Thanks to everyone who attended my session this morning at Flash on the Beach. From the stage, I saw nothing but darkness – so I hope not too many people were using the hour to take a quick nap. Here are some links to projects I showed during the presentation, as well as the reading list I showed briefly at the end of the session.
- Plumage – http://www.blprnt.com/plumage
- Variance – http://www.blprnt.com/variance
- At Home in the Universe, Stuart Kauffman (1995)
- The Nature of Economies, Jane Jacobs (1999)
- A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram (2002)
- The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki (2004)
- Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky (2008)
As always, I’d love to hear questions and feedback – blprnt@blprnt.com




















6 Comments
Thanks for an incredibly engaging presentation. I don’t think I knew what I was expecting from your presentation and I certainly didn’t get it! But what I did get was several new circles to wind it’s curiosity around. And that’s a real gem! I don’t think I’ll be taking on life and evolution quite yet. But I am thinking about a pattern that emulates the rules of that govern the very serious decision of choosing a seat on the tube (subway) which admitted already seem to bes some form of anti-flocking but hey it’s a starting point.
Hi Jeremy,
Just wanted to say thanks for the talk, how much I enjoyed it, and your enthusiasm for it.
I was thinking how the colour-trading experiment might be made even more interesting by perhaps the possibility of particular sub-groups of pixels trading in different colour-spaces (lab, cmyk) which would be of no interest to other pixels (which may also have the side effect of making red *not* the most-valued colour). Would these sub-groups be analogous to a city’s gangs perhaps? What would happen if one gang’s resources ran low? Would there be a mechanism to affect competition between groups?
Though no doubt you are over this and onto other projects now!
Thanks again, Dave
Gerry – interestingly enough, there’s a section in The Wisdom of Crowds about picking subway seats! It’s a simple system but actually fairly interesting.
Dave – No, this project is far from over! I like the ideas that you are proposing. When I’m a bit more recovered from jetlag I will mull them over more!
Jeremy – awesome presentation! Just a note to say thanks for the inspiration.
Better late than never, I just wanted to say thanks for the FOTB session. Yours was one of my stand-out presentations of the event, some of the ideas really got into my head. My only complaint would have been that I didn’t have time to write down the reading list, and hey, here it is!
A lot of what you spoke about put me in my of the processes behind formation of stars and planets – particles attracted / repelled by each other, their properties changing as they form clusters etc etc. Have you ever investigated anything along those lines?
Awesome stuff, thanks again and hope to see you at FOTB Brighton ‘09 (my boss being unlikely to fund a trip to FOTB Miami…).
Hey, just wanted to drop by and thank you for your session at FOTB this year. Your enthusiasm and the subject itself was of great fluffyness! I loved the whole emergence, chaos theory and beyond stuff. Been wanting to delve into it myself for a while now. Somehow the thought of using algorithms and controlled systems to create something beyond the parts of the whole intrigues me indefinately.
Keep on adventring!
Cheers
-N
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[...] Jeremy Thorp – Emergence (blog post/links) [...]
Flash on the Beach 08 / Day 2 / Sessions…
Flash on the Beach 2008, Brighton, UK – Day Two
September 30, 2008
Aral Balkan – Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit (or 5 Rules for Hedonistic Creatives)
Jeremy Thorp – Emergence
Grant Skinner – Things Every ActionScript Developer Should Know
Speaker Jam Sessi…