Brian explains it all....

Those of you who might wonder just the *teeniest* bit about
about Brian's usual signal-to-bile ratio could, of course, decide
to root about and see what's out there. One could take a look
at the Amsterdam Catalog of Compositional Algorithms of Alcedo
Coenen at

http://mars.let.uva.nl/ACCA/ACCA.html

There's also a couple of secondary artifacts where folks who're
actually *teaching* at *academic* institutions work hard at
assembling collections of pointers on the subject as they strive
to brainwash, bamboozle, and otherwise indoctrinate the poor,
stupid sheep who are their students... :-) Until such time as
Brian sees fit to savage their work, you can peruse one such
example that I've sent students to at Stanford at

http://cmn19.stanford.edu/~tkunze/algobib.html

These two sources have, admittedly, not been vetted by the
bias-free (e.g., Brian) and may thus exercise a pernicious
effect on the unwary reader. I think they *do* suggest that
there are other approaches and that the discourse may be
more nuanced than Brian's jeremiad contra the lowly
daisy-chain may suggest.

I'll close with one bit of Brian Eno's recently published bit
of demystification, shoptalk, and vernacular insight "A
Year With Swollen Appendices" [Faber and Faber, 1996
ISBN 0-571-17995-9] for your edification. From
a note to Stewart Brand (31 August):

"A by-the-by: I've noticed that all these complex systems
generators (such as Life and Boids (the flocking one) and
"The Great Learning") have something in common - just 3
rules for each. And these 3 also seem to share a certain
similarity of relationship: one rule generates ideas, another
reduces, another maintains. I suppose it's obvious, really.
But perhaps it's not trivial to wonder if those three conditions
are all you need to specify in order to create a complex
system generator (and then to wonder how those are actually
expressed in complex systems we see around us)."

With regards,
Gregory




_
I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one,
paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only
maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard
Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI



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