Hi all,
First, thanks for the SqueakFest2006. It was really awesome to be here, to know all that squeakers, to listen them, and to speak with them (a little). If love is the key to make visitors become residents, thanks for such warm act of love in such nice city :)
I'm now getting back to my academical activities and I'm wondering, after the speak of Yoshiki, if Kedama can be used to make cultural simulations also (may be you remember that I'm interested in the "Cultural Thing" of cognition also). I'm thinking to start with a specific simulations showed in the book The Complexity of Cooperation from Robert Axelrod. It's about culture dissemination.
Axelrod model different cultures as part of a grid (that where the idea of using Kedama come from). Every culture is a cell in that grid and every culture has a number of traits (for example 5) wich can have different values (lets say 10). What Axelrod says is that when two agents (cultures) are similar one to each other (it' means they share the same value in the same trait) they have more possibilities to interact and become even more similar.
The algorithm is something like this:
Repeat these two steps as much as wanted:
1) Select randomly a culture in the grid and select randomly a neighbor of that culture (in such grid neighbors can be on north, south, west or est). 2) This two cultures interact with a probability equal to their cultural similarity (that is, the number of similar values in the same trait of these two cultures). That interaction consist in selecting a trait where this two cultures are different and change the value of that trait for the value of the neighbor.
The process define a set of culture regions. You can find the source code of the implementation of Axelrod's algorithm in:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/Software/CC/CC7/CULTURE.P.html (<- Pascal version) http://www.cscs.umich.edu/Software/CC/CC7/FullCulture.p.html (<- Full Pascal version) http://www.cscs.umich.edu/Software/CC/CC7/CULTURE.BAS.html (<- Visual Basic version)
¿Do you think is feasible to implement the same model in Kedama? If yes, ¿Where is the best way to start implementing it?
Thanks a lot,
Offray
Ps: I will be probably on Wikimania next weekend (I have the scholarship acceptance and now I'm trying to get the proper permissions in the University). So may be we can see there :).
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