Bruce's journal (original) (raw)

One of my colleagues just commented "I could spend the rest of my life smoking dope and playing Mario Kart and never get bored."

I find that to be probably the scariest thing I've heard in ages. No, really.

Addendum: Someone just pointed out that this comment could be taken two ways. It's either a declaration of a 'closed mind' or of the Zen 'no mind'. The former is an absence of desire out of fear or laziness, the latter out of knowing that happiness can be found everywhere and in everything.

Unfortunately in this case, with this colleague, I'm fairly sure it's the former.

Just to demonstrate that I'm not really giving work much attention, here's a long but, to my mind, interesting article on artificial life simulations that show complex sociological behaviour deriving from agents acting on limited information and personal preference.

Of particular interest to me was the description of Sugarscape (an artificial life simulation of a society centred on the search for and accumulation of food - in this case, sugar). Back in my hobbyist programming days, I created a very similar thing based around ants. Each one had a 'genetic code' - a string of bits - that formed their aggression levels (always attacks, defends if attacked or does not attack), greed (always eats, eats when somewhat hungry, eats when is critical), eyesight, colour (red or black), loyalty to their own colour, gender, ability to procreate and so on. When two ants bred, the offspring got a random slice from one parent's gene applied over the gene from the other parent - plus a small possibility of one randomly flipped bit (to prevent the society settling completely into a world of clones).

Invariably, I ended up with ants, 50% male and 50% female, that only foraged a small way away from their starting position, had good eyesight, ate only when necessary and were entirely passive. The only major disappointment was that this settling of ways only occured after one colour had completely wiped out the other - I never had a run where the two colours lived in peace.

Addendum: I got home and ran it again on my much quicker, modern machine and realised I'd missed out the most amusing of the outcomes. One of the 'genes' controlled the ants' likelihood of successful procreation (either 33%, 66% or 100%). The population usually settled to only a 33% chance of success.