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Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities

Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.

Exploring Emergence

The World of Langton's Ant:
Thinking about "Purpose"

Summarizing and Going Beyond ...

Here are some of the interesting/important ideas that we think come out of experiencing and thinking about the world of Langton's ant ...
  1. Quite sophisticated behavior can result from simple interactions of simple things.
  2. One can often usefully and relatively rigorously distinguish two general classes of emergent systems
    • deterministic
    • non-deterministic
  3. One can often usefully and relatively rigorously distinguish four aspects of emergent systems
    • Agents
    • Environments
    • Observers/participants
    • Creator/architect/designer
  4. Changes in behavior can occur with no change within an agent, resulting instead from changes in the environment.
  5. Changes in the environment can be produced by an agent as well as by an observer
  6. A bidirectional relationship between an unchanging agent and an environment modifiable by the agent can produce behaviors that an observer may see as "purposive" even in a simple deterministic system.
  7. Behaviors that appear "purposive" to an observer do not depend on any representation of the "purpose" within the agent.
  8. Systems that exhibit "purposive" behavior need not depend on any conception of that "purpose" in the mind of a creator/architect/designer
  9. Signs of "purpose", and even systems that exhibit what an observer would characterize as "purposive" behavior, can come into existence simply because of indeterminate processes, ie need not involve minds at all.
  10. That a world does things that are surprising to an observer does not establish whether it is deterministic or not.

Here are some places to further explore Langton's ant ...

And to explore complex systems/emergence generally ... And to think more about "purpose" ...

Paul Grobstein with the Summer 2005 Serendip/SciSoc group. Applets created with NetLogo by Rebekah Baglini, building on earlier work by Panama Geer.

Continuing conversation
(to contribute your own observations/thoughts , write Serendip)

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"The World of Langton's Ant" was produced by Paul Grobstein with the Summer 2005 Serendip/SciSoc group. Applets were created with NetLogo by Rebekah Baglini, building on earlier work. Our thanks to the Emergent Systems Working Group for fertile conversations from which this emerged and to which we hope it further contributes.
Introduction
Watching
Looking Inside
Agents/Environments | Observers | Architects | Beyond Determinism?
Summary and ...
Further reflections on Emergence and Science Education
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