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            After reading “From Complexity to Emergence and Beyond”, I thought a lot about how we approach problems when working in Netlogo.  As suggested in the paper, we could do one of any number of things.  We could begin with a program, observe what it does, and then look at the code and learn more about the rules and properties that make it do what it does, which essentially is looking at the whole and using its parts to be able to understand and predict it.  We did this when we looked at Langton’s Ant.  Alternately, we could begin with the code and try and predict what the program will do.  We did this with the Game of Life and Cellular Automata.

            We’ve done the same things when building our own models as well.  We’ve begun by entering code first and observing what it does later.  We do this especially when we’re learning new code.  We sometimes begin with a specific behavior in mind, and from there we try and come up with a code to make that behavior happen.  We do this both with code we already know and to try out new code.

            So far, both approaches have been instrumental for me, both in thinking about the models we’ve looked at and in building my own.  I am not yet advanced enough in either the theory or practice of computer modeling to be able to decide which approach to use if I’m working on my own.  In other classes on other subjects I’ve found it useful to be able to choose an efficient way to approach problems right off the bat.  This tends to save time and energy.  It is my goal to be able to do that for this course as well, and then be able to continue to apply it.

In other news, I was at the Delaware Museum of Natural History over break, being a geek, and I noticed something really awesome.  There was a large display of shells from Cone Snails, a particularly venomous genus of mollusk.  One of the species, the Textile Cone, has a very familiar pattern on its shell:

How crazy is that!?  Mollusks add new shell on the end of the old shell as they grow, so could it be possible that these organisms have some sort of genetic version of a Cellular Automata rule that controls the color of the new shell based on the previously secreted shell?