(2003-04-15) Doctorow On Wright

Cory Doctorow's notes from Will Wright's PcForum 2003 talk. System Dynamics spun out of the idea of daisy chaining simple electronic components to make complex devices, from oil refineries and other paradigmatic systems of the time. It was used to model everything. The predictions of system dynamics didn't account for Chaos Theory and so small errors led to bad conclusions - system dynamics predicted global collapse in 1987... Chaos Theory... Complex Adaptive Systems... Adaptive Landscape... Hill Climbing... Network Theory...

Here's the transcript. Here is a simulation of The Sims Online, itself a simulation. These dots represent new players coming into the game... So it is a simulated system of building social networks. We're using systems like this to study our larger systems before we deploy them. The sliders allow me to change the parameters from the game... We build and use a lot of models like this - several a week - when we're playing with dynamic systems. They help us map a dynamic space and develop an instinctive understanding for which dynamics are working and which ones aren't. We'll build a model, play around with it and tune it, and do some hill climbing in that dynamic region until we hit a hilltop that we think is good and usable. Then we'll take the code ideas and dynamics, bring them back into the real code base and burn them into the game. This could be interesting eventually, maybe, in the design of Social Software, or maybe EcoSystem-s of social software like BlogWeb and WikiWeb.