23 April 2006

Nicholas Gessler
gessler@ucla.edu
www.bol.ucla.edu/~gessler

Home Office:
PO Box 706
Topanga, CA 90290-0706
Phone: (310) 455-1630


DEGREES:

DISSERTATION & CURRENT RESEARCH:

Artificial Culture - Experiments in Synthetic Anthropology.

Empirically, culture is the product of individuals, groups, artifacts, workplaces, architectures and settlements in their natural and social environments, a complex web of energy and information interacting both within and among various levels of complexity. Cultures are different, and within a culture each member shares both similarities and differences with others. Within an individual mind there are different and competing thoughts. Further complexify the human situation, cognition does not reside exclusively in one's head; it is unevenly distributed in one's natural, social and technological environments. Culture is the product that emerges, through dynamical hierarchical synthesis, from these unruly things. More formally, we might define culture as the pattern of activity interconnecting multiple webs of mutual causation, a massively parallel multiagent computational process of intermediation. Everywhere in human experience we find complexity which defies traditional description and analysis. Such complexities are largely intractable to discursive and mathematical representations, but the "new sciences of complexity" offer some promising alternatives. Although computational languages for describing, explaining and understanding these dynamic interactions came into being around 1950, the means for investigating their entailments have only recently become easily available. Artificial Culture is the research enterprise that extends work which began with distributed artificial intelligence, artificial life and artificial society, towards a new scientific practice of synthetic anthropology. Necessarily creative, yet cautiously critical and informed by practice and experiment, Artificial Culture recasts discursive and mathematical cultural theory as simulations in evolutionary computational . To accomplish this we synthesize a hypothetical world by encoding a multitude of agent individuals, along with their social and physical environments, inside a simulation. By varying the parameters of their world, or letting it evolve on its own, we can evaluate the entailments of an entire suite of theoretical models. In this way we are better able to describe, understand and explain the complex web of biological and cultural processes that distinguish us as human. Experiments of this kind allow us to synthesize large constellations of alternative counterfactual "what if"scenarios and observe the outcomes of different patterns of similarity and difference, individual and group (local and global) interaction, and ideational and material agency. We have over 150 simulations generating the consequences of alternative kinship systems and marriage rules, alternative foraging strategies on alternative patterns of resources, alternative strategies for playing iterated prisoner's dilemma, alternative preferences for segregation, as well as diffusion, cellular automata and evolutionary models, applications for geography (GIS, GPS), robotics and realworld sensing and actuation. My present research focuses on facilitating automatic second-order emergence in artificial worlds. This challenge has been addressed in three international workshops under the rubrics of computational synthesis, dynamical ontology and hierarchical selection. Our common goal is to build simulations in which local rules automatically synthesize global patterns, which, in turn, may automatically become the primitive constructors (relative local rules) for even higher levels of organization. This work contributes to the convergence of evolutionary and computational epistemologies which we expect to provide new insights into distributed cultural cognition, the rich intermediation between humans and their social, natural and technological environments --- the evolution and origin of the rich variety of cultural things-that-think and work.

MEMBERSHIP AND AWARDS:

TEACHING:
Pioneering courses in hands-on cultural programming, multiagent simulation, emergence and evolution with graphical visualizations in Borland Rapid Application Development platform for the universal and ubiquitous standard language of C++ for Windows PCs. No previous computer programming experience required.

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