RE: [humanmarkup-comment] New Book on a New Kind of Science

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Pattern recognition is a key concept.   
That is why regular expressions get so much 
mileage for so little when combined with a 
markup tag inside a structure.   Then co-occurrence 
constraints.

But latency and choosing a reliable response are the lock.  
Learning or adaptive systems are the usual combination 
when a key is insufficient. 

Pattern recognition falls apart given superstition.
The trick is to identify and react correctly before 
you are dead.  In WWII, the Brits armed aircraft with 
30 cal ammunition because they could put more of it 
in an aircraft (resulting in the Canadian conversion 
of the lend-lease American bombers) so they could 
shoot at more targets.  Americans used 
50 cal because they wanted to down a target with 
fewer shots.   So shoot at more targets with less 
kill power, or shoot at the same targets and kill 
more often?

What is learned affects what is optimized; what 
is optimized and works is learned.  I think what 
autopoesis says is that systems evolve to preserve 
themselves, thus, create systems to nurture the 
systems that enable them to create systems.  The 
problem is that a thoroughly optimized system 
is fragile and when the environment shifts unexpectedly, 
often cannot adapt whereas, a less optimized system 
may be slow but adaptive given the redundancies it 
has to spare.   Logistics teaches to favor simple 
systems with redundancy if the conflict is long, 
and highly optimized systems if the conflict is short.

So one can't just identify a pattern.  One must 
identify predictable patterns given where they 
occur relative to a process (a higher level pattern) 
to determine precisely when and how to affect 
the production.  In short, where is it 'sensitive'?

Given the advent of the early German jet fighters, 
which ammunition was best for the job?

Find the pattern in the process where the least 
amount of energy or supply does the most work.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com]

In case you don't hear much from me in the next few days, you can 
blame it on Rob Nixon who told me about a book by Stephen Wolfram, A 
New Kind of Science. If you have followed my commentary over the 
years wrt many scientific issues, specifically in the area of 
epistemology, linguistics, semiotics, and now autopoiesis, not 
mention complex adaptive systems and stratified complexity, then you 
know that the one single concept which has time and again cropped up 
from me has been: pattern recognition...

I wanted it and I wasn't getting it. Well, I now have 1280 pages to 
plough through to see if Wolfram got it. It sure looks like he did. 
Sorry, but there really isn't anything more important for me to be 
doing right now, so I'll see y'all when I come up for air. Consider 
this an apology in advance for some tasks I said I was going to do 
soon but which I won't be doing until I'm satisfied about this.