Reply to comment

My initial reaction to Serendip’s version of Langton’s Ant was ‘Ahhhh! Too much text!’ In part this was because we had been talking about the model in class, so much of the text was more or less repeating things we had discussed already. Also, I’m one of those people who really can’t stand to read blocks of text on a screen. When I get long newsy emails from my friends I automatically drop them in a folder so they won’t stay in my inbox, taunting me: ‘I’m really interesting! You should read me!’ and then never actually read them. Text-rich websites tend to illicit the same reaction. This is not to say that I have a chronically short 21^st-century attention span conditioned by action movies and television advertising—I spent hours a day during winter break reading, and have spent hours at a time this weekend playing with NetLogo. Just don’t like reading on-screen.

As an inveterate tinkerer, I appreciated the various controls provided by Serendip’s models, but what I really wanted was to see the code. With the Vants model I could not only think about emergence and toy with the controls, I could read the code and pick up programming tips, or even write in some new code and see what happened. I guess I’m a ‘learn by doing’ rather than a ‘learn by reading about’ sort of person (although I do read and save instruction manuals). Serendip’s models definitely have an interactive component, but they’re not nearly as ‘Tinker-Toys’ as a model that can be fundamentally altered.