V - Transformations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
Concerned with the general concept of transformations, this chapter focuses on the overlappings of ‘fish and chips.’ Against the backdrop of an epistemology of computer simulation, it describes how a biologization of computer science coincided with a computerization of (swarm) biology. Biological studies, beginning around the year 1980, were increasingly informed by digital media. As a retreat from nature, they employed computer-supported data processing, agent-based computer simulation models, and sophisticated computer graphic imagery. For this epistemology, interference and noise received a constitutive function for setting the parameters and tuning the dynamic models themselves. Conversely, biological knowledge about swarms made its way into computational programming routines and likewise informed fields like agent-based modelling and collective robotics.
Keywords: boids, computer graphic imagery, swarm intelligence, agentbased modelling, artificial life, history and epistemology of simulation
Fish and Chips
A book investigating the role of fish schools at the intersection of biology and computer science can hardly refrain from using the subtitle ‘Fish and Chips.’ Although fish-school research has done much, as we have seen, to assist the fishing industry, I am less interested in British comfort food here than I am in the operative and performative function of agent-based computer simulations of schools. Whereas the previous two chapters dealt with the ‘fishy business’ of experimental and empirical studies, their optical and acoustic methods of observation, and their physico-mathematical modeling – over the course of which the ‘naturalness’ of fish schools was gradually subtracted and replaced by sets of functional principles – the aim of the present chapter is to elucidate the final stages of this subtraction. In addition to fulfilling this aim, however, I will also have to focus on a historiographical and epistemological recursion that marked a transformation in our knowledge of swarm collectives: against the backdrop of an epistemology of computer simulation, a biologization of computer science coincided with a computerization of (swarm) biology.
In what follows, I intend to examine the liminal area between fish and chips, within which biology and computer science overlap. The technology of computer simulation expands the realm of addressable problems by increasing the applicability of quantitative analyses. Simulations treat multiple variables simultaneously and make them manageable in time. In real time, that is, they directly address the behavior of complex systems without needing to be based on any specific reference to empirical data.
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- ZootechnologiesA Media History of Swarm Research, pp. 229 - 296Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019