Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel MicroworldsHow does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can qhelp people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems—and help them move beyond the centralized mindset. |
Other editions - View all
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel ... Mitchel Resnick No preview available - 1997 |
Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel ... Mitchel Resnick No preview available - 1994 |
Common terms and phrases
activate-demon approach Ari and Fadhil Artificial ask patch-here behavior Benjamin Callie Cambridge cars cellular automata cemetery center-turtle centralized mindset chemical circle-turtles clear-all clone colony command complex Connection Machine construct create create-turtle creatures critical density dead ants decentralized ideas decentralized systems demon empty space environment Epistemology example explore fire food source forward Frank and Ramesh frogs green growing high-school students ifelse interactions iterations LEGO LEGO/Logo length-gene Logo turtle machines microworlds MIT Media Laboratory models neighbors nest number of piles object-oriented object-oriented programming objects Papert patch patch-setup patterns percent phenomena pheromone pheromone trail positive feedback puddle radar trap random recursive Resnick robots screen self-organizing set-heading set-patchcolor Seymour Papert Sherry Turkle simple simulation slime-mold cells spread StarLogo program StarLogo turtles step-size strategies termites tion tles traffic jams turtle geometry turtle-setup turtles and frogs turtles move users versions of Logo wander wood chips