Let’s say we’re all university professors for a moment and we’re trying to figure out how to influence how the kids in our classroom are going to interact.

Let’s first try a seating chart:

Let’s assume for a moment that there are two major tendencies in the classroom: talkers and sleepers and that talkers have the ability to excite the students in the seats around them, while sleepers have the ability to dampen talkers into a little lecture nap session. The interactions are limited to the students directly surrounding the one under consideration. That map looks like this:

We can expect to change the outcome of the class by altering the initial condition.

Ok, let’s do some science on these kids. The point Peter made last week is that if we have a discrete set of inputs (512), we can generate a continuous set of outputs (length of class).

Let’s try turning this on its head. Scrap the seating chart. Sleepers and talkers mill about at will and interact as they please. The space of possible initial conditions for this kind of interaction is beyond what my modern computer can compute for beyond 23 students

– in other words it’s virtually continuous. The interactions over the course of class produce a discrete experience that might be somehow captured in numbers. If we can’t even thoroughly describe what might happen first, we certainly cannot say that if sally comes to class first, then it would follow that… We might begin to operate on the class by setting up rules, but the rules can’t be given by the possible combinations of student interactions, again the possible space is too large to quantify. The rules then become behavioral heuristics; such as if Sally isn’t acting cool, then don’t talk to Sally, rather than the possible combinations of black and white tiles. This doesn’t seem far from Game of Life, although I was thinking of more complex simulations, like the racial preference study.

The conclusion I draw from this is that this might be a way to classify these different programs capable of generating complexity. Do all of them have the same organs in different interrelationships?