5 Experimental Protocol
Rediscovering Computational Autopoiesis
3 The Phenomena
The newly developed program is called SCL (for Substrate-Catalyst-Link) [6]. This has been implemented using the SWARM<Note 2> simulation system, developed at the Santa Fe Institute<Note 3>.
A conscious decision was taken that SCL would not be based on the algorithm originally published by Varela et al., but should rather reflect an independent implementation of the same qualitative chemistry. This stemmed partly from the previously documented problems with the original algorithm [5]; but it also reflected a desire to test the robustness of the autopoietic phenomena--i.e. are they perhaps reliant on some artifact of the original program and/or algorithm, or are they robust outcomes from the given qualitative chemistry.
The version of SCL used to generate the results described in this paper (v0.05.01) differs in minor ways from that described in the previously published documentation (v0.04) [6]. The complete source code relating to SCL v0.05.01 is available as:
ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/users-contrib/anarchy/scl-0.05.01.tar.gz
The SCL data files relating to the experiments described here are available in:
ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/users-contrib/anarchy/scl-data00.tar.gz
A key to the display of the three particle types in SCL is provided in figure 1.
Figure 1: Key to Particle Types.
5 Experimental Protocol
Rediscovering Computational Autopoiesis
3 The Phenomena
Copyright © 1997 All Rights Reserved.
Timestamp: Tue Apr 22 22:10:03 GMT 1997