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argument rehearsed earlier in the context of aesthetics and Musicolour—
cybernetics suggests an unfamiliar and productive stance in science, as well
the arts, entertainment, and teaching.
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Cas, social science, and F-22s
Pask discontinued his work on chemical computers in the early 1960s, and
we should think about this along the lines already indicated in the previous
chapter. Like Beer's biological computers, Pask's chemical ones were a valiant
attempt at radical innovation undertaken with no support, more or less as a
hobby, typified by “two very tired young men” trailing a microphone out of a
window as the sun came up over Baker Street. We could also note that even
within the cybernetics community, no one, as far as I know, sought to emu-
late and elaborate Pask's efforts—this in contrast, for example, to the many
emulators of Walter's tortoises. Meanwhile, from the later 1950s onward
typing trainers and teaching machines held out more immediate prospects of
paying the rent. But one spin-off from Pask's research is interesting to follow
briefly.
In an attempt to understand the dynamics of his threads, Pask undertook
a series of numerical simulations of their behavior, which involved a form
of idealization which is now very familiar in the sciences of complexity: he
represented them schematically as two-dimensional cellular automata (chap.
4). In these simulations the dish of ferrous sulphate was replaced by a two-
dimensional space, with “automata” residing at the intersections of a Carte-
sian grid. These automata evolved in discrete time steps according to simple
rules for persistence, movement, reproduction, and death according to their
success in exploiting a finite supply of “food.” The early chemical-computer
publications reported “hand simulations” of populations of automata, and in
1969 Pask reported on a set of computer simulations which prefigured more
visible developments in work on cellular automata and artificial life a decade
or two later (Pask 1969a).
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Interestingly, however, Pask framed his account of
these computer simulations not as an exploration of chemical computing but
as a study of the emergence of norms and roles in social systems. Over the past
decade there has been something of an explosion of social-science research
on computer simulations of populations of automata.
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It is not clear to me
whether Pask's work was a formative historical contribution to this new field
or whether we have here another instance of independent reinvention. What
is clear is that this contemporary work on social simulation, like Pask's, can be
added to our list of examples of ontology in action.
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