Waiting for update…

As per usual, updating Eclipse proves to be a PITA.  Thought I had everything planned out this time, ready for the drop, but a quick update on top of the update brought the program to its (gigabyte sized) knees.  While I’m re-updating, figure I may as well post my recent exploits… such as they are.

After my meeting with Inman this week, in which I was able to show my toy “unlimited” self-assembly system, we’ve decided the best way to go forward is to get complicated single-scale assembly going with arbitrary parts.  That should, in theory, get me to assembling “complicated” structures of any size.  I’ve been looking for a drop-in system for assembling complicated swarm formations, and may have finally found one from Elkaim and Kelbey, but only for identical agents.  A consequence of multi-scale assembly is that you get multi-scale parts at the end of the day / week / sim, and ideally we want to assemble things out of both little parts and big parts.  I’d call this process “heterogeneous self-assembly,” but google suggests that either nobody knows anything about it or other people found a better term for it.  I’ll keep looking.

I’ve also had some interesting (to me) thoughts about defining structures of multiple agents as informational entities.   There was an interesting paper about using information theory to automatically locate sensors from raw sensor data by Polani’s people?, if you considered the sensor data as large information vectors.  You could do the same for coordinates of agents moving through an environment, and dynamically place the agents in the same “information metric” as the sensors.  Agents in structures would have their information correlated, is my hypothesis, and so would tend to group in this information space.  More interestingly, if this was the case, multi-scale assembly might generate hierarchical information grouping.  If this was a requirement for multi-scale assembly, that would give some really pretty bounds on what kind of systems can exhibit this behavior in information terms.  Of course, I don’t really know anything about information theory, so getting to the testable point of these hypothesis is gonna be a steep slope involving lots, and lots, and lots of statistical practice.  Hmm.