I wish to reply to Francis:
>Second, many people in AI and
>Alife using computational models have been influenced by 2nd order
>cybernetics, though there is still an ideological battle going on around
>that.
I would like to know who is currently working in AI/Alife who support
SOC concepts (or if anyone has tried to incorporate them in their models).
Are there any research groups or projects who try to do this? What kind of
ideological battle is going on? I always thought SOC was an extreme
minority position (although I support it).
>On the other hand, it is obvious that if you take into account the
>observer, all models become more open, complex, fuzzy and variable, and
>because of that more difficult (if not plainly impossible) to compute.
>Felix Geyer, in his excellent review of 1st and 2nd order cybernetics
> ... has suggested
>that because of that 2nd order cybernetics may have been "a bridge too
>far": an important conceptual insight, which unfortunately makes all models
>so complex that they become practically useless.
This is exactly the problem. However, I do not think this needs to be
unsolvable. One of the challenges is to find ways of making this complexity
manageable. I think we can make some progress here.
Regards,
Catharina
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Catharina Kennedy, ck@ics.inf.tu-dresden.de,
PhD student, Institute for Artificial Intelligence,
Faculty of Computer Science,
Technical University of Dresden,
01062 Dresden, Germany.
Tel: +49 351 4575 490
Fax: +49 351 4575 335
------------------------------------------------------------------------------