31–40 of 93 posts
I understand advancing your clock to synchronize flashes, but doesn't this presuppose that the clocks run at the same speed?
When I turned on "Show Clocks" in the simulation it indeed looked like the clocks ran at identical durations. Seems like this would be difficult in nature.
I did the same thing a few years ago! My fireflies didn't move around though. https://www.michaelfogleman.com/static/fireflies/
I saw your comment: "The cells need not have identical individual frequencies to reach sychronization."
This seems counter-intuitive to me.
Parable of the polygons is extremely questionable. For one, it attempts to have its cake while eating it too, by pretending it's an abstract demonstration about choices while explicitly calling out to hot topics in diversity, implying a clear causal link. For another, the model involves discrete agents on a discrete grid making decisions based on their immediate 8 square neighborhood, with no persistence or hysteresi…
If you're so passionate about it, you should go implement these changes to show how the model fails. I would read that, if it were done well. It's not obvious to me that simply changing the radius or grid geometry would have the effect you claim. Your objection is just that the model is too simple, but everyone knows linear regression predicts quite a lot, quadratic polynomials estimate physical motion very well, etc…
(I don't generally like looking at people's comment history, but one, you're absolutely spot-on that it would be easy to change the simulation - it's public domain and it's in JavaScript, this is Hacker News, if you don't know how to edit the JS console yourself there are tons of people who will gladly help if you ask, so the lack of curiosity is interesting. And two, I've seen some sort of shift in more vocal MRA-adjacent / alt-right-adjacent viewpoints on this site in recent weeks and I've been kind of curious where it's coming from.)
Anyway, in the hope of not dragging this too far off-topic: 'tnone, do you have a specific change you'd like to see implemented in the simulation? I'd be happy to implement the change and rehost it and see what happens. I think there are genuine criticisms to be made (for instance, https://github.com/ncase/polygons/issues/9 sounds worth some investigation, despite the phrasing of the comment thread). But given how easy it is to apply actual data to these questions, I think we should do that to avoid FUD.
In particular, how about changing the radius to be the surrounding 24 squares (two steps out, instead of one), or making it less likely that an individual polygon will move again shortly after it has moved?
I did not realize you could scroll down on first viewing. If this weren't at 400+ upvotes when I saw it, I would have thought that was it.
My only hang-up with the explanation/simulation is, why do the fireflies all have clocks that run at the same duration as one another? I understand advancing your clock to synchronize flashes, but doesn't this presuppose that the clocks run at the same speed? When I turned on "Show Clocks" in the simulation it indeed looked like the clocks ran at identical durations. Seems like this would be difficult in nature.
Parable of the polygons is extremely questionable. For one, it attempts to have its cake while eating it too, by pretending it's an abstract demonstration about choices while explicitly calling out to hot topics in diversity, implying a clear causal link. For another, the model involves discrete agents on a discrete grid making decisions based on their immediate 8 square neighborhood, with no persistence or hysteresi…
I have a question about a detail.
The rule is:
1. When you see a nearby neighbour flash, nudge your own clock forward.
2. That's it.
My question is -- when the fireflies are firing at the same time, they see each other flash, so they all nudge their clocks forward, correct?
Assuming they don't nudge their clocks forward at the same amount, they would fall out of sync, correct? But they stay in sync, so they must nudge forward at the same amount...is this right?
So my question is -- if everyone keeps nudging their clocks forward, why don't they keep speeding up? They do appear instead to continue flashing at the same steady rate.
Does this mean that there ought to be another detail in the rule, such as,
If you see a neighbour nearby flash, when you are not flashing, nudge your clock forward by a bit.
? Or is the perspective I just said missing something?
Nature has the best algorithms, don't it folks? I have a question about a detail. The rule is: 1. When you see a nearby neighbour flash, nudge your own clock forward. 2. That's it. My question is -- when the fireflies are firing at the same time, they see each other flash, so they all nudge their clocks forward, correct? Assuming they don't nudge their clocks forward at the same amount, they would fall out of sync, c…
Nature has the best algorithms, don't it folks? I have a question about a detail. The rule is: 1. When you see a nearby neighbour flash, nudge your own clock forward. 2. That's it. My question is -- when the fireflies are firing at the same time, they see each other flash, so they all nudge their clocks forward, correct? Assuming they don't nudge their clocks forward at the same amount, they would fall out of sync, c…