[FRIAM] Thread Bust: WAS: stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

[Jon Zingale]

*Usefulness* is almost certainly intensional. An *Image* can either be a
beacon or a beckoning siren, with no way to distinguish from the type
signature alone. That is, the use of an image may be maximally stateful.

Discussion was at a point like this one, parallel discussions about
canalization and  Sober's epiphenomenator, from which Glen's image of
diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) emerged. I am very thankful for the
ideas that blossomed in the process of stepping through those
implementation details, those months back[⍼].

To write Sober's sort in the functional style is trivial, the type
signature is obvious. In this sense, Sober's sort is prototypical of
pure extensionality. However, to know the details of where one colored
ball touches another of the same, intensionality creeps in and the
purity of the code slips toward the stateful.

With DLAs, something akin to stigmergy (though maybe not the same thing
as stigmergy) appears. The particular form that the DLA takes is path
dependent, that a local patch of the forming surface has access to
capture a freely drifting particle is a function of the aggregates form,
which is a function of the aggregates history. In a funny sense, one
can claim, "stimulation of particles by the performance they have
achieved"[⍾], with past "behavior" *canalizing* future "behavior".

[⍼]
https://github.com/jonzingale/Haskell/tree/67464a88f77d52954bdae617406d212a534bae44/blinky/diffusion_limited_aggregation
[⍾]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy#:~:text=Stimulation%20of%20workers%20by%20the%20performance%20they%20have%20achieved
.
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