🚀 go-pugleaf

From Bruce Abbott (990502.0915 EST)]

To stave off further discussion of what Herbert Simon did or did not say
about the ant in _The Sciences of the Artificial (1969), I herewith present
the relevant paragraphs from "Chapter 2 -- The Psychology of Thinking:
Embedding Artifice in Nature."
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We watch an ant make his laborious way across a wind- and wave-molded beach.
He moves ahead, angles to the right to ease his climb up a steep dunelet,
detours around a pebble, stops for a moment to exchange information with a
compatriot.  Thus he makes his weaving, halting way back to his home.  So as
not to anthropomorphize about his purposes, I sketch the path on a piece of
paper.  It is a sequence of irregular, angular segments -- not quite a
random walk, for it has an underlying sense of direction, of aiming toward a
goal.

I show the unlabeled sketch to a friend.  Whose path is it?  An expert
skier, perhaps, slaloming down a steep and somewhat rocky slope.  Or a
sloop, beating upwind in a channel dotted with islands or shoals.  Perhaps
it is a path in a more abstract space:  the course of search of a student
seeking the proof of a theorem in geometry.

Whoever made the path, and in whatever space,  why is it not straight;  why
does it not aim directly from its starting point to its goal?  In the case
of the ant (and, for that matter, the others), we know the answer.  He has a
general sense of where home lies, but he cannot forsee all the obstacles
between.  He must adapt his course repeatedly to the difficulties he
encounters, and often detour uncrossable barriers.  His horizons are very
close, so that he deals with each obstacle as he comes to it;  he probes for
ways around or over it, without much thought for future obstacles.  It is
easy to trap him into deep detours.

Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, hard to
describe.  But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the
beach, not a complexity in the ant.  On that same beach, another small
creature,  with a home at the same place as the ant, might well follow a
very similar path.

Some years ago, Grey Walter built an electromechanical "turtle" capable of
exploring a surface and of periodically seeking its nest, where its
batteries were recharged.  More recently, goal-seeking automata have been
under construction in several laboratories, including Professor Marvin
Minsky's in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Suppose we undertook to design such
an automaton with the approximate dimensions of an ant, similar means of
locomotion, and comparable sensory acuity.  Suppose we provided it with a
few simple adaptive capabilities:  when faced with a steep slope, try
climbing it obliquely;  when faced with an insuperable obstacle, try
detouring;  and so on.  (Except for problems of miniaturization of
components, the present state of the art would surely support such a
design.)  How different would its behavior be from the behavior of the ant?

These speculations suggest a hypothesis, one that could as well have been
derived as corollary from our previous discussion of artifactual objects:

        An ant, viewed a a behaving system, is quite simple.  The apparent
        complexity of its behavior over time is largely a reflection of
        the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself.

We may find this hypothesis initially plausible or implausible.  It is an
empirical hypothesis, to be tested by seeing whether attributing quite
simple properties to the ant's adaptive system will permit us to account for
its behavior in the given or similar environments.  For the reasons
developed at length in my previous chapter, the truth or falsity of the
hypothesis should be independent of whether ants, viewed more
microscopically, are simple or complex systems.  At the level of cells or
molecules, ants are demonstrably complex;  but these microscopic details of
the inner environment may be largely irrelevant to the ant's behavior in
relation to the outer environment.  That is why an automation, though
completely different at the microscopic level, might nevertheless simulate
the ant's gross behavior.
        Simon, H. (1969), Pp. 23-25.
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There's quite a bit more in that chapter that serves to clarify what Simon
has in mind, as applied toward understanding human (rather than ant)
behavior.  However, I hope the above-quoted material is enough to get a
clear sense of Simon's argument.

Regards,

Bruce