Instructor: Douglas Blank
Course Webpage: cs.brynmawr.edu/cs361
Course Blog: emergence.blogs.brynmawr.edu
Email: dblank@cs.brynmawr.edu
Class time: M/W 1:00 - 2:30pm
Class location: Park Science 230
Office hours: Monday 10am - 11am, Wednesday 10am - 11am, and by appointment.
CMSC B361 Emergence
A multidisciplinary exploration of the interactions underlying both real and simulated systems, such as ant colonies, economies, brains, earthquakes, biological evolution, artificial evolution, computers and life. These emergent systems are often characterized by simple, local interactions that collectively produce global phenomena not apparent in the local interactions (cross-listed as BIOL B361).
| Week |
Topic |
Assignment |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1: Aug 31, Sep 2 |
What is Emergence? |
Read the active essay Exploring Emergence |
| Week 2: Sep 7, Sep 9 |
The Game of Life and Cellular Automata |
Netlogo and Python |
| Week 3: Sep 14, Sep 16 |
Cellular Automata |
Pyro Module on Cellular Automata |
| Week 4: Sep 21, Sep 23 |
Emergence everywhere? |
Discuss Steven Johnson's Emergence: Blog posts and comments |
| Week 5: Sep 28, Sep 30 |
Universal Computation and Evolution |
Evolutionary Systems: the Genetic Algorithm and Genetic Programming: Revisiting the Edge of Chaos, Documentation on ga.py, and gaca.py |
| Week 6: Oct 5, Oct 7 |
Review |
Project Proposals Discussion |
| Week 7: Oct 12, Oct 14 |
Fall Break |
No classes |
| Week 8: Oct 19, Oct 21 |
NetLogo |
Explore NetLogo and Project Presentations are Due |
| Week 9: Oct 26, Oct 28 |
Bigger things than just pixels: People, Consciousness, and Sheep |
Read Metacat by J. Marshall, and instructions on running the program. |
| Week 10: Nov 2, Nov 4 |
Consciousness and thought |
Monday, discuss Metacat program and paper. Wednesday, discuss Connectionist Foundations |
| Week 11: Nov 9, Nov 11 |
Neural Networks and Emergent Systems. Demonstration of learning. |
Work on Projects. For Monday: write an essay on "Eistein's Brain vs. a Brain of Eisteins" and post to blog. Internet scavenger hunt: do a search on your assigned phrase, as related to emergence. |
| Week 12: Nov 16, Nov 18 |
Social Networks |
Reading 1: Community structure in social and biological networks, or Reading 2: FilmTrust: Movie Recommendations using Trust in Web-based Social Networks |
| Week 13: Nov 23, Nov 25 |
Language |
|
| Week 14: Nov 30, Dec 2 |
||
| Week 15: Dec 7, Dec 9 |
Final Presentations |
Software:
Python and selected libraries.
NetLogo
Avida, artifical life environment
Readings:
Emergence: The connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson.
The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake.
Emergent Computation by Mitchell and Forrest.
A new kind of science by Stephen Wolfram.
All graded work will be graded on a point scale, with the total worth of the assignment proportional to its complexity and difficulty. At the end of the semester, final grades will be calculated as a weighted average of all grades according to the following weights: