source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 15:24:40 -0700 Subject: Brian explains it all.... From: gtaylor@heurikon.com (One Cointreau, on ice....) Those of you who might wonder just the *teeniest* bit about about Brian's usual signal-to-bile ratio could, of course, decide to root about and see what's out there. One could take a look at the Amsterdam Catalog of Compositional Algorithms of Alcedo Coenen at http://mars.let.uva.nl/ACCA/ACCA.html There's also a couple of secondary artifacts where folks who're actually *teaching* at *academic* institutions work hard at assembling collections of pointers on the subject as they strive to brainwash, bamboozle, and otherwise indoctrinate the poor, stupid sheep who are their students... :-) Until such time as Brian sees fit to savage their work, you can peruse one such example that I've sent students to at Stanford at http://cmn19.stanford.edu/~tkunze/algobib.html These two sources have, admittedly, not been vetted by the bias-free (e.g., Brian) and may thus exercise a pernicious effect on the unwary reader. I think they *do* suggest that there are other approaches and that the discourse may be more nuanced than Brian's jeremiad contra the lowly daisy-chain may suggest. I'll close with one bit of Brian Eno's recently published bit of demystification, shoptalk, and vernacular insight "A Year With Swollen Appendices" [Faber and Faber, 1996 ISBN 0-571-17995-9] for your edification. From a note to Stewart Brand (31 August): "A by-the-by: I've noticed that all these complex systems generators (such as Life and Boids (the flocking one) and "The Great Learning") have something in common - just 3 rules for each. And these 3 also seem to share a certain similarity of relationship: one rule generates ideas, another reduces, another maintains. I suppose it's obvious, really. But perhaps it's not trivial to wonder if those three conditions are all you need to specify in order to create a complex system generator (and then to wonder how those are actually expressed in complex systems we see around us)." With regards, Gregory _ I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one, paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 10 Aug 1996 17:44 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA06483; Sat, 10 Aug 1996 17:44:12 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA06476 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id IAA26058; Sat, 10 Aug 1996 08:44:10 -0700 Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 08:44:10 -0700 Message-Id: <960810114533_256423901@emout16.mail.aol.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu