Steven Smith mentioned. But those are mainly weather
and related. I guess that could be generalized to weather and geology.
I don't see why formation of galaxies, stars and planets would be
considered a complex system phenomenon unless all of physics would be.
A vortex or hurricane or other dissipative system?
I'd rule out high speed trading since it's done with computers and
works only because it interacts with people trading.
All the examples I like (weather, etc.) are open systems that have
energy flowing through them. That often generates interesting
phenomena. (As we mentioned above dissipative systems
<https://goo.gl/WGAZ9Q>.) Do you think that's enough to qualify a
system as complex? (I know, as Steve said, it's a fuzzy term.) They
all reflect "emergence" of some sort -- even though I don't like that
term these days. But they lack the quality of complexity that we find
in systems containing agents with some degree of autonomy.
Are there any non-biological, non-human, non-computer systems that
would qualify as consisting of autonomous agents?
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:48 PM Gillian Densmore
<gil.densm...@gmail.com <mailto:gil.densm...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Although Donder's Son may have a fine example. The clouds (gas
things) Jupiter or saturns weather are fine example of
complicated stuff only those planets make.
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 9:04 PM, Steven A Smith <sasm...@swcp.com
<mailto:sasm...@swcp.com>> wrote:
"Complex Systems" being a somewhat fuzzy concept, this is
hard/easy to answer.
Any physical system comprised of large numbers of similar or
identical elements which interact and yield non-linear
collective behaviour seems like a good enough definition for
your purposes. Sand dune formation and (breaking) waves and
cloud formation/dissipation all seem like pretty good
candidates, not to mention the aforementioned weather in
general. Earthquake/Rift/Mountain formain seems like a good
fit as well as wind/rain erosion of soil in general.
On 5/24/17 8:56 PM, cody dooderson wrote:
Is a vortex like a funnel cloud or the Saturn's hexagon
considered a complex system?
Cody Smith
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Marcus Daniels
<mar...@snoutfarm.com <mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
High speed trading comes close to not involving people.
Other examples that come to mind involve some
autonomous (biological) agent creating demand. For
example, energy or data or transportation networks are
responding to a logistical demand created by people.
Netflix (vs. adaptive routing) is a demand created by
people.
As companies like Google begin to build agents that build
models and satisfy constraints the requests they initiate
will become more adaptive.
*From:*Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com
<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>] *On Behalf Of *Russ
Abbott
*Sent:* Wednesday, May 24, 2017 6:59 PM
*To:* FRIAM <friam@redfish.com <mailto:friam@redfish.com>>
*Subject:* [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?
Are there any good examples of a complex system that
doesn't involve biological organisms (including human
beings)?
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