> 1) The whole dogs/wolves/humans analogy. Wrong. All of the
> aforementioned animals are SOCIAL creatures. Presumably, the
> "territoriality" he mentions exists to facilitate social interaction.
> And that approach, although it doesn't fit his individualist
> political views, fits better with his comments on the open
> source development community, rather than some dubious
> explanation of how animals are "hardwired" with an intuitive
> notion of property.
I think he meant it as a general example of both. Wolves aren't, by
anyone's common understanding, considered "social" creatures. They travel
in a pack, for security maybe, but when food is scarce they'll fight each
other to the death over it, or for male dominance or for territory. There
is, however, a certain "code" and a mechanism for marking territory that
wolves respect, so that they don't all kill each other. Humans do the
same thing, only much more formally with fences and property laws. I
believe this is the trend to which he was referring.
> The fractal analogy for how and where people choose to develop would
> indicate that new development could continue at multiple levels,
> in parallel.
I think he would agree with you. (Which is why he made the analogy). The
reference to "moving on to applications" was directed at the frontier of
development, not the whole.
> 3) The N^2 bit was worked a bit too hard. Handwavy. How is a
> "control" hierarchy N^2 in complexity? It would seem that
> any hierarchy is logarithmic in complexity by nature... the
> proper model is a tree.
No, becuase on many programming projects, each individual must communicate
with every other individual... no groups ever function in a perfect
hierarchical structure. (If we could, we wouldn't have problems with
bureaucracies in the United States). If you need to know something about
Joe's code, you don't send an email to the prog. manager and wait for a
reply, possibly with second-hand muddled information, you send an email
directly to Joe. Thus the n^2 communication network.
-C.2
_____________________________________________________________
| Brian Carp | P.O.Box 202627 |
| Yale University | New Haven, CT |
| Calhoun College '01 | 06520-2627 |
| 203-436-0471 | brian.carp@yale.edu |
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