emergent/swarm/evolutionary systems etc

[Peter MacKenzie]

Peter Hansen + Mickel Grönroos, (unsure of a more suitable intro protocol
for this environment + situation)

Oh the joy!  It makes life worth living when things click into place and
make sense.  My style of learning seems ill suited to the material available
on the subject, so although I had indeed read all that I could find on
making files, it was presented in a manner that I couldn't quite comprehend.
To elaborate, I process linguistic information in a holistic, intuitive
manner; a quality that requires for me to develop a 'feel' for the language
in question, rather than a literal understanding of the rules.

Because of this, I need full-yet-simple working examples to deconstruct and
process.  Most of the examples I've come across have been fragmented and
incomplete, which leaves me grasping at loose ends and the countless
possibilities therein.  It's as though somebody had handed me at birth a
dictionary and a set of grammatical rules, with the expectation that I would
be able to piece it all together and learn to communicate.

Conversely, my search for the working examples I craved only turned up
applications of the process that were too bound up in more complex matters
to be decipherable, the analogy this time being that of getting handed a
copy of 'Moby Dick' from which to start my education.

Being presented with an isolated, sterilised 'specimen' has helped me to
form a better understanding of the language, being of the right mix of
information bandwidth vs. complexity to allow me to capture the 'flavour' in
the code.

If there are any teachers reading this, I hope it might engender you to
consider the varying needs of students in your classes.  By being an outlier
on the mental demographic, I've long suffered from problems arising from my
minority neurology.  The cause, however, has generally been from
communicative frictions, rather than from the relative merits and demerits
of that mental architecture.

Thank you both for your help (spreadsheets in the next message).