RE: Central Control

[Randy Picker <sppt@midway.uchicago.edu>]

I would not have thought that knowledge should equal control.

We have a variety of institutions that aggregate widely-held information 
and make it generally available (newspapers, stock markets, etc.). 
Depending on how good a job the summary statistics do in capturing the 
distributed information, this may be akin to global visibility, but this 
doesn't say anything obvious about central control.

Randy


Prof. Randal C. Picker 
                                                      email: 
r-picker@uchicago.edu
The Law School 
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773-702-0864
The University of Chicago 
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- -----Original Message-----
From:	David A. Fisher [SMTP:dfisher@cert.org]
Sent:	Tuesday, October 07, 1997 6:37 PM
To:	starlogo-users@media.mit.edu
Subject:	Re: Central Control


>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.