Turtles, termites, and traffic jams : explorations in massively parallel microworlds
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Turtles, termites, and traffic jams : explorations in massively parallel microworlds
(Complex adaptive systems)
MIT Press, c1994
Available at 11 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
"A Bradford book."
Includes bibliographical references (p. [157]-163)
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Does every group have a leader? Does every pattern have a central cause? Most people tend to think so. Increasingly, decentralized models are being chosen for the organizations and technologies they construct in the world, and for the theories they construct about the world. But even as ideas about decentralization spread throughout the culture, there is a deep-seated resistance to them. This text examines how and why this is so and describes innovative computational tools and activities that can help people (even young children) develop new ways of thinking about decentralization, with examples in many different domains. This wide-ranging exploration into the non-intuitive world of decentralized systems and self-organizing phenomena brings together ideas from computer science, education, systems theory, and artificial life, with the aim of making the notion of self-organization more accessible. Using a new massively parallel programming language called StarLogo, Mitchel Resnick shows how the actions and interactions of thousands of artificial "creatures" can be controlled on the computer screen.
For example, a user might write simple programs to describe the actions of thousands of artificial ants, then observe the complex patterns in the ant colony that arise from all of the interactions. Resnick describes how high school students have used StarLogo to create new types of computer simulations, examines how their thinking changed in the process, and concludes by proposing heuristics for thinking about decentralized systems.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Foundations: introduction
- the era of decentralization. Part 2 Constructions: constructionism
- LEGO/logo
- StarLogo
- objects and parallelism. Part 3 Explorations: simulations and stimulations
- slime mould
- artificial ants
- traffic jams
- termites
- turtles and frogs
- turtle ecology
- new turtle geometry
- forest fire
- recursive trees. Part 4 Reflections: the centralized mindset
- beyond the centralized mindset. Part 5 Projections: growing up. Appendices: student participants
- StarLogo overview.
by "Nielsen BookData"