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Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems) (Paperback)

by M Resnick (Author) "A flock of birds sweeps across the sky ..." (more)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 181 pages
  • Publisher: MIT Press; New edition edition (3 Mar 1997)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0262680939
  • ISBN-13: 978-0262680936
  • Product Dimensions: 22.6 x 15 x 1 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 241,978 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #42 in  Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Comparative Psychology

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Product Description

Does every group have a leader? Does every pattern have a central cause? Most people tend to think so. Increasingly, decentralized models are being chosen for the organizations and technologies they construct in the world, and for the theories they construct about the world. But even as ideas about decentralization spread throughout the culture, there is a deep-seated resistance to them. This text examines how and why this is so and describes innovative computational tools and activities that can help people (even young children) develop new ways of thinking about decentralization, with examples in many different domains. This wide-ranging exploration into the non-intuitive world of decentralized systems and self-organizing phenomena brings together ideas from computer science, education, systems theory, and artificial life, with the aim of making the notion of self-organization more accessible. Using a new massively parallel programming language called StarLogo, Mitchel Resnick shows how the actions and interactions of thousands of artificial "creatures" can be controlled on the computer screen. For example, a user might write simple programs to describe the actions of thousands of artificial ants, then observe the complex patterns in the ant colony that arise from all of the interactions. Resnick describes how high school students have used StarLogo to create new types of computer simulations, examines how their thinking changed in the process, and concludes by proposing heuristics for thinking about decentralized systems.
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Customer Reviews

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent introduction, 1 Nov 2001
By A Customer
This book is not solely about StarLogo, but it does feature quite prominently. Its main function is to introduce modelling decentralised systems, and it does this using the StarLogo language.

The book is highly readable and covers the basics very well, and delves into some of the more advanced topics as well. A student learning to model systems could do a lot worse than get this book as the starting point. Combine it with 'Adventures in Modeling' and you've pretty much got yourself a good course is modelling, as well as all the software you need.

One minor caveat is that the examples in the book do need some minor modification to work with the latest version of StarLogo, but this is explained on the website. On the whole though, I think it is an excellent book.

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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars A book on Star Logo, 3 Aug 1999
By A Customer
This book is mainly about Star Logo, an extension to the Logo language, you know, this program with a turtle strolling around, for children to get acquainted with computers and plane geometry.

Star Logo has much more features, allowing easy yet sounding powerful implementation of decentralized system, which one famous instance is cellular automaton, and some specific others in the book are ant colonies behavior, forest fires or traffic jams, with the cell of cellular automata being replaced by the notion of an "agent" (less known it seems to the public).

If you need a book for Star Logo, this is the one to get, but if you are looking for artificial life and self organization alone, don't get it.

Excellent bibliography.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Sows the seeds of ideas to explore, 27 Jan 2000
By A Customer
This book is *not* mainly about StarLogo.

The author firstly gives an account of the current trend toward decentralised models in different contexts. I found these first couple chapters enjoyable but wasn't completely convinced by the arguments and examples presented. I felt that the author had stretched reality a little to fit nicely to his ideas. There were very interesting and fresh observations even in those chapters, though.

Don't be put off by the apparently technical nature - this is a very accessible book that explains ideas in a clear and understandable manner. Remarkably, you can get a lot out of the book even if you don't look at (or understand) the StarLogo program listings.

Resnick provides plenty of external references so that you can go and find out more about topics you find interesting. I am, however, a little disappointed that he did not provide a list of general introductory references. People who stumble across this book may want to find out more but be discouraged by the difficulty of some of the referenced text.

I don't believe that there is a particular intended target audience but I'd recommend this as reading for all. Parents, children, and educators especially should find the main ideas (implied and explicit) fascinating. They should be able to use it as a start of exploration into different ways of looking and thinking about the world.

The book is by no means a comprehensive text on decentralised (complex) systems or on emergent behaviour but is a good way to get excited about those ideas!

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenges your centralized way of thinking
The book starts off slow but quickly builds on the principles discussed. I found many chapters fascinating. Read more
Published on 26 May 1999

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is an excellent intro to complex systems
The study of complex systems is a little too trendy at the moment to be conducive to good science. Many of the popular books on the topic are full of entertaining speculation... Read more
Published on 14 Dec 1998

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