Rating: 
Summary: A book on Star Logo
Review: This book is mainly about Star Logo, an extension to the Logo language, you know, this program with a turtle strolling around, for children to get acquainted with computers and plane geometry.Star Logo has much more features, allowing easy yet sounding powerful implementation of decentralized system, which one famous instance is cellular automaton, and some specific others in the book are ant colonies behavior, forest fires or traffic jams, with the cell of cellular automata being replaced by the notion of an "agent" (less known it seems to the public). If you need a book for Star Logo, this is the one to get, but if you are looking for artificial life and self organization alone, don't get it. Excellent bibliography.
Rating: 
Summary: Invention - on all levels
Review: This book provided the motivating force to write my first, and last, review for Amazon.com. Over the past 5 years since my first reading Mitchel Resnick's Turtles Turmites and Traffic Jams, the book has come up on numerous occasions related to several topics, two of which most basically: 1) Writing style - Resnick's clear, well-researched, simple yet profound style. His background as journalist and inventor enables TT&T to walk a new line between source material and criticism. 2) Content - Resnick's theoretical application of emergent behavior to education is robust; his practical educational tools (starlogo and later, mindstorms) are a fundamentally clear and wondrous collapsing of idea into artifact. I will include this book with few others in my life bibliography.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting, but describes an old version of the software
Review: This is a book describing the research of a team at MIT using a version of the educational language "Logo". Running in a simple graphical environment which supports multiple parallel operation of code in the same shared space. Write a few lines of code for an "ant", then let 1000 of them loose. The current version of this "StarLogo" system is written in Java, and available as a free download for anyone to play with. The use of Logo is both a strength and a weakness of the approach. The strength is that the code is concise and easy to understand. The weakness is that there is only one source of the software, and anyone wishing to try it is limited to the available download. This would not be such a limitation if the book described the same version, but unfortunately things have moved on a lot since the book was written, and few (if any) of the examples will work without alteration. As well as the development of the StarLogo system, the book covers experiments in emergent behaviour. Typical sections include how parameter and environment changes can affect the growth and development of simulated ant colonies, and a theoretical basis for those "phantom traffic jams" we have all experienced. This book is certainly interesting if you are interested in developing parallel software simulations, or if you are interested in marginal computer languages, but don't expect the code to work without effort.
Rating:
Summary: interesting, but describes an old version of the software
Review: This is a book describing the research of a team at MIT using a version of the educational language "Logo". Running in a simple graphical environment which supports multiple parallel operation of code in the same shared space. Write a few lines of code for an "ant", then let 1000 of them loose. The current version of this "StarLogo" system is written in Java, and available as a free download for anyone to play with. The use of Logo is both a strength and a weakness of the approach. The strength is that the code is concise and easy to understand. The weakness is that there is only one source of the software, and anyone wishing to try it is limited to the available download. This would not be such a limitation if the book described the same version, but unfortunately things have moved on a lot since the book was written, and few (if any) of the examples will work without alteration. As well as the development of the StarLogo system, the book covers experiments in emergent behaviour. Typical sections include how parameter and environment changes can affect the growth and development of simulated ant colonies, and a theoretical basis for those "phantom traffic jams" we have all experienced. This book is certainly interesting if you are interested in developing parallel software simulations, or if you are interested in marginal computer languages, but don't expect the code to work without effort.
Rating:
Summary: Experimental complexiry for everyone
Review: When Papert created the LOGO computer language, it was with the idea of creating a tool simple enough for children to use that could nontheless teach them very power notions about algorithms and the power of computing. With Star LOGO, Mitchell Resnick has created a equally simple, yet unbelievably powerful tool that can be used to experiment with ideas of complexity. "Termites..." is about how complex behaviors can arise from very simple systems, and to that end Resnick provides a number of case histories and simple programs that demonstrate how conceptually complex systems can be simulated using only a few rules. Phenomena as diverse as the movement of traffic james, pile making by termites and the migration of slime molds can all be simulated in Star LOGO with very a few assumtions. But Resnick's programs aren't just simulations; they're models of the real underlying processes that govern these complex phenomena. Resnick hasn't just created a clever program; he's provided a wonderful tool for exploring complexity, and found a way of translating complexity into something a child can understand- while still fascinating to an adult.
| 
