Another CoSMoS paper is being presented at the ALife XII conference which takes in Odense in August.
The paper is related to my PhD work, and in particular what I started out doing, back in the mists of time, relating to Chris Alexander’s Nature of Order. Chris is an architect, of the building variety, and this work relates to his ideas about how the built environment should, and in some cases does, evolve to preserve some properties he thinks important.
In a nutshell,we built a bit of software that places blobs in a two-dimensional space in a manner that attempts to mimic some of Chris’s properties. In particular ones that he calls Positive Space and Levels of Scale. The idea is that, to some extent, the diagrams look rather like city plans, especially the ones for ancient cities that have arisen from geography, geology and centuries of human activity.
If nothing else, it makes for some pretty diagrams. Once the full paper is published, look here for the text.