🚀 go-pugleaf

[From Bruce Abbott (990423.1235 EST)]

>Bill Powers (990423.0248 MDT) --

>What Simon was talking about, as I would see it now, was the basic PCT
>concept of achieving constant ends by variable means. But when Simon wrote
>that piece there was no way to say this, because the accepted wisdom was
>still that the environment, in the final analysis, controlled behavior.
>Remember that this was the same Simon who wrote that the organism is just
>one huge complex input-output function. Knowing what we know now, it's easy
>to read an understanding of control processes into descriptions that
>actually came from an entirely different concept of organisms.

Well, that's one way to spin it: Pooh pooh pooh pooh.  I have a different
opinion.

Unlike most, I have actually _read_ Simon's "Sciences of the Artificial."
What Simon was talking about was that the ant, as a behaving organism in
this situation, is basically simple.  The complexity seen in its behavior is
due, not to the complexity of the ant, but to the complexity of the environment.

Given that the ant's behavior in the situation described (returning to its
nest over rough, obstacle-filled terrain) can be elegantly described by the
few simple equations that specify a particular control system, I find
Simon's observation right on the money.  The complexity of the ant's
behavior is due not to the complexity of the ant but to the many
disturbances which must be countered, that threaten to deviate the ant's
path from its reference direction.

Bruce A.