Re: [FRIAM] can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
Hugh, Yes, that example of the breaking point of the peloton does sound like the limit of negotiated cooperation for the individual cyclists. Here everyone expects the usefulness of the peloton to be abandoned entirely at some point, and choosing just when to break from it is probably a critical individual decision. It's an expected 'line of conflict' determined by when the individual riders break free from the shelter of the group. Here the common resource is the relative air-pocket formed by the group, and the regularity of alternating positions within it. Maybe that would be analogous to users sharing a bus and having negotiated some regular habit of coordinating their uses of it. An established pattern of sharing is one of the kinds of independent natural systems I focus on. Once established some change could cause it to fall apart and then need to be completely re-negotiated. The canonical example is of a resource that begins with having no limit for a small community of users with various cooperative habits for exploiting it. If their habits constitute a growth system, the users will usually know only their own individual experience and have no experiential information about the approach of that limit. It's not clear what their best source of information would be about it, or how they would choose what to do at the limits. What kind of information might indicate the approach of common resource limits? How would that be different from evidence that other users are breaking their agreements? As independent users of natural resources tend to have less information about, or interest in, each other's particular needs than, say, cyclists in a peloton, how would they begin to renegotiate their common habits when circumstances require it? Phil -Original Message- From: Hugh Trenchard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 6:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] can you have 4 operating systems on one buss? I might as well throw this example into the fray, which may cover a few of your bases, Phil, though I'll happily stand corrected if they are not on target. The only complex system I can claim any sort of slightly-more-than-superficial understanding is that of bicycle pelotons. As I've mentioned in previous posts, a bicycle peloton is a group of cyclists who ride within drafting range of each other (except for the riders facing the wind), who thereby reduce their energy output by drafting. A peloton is a very good example of resource optimization, since it easily demonstrated that a peloton can travel faster and farther than an individual cyclist on his or her own. In high-level bicycle races, the range between the riders' ability is fairly narrow (I've compiled some figures which show the range to be about 17 percent). The range is narrowed further by drafting, and I've also compiled figures which show that the range is narrowed to an average of about 4% between first and last place finishers in pelotons (as compared to 17% between first and last place finishers in individual time trials, which is where the first figure of 17% above comes from), and there are frequent race situations where an entire peloton finishes with the same finishing time. In any event, if I understand your original inquiry, a peloton is a good example of the kinds of self-organized resource sharing you are talking about. When cyclists set off at the beginning of a race, there is a period when the speeds are low enough when they have no need to draft one another to feel comfortable in any position in the peloton and are not expending energy close to maximum capacity. However, as speeds increase, a transition occurs (I argue this is a true phase transition) whereby resource sharing becomes necessary as cyclists are either in drafting positions or at the front (most are drafting). In this phase, a balancing occurs between energy expenditure and optimal position within the peloton. Because it is a competitive situation, it is better to be positioned as close to the front as possible. As this is a continuous imperative, rotational movements occur within the peloton, where riders are moving up and down the peloton, or are caught in eddies whereby they advance for relatively short distances within the peloton, before begin shifted backward again, and then attempt to move forward again. These movements occur while riders attempt to use as little energy as possible to advance. So, where there are riders who shift to the outside of the pack (facing the wind by doing so), other riders will follow in their draft. This results in a pattern whereby riders advance up the sides for relatively long stretches, while riders drop back within the peloton, and while within the peloton there are these smaller-scale eddies. Another phase transition occurs when the pace shifts up beyond another
[FRIAM] Babbage's Difference Engine - May 1, 2008]
Put 4 different OSs on THIS buss: http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1206647564 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Reciprocal Altruism - was: can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
Folks, I apologize if I missed this in an earlier part of the thread... these discussions are so elaborate and rich that I simply find I cannot keep up with them all front to back. However... this divergence of discussing bicyclist pelotons which is segueing into what feels like a discussion of seeking solutions to what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons has gotten my attention. The canonical example is of a resource that begins with having no limit for a small community of users with various cooperative habits for exploiting it. If their habits constitute a growth system, the users will usually know only their own individual experience and have no experiential information about the approach of that limit. It's not clear what their best source of information would be about it, or how they would choose what to do at the limits. What kind of information might indicate the approach of common resource limits? How would that be different from evidence that other users are breaking their agreements? As independent users of natural resources tend to have less information about, or interest in, each other's particular needs than, say, cyclists in a peloton, how would they begin to renegotiate their common habits when circumstances require it? As most of us know, there has been a lot of abstract study of this in Game Theory as well as practical study in economics, political science, and evolutionary biology. The bicycle peleton seems to arise fairly directly from reciprocal altruism. While there is some cost to the riders at the head of a peloton in terms of simple distraction and risk of interference, in general the only cost they bear is relative to the others who gain an advantage from an emergent common resource, the air pocket behind them which is unexploited otherwise. reciprocal altruism is an obvious response, each member of the peleton being motivated to contribute to the group as a windbreaker in exchange for not being ejected or ditched from the peleton. As the end of the race nears, the motivation to defect increases and only those with a shared fate (members of the same team) are likely to maintain pelotons right up to the last minute. Phil makes good points about global optimization under local awareness. As our actions begin to have longer range consequences and we begin to exploit a larger commons (global, including earth orbit, Lagrange points, and the lunar surface soon enough) our awareness of the state of said commons must be expanded equally. This also is problematic, as our awareness must be mediated both technologically and socially (we must use telescopes, remote sensors, etc. and depend on others to share their observations and judgements about the condition of the commons). When these other devices (mechanical and social) are insinuated between our perceptual system and the commons in question, we are at risk of them being miscalibrated and of our innate perceptions not being tuned to them. We simply may not understand the implications of what our instruments are telling us in the first case and in the second case, we may not trust the agenda of the social constructs between us and what we are observing (see the long-running arguement over whether climate change is real or not). - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
Marcus, [ph] Phil Henshaw wrote: I'm trying to compare the use central managed solutions and user negotiated solutions in this fairly simple problem to develop a way of discussing the more complicated situations where efficient and fair central resource management is not possible. For lots of things central control is going to work well and be naturally more efficient. The user negotiated solutions reduce to the question of a shared values. [ph] Well, not as I see it. That would be the central manager's assumption for setting up rules that are to be made self-consistent, and excluding the environment's inconsistencies from consideration. From an inclusive view, though, the individual users will have different needs, interests, information and perceptions and that's the general problem. When shared values can be identified amongst N people, then conceptually we can replace those N people with a single person that plans a larger array of work and then again it's a question of scheduling, load balancing, and optimization. Normally, though, people know what they want and are competing to get as much of it as possible. [ph] Yes,... when shared values can be identified. In addition to individuals not choosing to cooperate as you suggest, there are also lots of times when the long established shared values become inappropriately agreed to, because of a change of circumstance. One present glowing example is the idea of agricultural resources being 'renewable' and the world's environmentalists and governments committing themselves to a plan of increasing non-renewable mining of 'renewables', permanently setting aside growing areas of the surface of the earth to replace the growing energy uses that used to be supplied from holes in the earth. It's then kind of quintessential mistake that helps us examine the real blind spots in our thinking about nature. When there are no shared values, than all that can be done is to dynamically divide the resource into a virtual resource and use the strengths of the resource to make up for the weaknesses in the resource.It's a design question, whose solution may be central or distributed in nature but still algorithmic. Virtualization can prevent hogging, although the resources will divide in power as more and more users draw upon it. [ph] There are lots of things that virtualization might work for, and that's a good way of saying it. It still requires the global God's eye view of things that no one naturally has... though. Still, there are some things for which one can set up useful controls based on information sharing if one has run into a necessity of rationing due to not having seen some new circumstance coming... That can be done either with central regulation, or better with informing free markets about the truth of some long neglected problem, where knowledge is more out-of-date than usual, so they can catch up. An example is the fact that the economies are widely acting to accelerate the depletion of under priced resources to maintain a growth of output displays. That seems to be another kind of quintessential error that helps us examine the real blind spots in our thinking. In contrast, a political solution requires trust (or at least policing). Without trust, there will be instabilities created when people pretend to have consensus in order to get preferred access and then soon defect on one another when it actually comes time to use the thing. [ph] yes I agree. I think managing social and economic conflict with political conflict is nearly a complete waste of time. Governments also have a tendency of getting fed up with stalled negotiations and going to war instead... I think it would be much better if they devoted their limited resources to giving people better information and discovering comprehendible rules that would tend to be self-enforcing. Without a central operator different users connected to a bus would need some way of telling what the load on it in the near future would be, in order to be ready to use it when it wasn't busy. Sure, it's called a scheduler. For schedulers like are in the kernel of an average Windows/MacOS X/Linux system one resource is made to look like many, and during the period that a user sees their resource, there will tend to be minimal contention for resources, although waste may still occur due to mismatches in latency between the different components in the system (as would also occur in the non-virtualized case).There are some costs to time slicing, in particular that CPU caches have to be invalidated on context switches, but the idea is to run long tasks enough to amortize these costs. [ph] The management of users on a controlled resource provides the users with predictable windows of opportunity for using the resource. There are some network schemes I've heard discussed that would let subscription users have ownership of a
Re: [FRIAM] Reciprocal Altruism - was: can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
Steve, Yes, and to keep brief, I think there are so very many clear examples of our being clueless about the nature of the 'game' and 'commons' we are sharing that the earlier game theory and tragedy of the commons studies were clearly missing something. It think what they were missing is the arts, and or sciences, of how to read the environment in which your conception of the game and commons are imbedded. You say We simply may not understand the implications of what our instruments are telling us in the first case and in the second case, we may not trust the agenda of the social constructs between us and what we are observing (see the long-running argument over whether climate change is real or not). I see both are examples of trusting our models rather than using them as open questions for the purpose of discovering the true circumstance we're in. Phil -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2008 12:11 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Reciprocal Altruism - was: can you have 4 operating systems on one buss? Folks, I apologize if I missed this in an earlier part of the thread... these discussions are so elaborate and rich that I simply find I cannot keep up with them all front to back. However... this divergence of discussing bicyclist pelotons which is segueing into what feels like a discussion of seeking solutions to what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons has gotten my attention. The canonical example is of a resource that begins with having no limit for a small community of users with various cooperative habits for exploiting it. If their habits constitute a growth system, the users will usually know only their own individual experience and have no experiential information about the approach of that limit. It's not clear what their best source of information would be about it, or how they would choose what to do at the limits. What kind of information might indicate the approach of common resource limits? How would that be different from evidence that other users are breaking their agreements? As independent users of natural resources tend to have less information about, or interest in, each other's particular needs than, say, cyclists in a peloton, how would they begin to renegotiate their common habits when circumstances require it? As most of us know, there has been a lot of abstract study of this in Game Theory as well as practical study in economics, political science, and evolutionary biology. The bicycle peleton seems to arise fairly directly from reciprocal altruism. While there is some cost to the riders at the head of a peloton in terms of simple distraction and risk of interference, in general the only cost they bear is relative to the others who gain an advantage from an emergent common resource, the air pocket behind them which is unexploited otherwise. reciprocal altruism is an obvious response, each member of the peleton being motivated to contribute to the group as a windbreaker in exchange for not being ejected or ditched from the peleton. As the end of the race nears, the motivation to defect increases and only those with a shared fate (members of the same team) are likely to maintain pelotons right up to the last minute. Phil makes good points about global optimization under local awareness. As our actions begin to have longer range consequences and we begin to exploit a larger commons (global, including earth orbit, Lagrange points, and the lunar surface soon enough) our awareness of the state of said commons must be expanded equally. This also is problematic, as our awareness must be mediated both technologically and socially (we must use telescopes, remote sensors, etc. and depend on others to share their observations and judgements about the condition of the commons). When these other devices (mechanical and social) are insinuated between our perceptual system and the commons in question, we are at risk of them being miscalibrated and of our innate perceptions not being tuned to them. We simply may not understand the implications of what our instruments are telling us in the first case and in the second case, we may not trust the agenda of the social constructs between us and what we are observing (see the long-running arguement over whether climate change is real or not). - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] and example fyi - the environ conflict flash point story of Darfur
From the State of the Planet meetings at Columbia Earth Institute http://www.columbia.edu/acis/networks/advanced/ei/sop08/0327pm/morton.ram Andrew Morton - UNEP http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sop2008/?id=speakers Phil FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] The Apex of the Vee
The interesting discussions relating to bussing, pelotons and human/animal behavior call to mind some papers I published at Caltech in 1969 relating to the advantages of Vee formation flight for migrating birds. Because the saving is in induced drag the least energy position is, counter intuitively, the apex (point) of the Vee. I was immediately assailed by ornithologists and bird watchers, who knew much more about the subject than I, and rather than checking the equations, challenged my results on their ideas of behavioral grounds. It turns out that the apex position is indeed taken by the oldest and strongest bird. Would he, they asked, take the easiest job? My answer was:yes.! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 TEL: (505) 983-7728 FAX: (505) 983-1694 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
Phil Henshaw wrote: The user negotiated solutions reduce to the question of a shared values. Well, not as I see it. That would be the central manager's assumption for setting up rules that are to be made self-consistent, and excluding the environment's inconsistencies from consideration. From an inclusive view, though, the individual users will have different needs, interests, information and perceptions and that's the general problem. For one thing, a program, or a user of a program, can make statements of intent. Example 1: A Linux program that monitors another can ask to keep memory resident and also ask for a modest scheduling frequency. It could do this to ensure that a peer program would get most of the CPU cycles, but on the other hand that it would be able to count on getting enough cycles to be able to periodically send the result of the peer calculation to some I/O device. Say, wavelet compression of an image taken on a satellite before it gets sent back to earth. Example 2: I'm leaving work and I have a job I want done by morning. Rather than asking for more than I need, I make the best calculation I can of how much CPU time the job will take and look at the queue schedule for the upcoming 12 hours. In particular, I can look for holes in this calendar. Depending on what's likely to be available, I can either ask for a giant number of processors for only an hour, or a small number for all 12. I have an incentive to make realistic estimates and to fit it into whats available. There are lots of things that virtualization might work for, and that's a good way of saying it. It still requires the global God's eye view of things that no one naturally has... though. In the case of computer resource sharing, I don't agree. First of all, people know what the system is and how fast it can in-principle operate. When performances drops below some fraction, users will complain or leave. They can't complain about unfair hogging, because that can be dealt with fairly. Secondly, everything the computer does can be measured. Common code paths can be identified and compressed. A typical computer system has a large number of DLLs, or frameworks, or shared libraries, etc. that represent stuff in memory that everyone shares, i.e. they name the resource instead of copying it (shared values in some sense). Jobs can even be profiled and marginalized when shown to be doing wasteful things. A God's eye view can be approximated by direct measurement, using statements of intent, and by inference from the historical record. Much more so than in natural systems. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 10:55:01AM -0400, Phil Henshaw wrote: The canonical example is of a resource that begins with having no limit for a small community of users with various cooperative habits for exploiting it. If their habits constitute a growth system, the users will usually know only their own individual experience and have no experiential information about the approach of that limit. It's not clear what their best source of information would be about it, or how they would choose what to do at the limits. What kind of information might indicate the approach of common resource limits? How would that be different from evidence that other users are breaking their agreements? As independent users of natural resources tend to have less information about, or interest in, each other's particular needs than, say, cyclists in a peloton, how would they begin to renegotiate their common habits when circumstances require it? Phil Interesting that you should have brought the tragedy of the commons into this. I recently read a paper by Juergen Kremer (http://www.rheinahrcampus.de/fileadmin/prof_seiten/kremer/MasterKeenEconomics.PDF) discussing some work that Steve Keen and I have done on the theory of the firm. In it, he mentions that our framework can be applied to the tragedy of the commons case, and that under the same special conditions of prefectly rational competitors and frictionless response, a cooperative solution will emerge that exploits the commons without overloading it. The paper is in German, but the idea is pretty simple once you understand our theory of the firm stuff, which you can get from my website. Of course, real economic agents are neither rational, nor frictionless, and in our Complex Systems '04 paper, we explore just how much irrationality and how much friction is required to break the Keen (monopoly) solution (corresponding to the benevolent dictator ToC solution) into the Cournot (competitive) solution (corresponding to over exploitation of the ToC). Cheers -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The Apex of the Vee
On Mar 30, 2008, at 1:05 PM, Peter Lissaman wrote: It turns out that the apex position is indeed taken by the oldest and strongest bird. Would he, they asked, take the easiest job? My answer was:yes.! He may be a bird-brain but he's not stupid. That leads to my theory on how various religious traditions came into being. Once humans reached a level of caloric social security that allowed some citizens to live past their sexually and huntingly (sic) productive years, the longer-lived individuals had to develop an argument for being fed by their younger counterparts. What better way than to promise they could bring the sun back if only they were fed while they performed the necessary rituals. -d- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Reciprocal Altruism - was: can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
Marcus G. Daniels wrote: The reciprocal altruism of the peloton is interesting, but don't forget the race finally turns to teams sacrificing their members, one by one, for the sake of the final attack by the most capable rider... Good point. And do the team's sacrifice their members or do the members sacrifice themselves? Is there a difference? - Steve PS. I don't follow any professional sports, including cycling... so I'm sure I don't get many of the nuances! FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Reciprocal Altruism - was: can you have 4 operating systems on one buss?
Steve Smith wrote: And do the team's sacrifice their members or do the members sacrifice themselves? Is there a difference? Yes, they even call them domestiques (servants).Bicycle racing is a corporate thing. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
