RE: Biological Metaphor

Genetic algorithms and genetic programming are fascinating in their own
rights, I'd love to tinker more with 'em. But...

The latter direction was the one I was hoping to see more of here.

The "long tail" meme must have broken out and gone epidemic recently. I
don't recall where I first saw it, maybe Barabassi's Linked, maybe not, but
its suddenly impinging on my consciousness from several directions at once
(this being one of them).

I wasn't aware this meme had joined forces with the notion of end user
programmability and one-off knock off apps, hmmm. One of those catfish in
the memepool moments...

I'll surf it.  Later, alas.

It is, I gather, agreed that it is not controversial to regard the process
by which these phenomenon are cultivated as having broad similarities to
those in play in markets, ecosystems, and the like, hence, notions like
teleonomy, endosymbiosis, speciation, r-k strategies, etc. etc. all get to
come into play. Signaling, megafauna, component Cambrian explosions, yup,
there's lots of play left in biological metaphors...

--BF, uh, back to work...

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]=
]
On Behalf Of Logan, Patrick D
Sent: Thursday, 16 June, 2005 18:54
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [emergentdesign] Biological Metaphor

"Is the biological metaphor necessary?=A0 Obviously it isn't, but=20
I can't help but feel that it is valuable."

>From what little I know "genetic" or "evolutionary" programs have proven
useful in certain situations.

(cite: http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~mm/publications.html)

I think there are other ways to consider the same metaphor. For example, a
current topic on the web is "long tail" software, i.e. the ability to creat=
e
niche applications through some end-user-programming capability where each
application is not significant individually but are more impressive when yo=
u
see all the niches they can fill.

e.g. http://jotspot.com/ and http://smallthought.com/

What if end users had the primitive parts they could usefully combine
(applications and data) and share. One could track the use and flow of thes=
e
parts and perhaps observe a larger system evolved from parts by the people
that combined them. Perhaps higher level capabilities could be discovered,
automated, and supported more explicitly by observant people or tools.

-Patrick



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