Generative Sciences
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Generative science is an area of research that explores the natural world and its complex behaviours. It explores ways "to generate apparently unanticipated and infinite behaviour based on
deterministic Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and consi ...
and finite rules and parameters reproducing or resembling the behavior of natural and social phenomena". By modelling such interactions, it can suggest that properties exist in the system that had not been noticed in the real world situation. An example field of study is how unintended consequences arise in social processes. Generative sciences often explore natural phenomena at several levels of organization.J. Schmidhuber. (1997
A computer scientist's view of life, the universe, and everything
Foundations of Computer Science: Potential – Theory – Cognition, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 201–208, Springer
Self-organizing natural systems are a central subject, studied both theoretically and by simulation experiments. The study of complex systems in general has been grouped under the heading of " general systems theory", particularly by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Anatol Rapoport,
Ralph Gerard Ralph Waldo Gerard (7 October 1900 – 17 February 1974) was an American neurophysiologist and behavioral scientist known for his wide-ranging work on the nervous system, nerve metabolism, psychopharmacology, and biological basis of schizophrenia ...
, and Kenneth Boulding.


Scientific and philosophical origins

The development of computers and automata theory laid a technical foundation for the growth of the generative sciences. For example: * Cellular automata are mathematical representations of simple entities interacting under
deterministic Determinism is a philosophical view, where all events are determined completely by previously existing causes. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and consi ...
rules to manifest complex behaviours. They can be used to model emergent processes of the physical universe, neural cognitive processes and social behavior. ** Conway's Game of Life is a zero-player game based on cellular automata, meaning that the only input is in setting the initial conditions, and the game is to see how the system evolves.John Conway's Game of Life
/ref> **In 1996 Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell wrote the book ''Growing Artificial Societies'' which proposes a set of automaton rules and a system called ''
Sugarscape Sugarscape is a model for artificially intelligent agent-based social simulation following some or all rules presented by Joshua M. Epstein & Robert Axtell in their book ''Growing Artificial Societies''. Origin Fundaments of Sugarscape models can ...
'' which models a population dependent on resources (called sugar). * Artificial neural networks attempt to solve problems in the same way that the human brain would, although they are still several orders of magnitude less complex than the human brain and closer to the computing power of a worm. Advances in the understanding of the human brain often stimulate new patterns in neural networks. One of the most influential advances in the generative sciences as related to cognitive science came from Noam Chomsky's (1957) development of generative grammar, which separated language generation from semantic content, and thereby revealed important questions about human language. It was also in the early 1950s that psychologists at the MIT including Kurt Lewin,
Jacob Levy Moreno Jacob Levy Moreno (born Iacob Levy; May 18, 1889 – May 14, 1974) was a Romanian-American psychiatrist, psychosociologist, and educator, the founder of psychodrama, and the foremost pioneer of group psychotherapy. During his lifetime, he was rec ...
and Fritz Heider laid the foundations for group dynamics research which later developed into social network analysis.


See also

*


References

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External links

* http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/artsoc.html (Artificial Societies, Virtual Worlds and the Shared Problems and Possibilities of Emergence) * http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html (The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation) Systems theory