Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
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Cellular automata and Wolfram's exploration
My initial thought on Wolfram’s exploration of 1-D cellular automata is that I like the way that he has organized and separated the different rules and that it just makes everything look simpler. His framework is useful and better than what I had come up with before I saw his hierarchical categorization scheme for the rules.
From Wolfram’s reading and from looking at different rules, I thought about how models can seem to get infinitely more complex, but that this is sort of an illusion. Given what we have said about complexity and how it is a result of something simple, it makes more sense to think and accept that complexity has a limit. Specifically, I am thinking about a threshold for complex behavior and what Wolfram says about how adding more complicated rules does not add much greater complexity to overall behavior. In line with this idea is the notion that there is no apparent correlation between the complexity of the rules and the behavior they produce.
Last week I talked about the relevance of cellular automata in explaining real world phenomenon and I like how Wolfram explains that “the basic themes of repetition, nesting, randomness, and localized structures…are actually very general, and in fact represent the dominant themes in the behavior of a vast range of different systems” (106). This is sort of what I was trying to explain…the fact that because cellular automata reveal things such as complexity, simplicity, randomness, disorder, and order (elements that are present across different phenomena) makes them a useful tool that can be used to make sense of other behaviors and systems.
As far as the size of the world in which the cellular automata operate in, I agree that the size can be limiting and that this is something that prevents the observer from drawing meaning/sense of the rule or seeing the bigger picture. As far as what we should be paying most attention to—the beginning, middle, or ultimate output, I think that everything is important. The rules are just as important as the outcome, which can be simple or complex. For some rules, there is an ultimate output, but for others an end is not entirely clear as the patterns seem to continue to change infinitely. So I think that we should not say that the output is more important than the elements that come in between. We can essentially draw a conclusion from all of the outputs. However, some conclusions may be repetitive or simply not as interesting as the ones from later outputs.