Re: Central Control

["David A. Fisher" <dfisher@cert.org>]

>At 2:29 PM -0400 9/29/97, billcl wrote:
>>Mitch Resnick has mentioned how people see central control even when none is
>>present.  I am curious if any one knows a method (psychological instrument,
>>experiments, etc) that one can use to measure how strong that tendency is in
>>different individuals.  One way is simply to show them Starlogo demos and
>>ask them what to explain what they saw.  Are there other ways?  Is there a
>>range that people are distributed along?
>>
>>Any thoughts or ideas?

In research that we are doing related to emergent algorithms, we consider
global visibility on a par with central control and generally do not
consider algorithms that depend on either.  Global visibility, however, is
much easier to distinguish than is central control.  Put another way, any
control that depends on global knowledge of the state of the system as
whole, should be considered central control.