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Paper at a Glance

The Greek Miracle: An Artificial Life
Simulation of the Effects of Literacy on
the Dynamics of Communication
A Thesis
Presented for the
Master of Science Degree
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Andrew Douglas Digh
December 1994
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank my advisor, Dr. Bruce J. MacLennan, for the tremendous
support, patience, and guidance in all aspects of creating this thesis; to express
my gratitude to Dr. Donald R. Ploch and Dr. Bradley Vander Zanden for serving
on my committee; to Michael Atherton for help in finding a thesis topic; to my
students in Computer Science 219 for keeping a smile on my face throughout this
endeavor; to my good friends for their many words of advice and encouragement,
and to my wonderful parents for helping me reach this point.
ii

Abstract The period of time during the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., when the Greek society moved out of the Dark Ages and into the ``golden'' period of so many great scientific, philosophical, and literary achievements, has often been called the ``Greek Miracle.'' Many historians claim this cultural shift of Greece was ``pro­ foundly influenced'' by the introduction of alphabetic literacy to the population. After discussing this impact from a humanities standpoint, an artificial life simulation is used to investigate the dynamics of communication found in both a primarily oral population as well as a literate one. In each simulation, we find complex systems known as simorgs, or simulated organisms, whose behavior is determined by a transition table. The communication found in both simulations is compared in terms of different parameters such as population size, interconnect probability, and transition table entries. In the literate simulation, we find more activity and longer cycle lengths. One powerful parameter that we focus much of our attention on is the lambda parameter, a parameter first investigated by Christopher Langton in his research on the emergence of computation in complex ...

@mastersthesis{digh94theGreek,
  author={Andrew Douglas Digh},
  title={The Greek Miracle: An Artificial Life Simulation of the Effects of Literacy on the Dynamics of Communication},
  year={1994},
  month={December},
  school={},
  note={This thesis reports a study of complex systems phenomena motivated by the apparent ``phase transition'' that took place in ancient Greece when the alphabet was introduced. In particular, the complexity of behavior (Wolfram's classes I, II, etc.) is related to a parameter analogous to Langton's . Instead of a simple cellular automaton, the topology is given by separate random networks for oral and literate communication.},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/digh94theGreek.html}
}

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