Date: Thu 27 May 2004 - 06:43:37 CEST
Thanks for the notice, Aleks
In fact I wanted to emphasize the CA not just as a "simplified modeling
technique" but rather as "the building blocks of the real Universe" idea.
But now as you mentioned gradualistic patterns of history it seems that
similar to "the real world's CA" ideas can be back-traced to 1644, Rene
Descartes' works and drawing of the heavens. Descartes' starry sky is
divided into polygons, each with a star at its center. Each star holds sway
over a polyhedral region of the sky. Thus space is like a froth of soap
bubbles (a set of cells controlled by their nucleuses). Descartes isolated
the stars-dots following a very simple rule - by expansive filling of a
space - which (raster version of it) in fact is just one more case of the CA
! The method today is widely used in all fields of science (contemporary
astrophysics, biology, quantum physics, GIS, etc...) and is known under
several names - Voronoi diagrams, Thiesen polygons, Spatial tessellations
(hmm... gradualistic history), etc. There is also a vector based method to
draw those cells - (not so interesting for this discussion :) therefore).
Also Descartes' idea of the Universe being a machine is close to Zuses'
Rechnender Raum" and ideas of contemporary digital physicists.
Descartes' theory of forces working through contact (we'd call it
communication) comes very close to CA again.
Besides one of core-statements of today's complexity research - the idea
that the dynamics of systems can tend, by themselves, to make it more
orderly can also be backtraced to the fifth part of Descartes' Discourse on
Method. He further elaborated on the idea at great length in Le Monde which,
unfortunately :-(, was not officially (or was it ?..) published.
I think someone could try looking for similar ideas in treatises of ancient
Arabian or Indian mathematicians or philosophers... And who knows...
With kind regards
Viktoras
-------Original Message-------
From: jakulin@acm.org
Date: 2004 m. geguþë 26 d. 07:39:54
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: RE: [Fis] Information and communication
Viktoras wrote:
> indeed Cellular Automation approach can provide many
> hints solving structure/information/communication/order
> related issues. The CA principle (just without titling it CA)
> was discussed long long ago by Conrad Zuse in his
> "Calculating space" (1969, C. Zuse. Rechnender Raum.
> Schriften zur Datenverarbeitung, vol. 1, Freidr. Vieweg &
> Sohn, Braunschweig, 1969, 74 pp.)
Cellular automata are usually attributed to von Neumann, who worked on them
in the 1940's with S. Ulam. There is a short story describing how they came
to be at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/depts/AI/alife/al-ca.htm Of course, history
is always more gradualistic (today S. Wolfram seems to be trying to become
the original inventor), and the earlier Ising lattice models of
ferromagnetism carry a striking resemblance to hardwired cellular automata
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/anglica/Chronology/20thC/Ising/isi_fm00.ht
ml This simple Ising's model already manifests the phase transition
phenomena.
Best regards,
Aleks
---
mag. Aleks Jakulin
http://www.ailab.si/aleks/
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana.
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