there is a wide variety of models to choose from. One that Farmer has given particular attention to is connectionism: the idea of representing a population of interacting agents as a network of “nodes” linked by “connections.” And in that, he has plenty of company. Connectionist models have been popping up everywhere in the past decade or so. Exhibit A has to be the neural network movement, in which researchers use webs of artificial neurons to model such things as perception and memory retrieval—and, not incidentally, to mount a radical attack on the symbol-processing methods of mainstream
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