Re: of(f) course

[Vanessa Stevens Colella <vanessa@media.mit.edu>]

No such thing as a silly question.  In fact, one of the things that I think
makes learning about  emergent systems challenging is developing an
intution for why the "average" is not always the result.

-- Vanessa


>Staffan Liljegren wrote:
> > Each person in the audience could guide either up-down
> > or left-right and this was then fed into navigation
> > of the virtual airplane. The emergent behaviour -
> > of course - was that the virtual aircraft was safely
> > guided through most of the  landscape.
>
>
> My question is "why "of course"?" It seems to me that whenever there is a
>conflict in turning up/down or left/right to avoid an obstacle the audience
>would react differently and the average would be a head-on collision.
> How could that be solved without barring some "emergent" alternatives? Or
>does
>"emergent" in this setting only mean "the most common behaviour" (with some
>default option perhaps ...?).
> A way to put the question might be "how does emergent behaviour avoid the
>average?".
>
> This might be a silly question - if it is I hope Vanessa will edit it :-)
>
>
> /Christer


Vanessa Stevens Colella
vanessa@media.mit.edu
Epistemology and Learning Group
MIT Media Lab
617-253-5988
http://www.media.mit.edu/~vanessa