פרסומים אחרונים במדור "מדע"

Kudos on the Kuhn reference. you beat me to it :).
What i found troubling is the notion that creating a program that will simulate a system's behavior is enough. we can only judge how closely a program's performance matches behavior that has already occured. other than that, it's just another form of forecasting. even a model which simulates a system perfectly is prone to error. it even goes beyond simple forecasting models.
Imagine the year is 1970. the forum of Rome which is a group of academics, industry leaders and professionals want to know what the future holds. they come to the natural place to go - MIT SDG (System Dynamics Group) and ask for help, since they are unable to come up with reasonably reliable forecasts by themselves. MIT creates the World3 system dynamics model, which is impressive even today. the model crunches something like 120 variables and is able to produce past behavior of the world with incredible accuracy. it also predicts that within 20 years there will be no fossil fuel left. the result is an unlikely bestseller "the limit to growth". well, it was wrong.
ask me nicely and i will tell you who actually gave the correct future scenario...

well, at least you showed interest. good enough.
at about the same time as the world3 model (1970) there was this guy working for Royal Dutch shell named Mr.Wack. he came up with a new way of generating scenarios for possible futures by storytelling. in one of the stories he told the shell executives he described an oilpipe bursting in the persian gulf, causing a redction in production and a price increase, which will be maintained later by OPEC countries, which could thus pump less oil and make more money. the scenario (which the cumputer model could not have predicted) was troubling enough for the Shell executives, so they made plans accordingly, which put them at an edvantage once this actually happened in 1973.
amazing, isn't it?
now for some really bad shit.
in 1980, the guy now heading the scenario generating unit (now called Global Business Environments) came up with a story about a guy not even yet a mamber of the Pulitburo, Mikhail Gurbachov. (Gurbachov became the youngest Politburo member later that year!). in that story, Gurbachov was to lead a revolution in USSR, eventually leading to the dismantling of it. when this actually happened in 1989 the world was shocked, but Shell wondered why it took so long.
Point being, the mind is complex enough to foresee many things, but sometimes over analysis and bottom up approach is counterproductive.

the controlled and disciplined scenario generation method, as well as the formal education required are part of what turns this "witchcraft" into a science, or at least a practice worth considering. it is in fact taught in such places as Cornell, Leeds, and yes, even Bar Ilan :) look under "Future Studies".

regarding the method, i highly recommend a quick googling of future studies. it is vast and deep, so for lack of space i will just mention system dynamics, very formal education, delphi, as well as guided imagination and brianstorming.
about the number of scenarios generated, the GBE group in RDShell generates just three (3!) scenarios a year. that has got to put the Gurbachov scenario in a more impressive light.
Furthermore, RDS has a system in place dubbed TINA (There Is No Alternative) which guides them in their business and policy making process. in a nutshell, element that keep popping up in all scenarios and cannot be eliminated are "in your face" enough that they cannot be ignored when drafting a policy. Mr. Wack himself acknowledged the likely dilution of this method as more and more people start practicing it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

"For many afficianados Life was simply a programming challenge, a fun way to waste CPU cycles."

(ZX81, Dragon 32, Apple II)

Sinclair ZX81 & Sinclair Q.L.

T |= (X -> con(T))

T |= X

T |= con(T)

T, ~f |- g

T, ~f |- ~g

T |- f

In a paper published in Nature this week, Austrian physicists show that
there's a smooth transition between the outlandish quantum behavior typical of the very small and the ordinary behavior of larger objects such as cells and baseballs and people. (Full story at
http://rd.mailshell.com/www.sciencemag.org/cgi/conte...

you do not need to define an "interest" as you called it. it is enough to allow units to have some behaviour which might change slightly over generations (mutation). you should be able to observe certain behaviors which have an interesting property. they might not be optimal for the individual, but if everybody does it, it would be stupid to do anything else. the utility function of the cooperators would exceed that of defectors. that's the basic scenario. beyond that, it gets complicated, but extremely interesting.
one very simple example. imagine baby birds in the nest. when mommy bird comes to feed them, they all scream. you scream louder, you increase the chance of getting food, but also the chance of mr. fox hearing you and putting an end to our discussion. how loud should you scream? surprisingly enough, you should scream 1/n (or something like that)of your full potential, assuming the rest of the baby birds are your siblings and have the same screaming capacity, and there are a total n of you chicks. want to make it complicated? sure. what if you are a cookoo bird chick, and these are not your brothers? does mr. fox eat all of you, or just a random chick? what if you are not brothers but cousins? etc.

you got right to the point. you need to make your decision in advance. the thing about evolution is that there is no decision making. they simple make as much noise as they make, and any other behaviour would be a disadvantage.
if the decision was cyclic, you could have an ever increasing (by epsilon) series of screams. chicks that are programs to scream 1/n are cool the rest suck.

‏¹ http://www.moshesipper.com