8 ms·

What neurons tell us about the 'hipster effect' when contrarians look the same

127 points by huherto 12y ago

meow_mix 12y ago
This quote: “That’s the real role of mathematics,” Touboul said. “To abstract things. To see what is really important.” Is concentrating on things like this really important?
- m3rc 12y ago
  Maybe not to you, or to someone coming from a pure math area, but to anyone who studies social changes/trends then yes, it would be
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  Yes? The point of applied mathematics is to understand if the same driving forces which cause clothing trends also govern other human behaviors, and to extract out these commonalities (or what is "really important" about the events) to study in the abstract, as a mechanism free of context, so we can enhance our ability to understand these situations (as well as other situations with similar behaviors) and make accurate predictions of the future. That's the very basis of applied mathematics. Nor should fashion be discounted as a trivial human endeavor: it acts in several capacities, from providing some safety from the elements to appealing to our sense of aesthetics to behaving as social signaling mechanism. Understanding how humans deal with the confluence of these competing forces is hardly a trivial area of research in to human behavior. I'm curious, what exactly you're intending with a clearly out of context quote, seemingly trying to slight the study of fashion with it.
- tikhonj 12y ago
  In this case, the whole "hipsters" angle was just a cute hook to make the paper more interesting. In reality, it's a neat model of many different dynamic system and a useful mathematical abstraction in and of itself. Even if we didn't have an immediate application now, it would be useful as math and clearly increase the "sum of human knowledge". It's impossible to predict exactly where this idea will lead in the future, whether interesting applications or more math, so it's worth working on just speculatively. Of course, in this case, it also has an immediate application in neuroscience, which is useful in a visceral sort of way that's easier to appreciate.
  - barce 12y ago
    I totally agree. Replace "non-comformist" and "conformist" in this paper with "predator" and "prey," and you can speculate on some more interesting biological ideas.
- bane 12y ago
  Now use it to predict a trend: Bam, you're now in economics, you've just figured out what the next group of ten million people will be wearing and doing and you've employed tens of thousands of people to make that happen. That's a lot of families suddenly being fed and clothed so other people can exercise their compulsive need to belong to a group.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- protonfish 12y ago
  That is not the role of math, it is the role of science. If he did actual science, he would also need to try and disprove his mathematical model with experiment. Since, it isn't science, he can skip that step and just publish his idea as truth.
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
So a random imbalance in a binary pattern triggers an oscillation, if the delay is big enough, because the hipsters all try to be non-conformists. I don't think the delays in real life fashion cycles are what is causing lookalikes, I think people do try to conform to fit a certain subculture. Con-conformist hipsters are a rare breed, as it takes lot a of effort and style savvy. Always happy to see one!
tunesmith 12y ago
This is a funny rephrasing of "systems thinking". Donella Meadows, stocks and flows, etc. When you introduce a delay into adjusting flows, oscillations happen. The classic example is the shower faucet when the hot water heater is too far away from the spigot - you find yourself making it too hot, then too cold, etc.
- antsar 12y ago
  [OT/Pedantry] The shower faucet thing is caused by a large distance between the spigot (where the hot/cold mixing happens) and the shower head, not between the water heater and spigot.
  - tunesmith 12y ago
    thanks, I'm better at systems thinking than plumbing. :)
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    [Pedantry^2] Both effects are important on different timescales. When first starting a shower, the distance between the hot water tank and the spigot is what matters, and this tends to produce a long-period oscillation that manifests as just a single over-shoot at the start. Then there is a short-period oscillation due to the tap/spigot distance. The initial transient is still technically an "oscillation" in the sense it is described by the same mathematics, even though it's a one-off.
jgrahamc 12y ago
This is interesting, but surely not the reason why group X (for any X) all look alike. Members of any group X will look alike because they decide to in order to be part of that group. X can be hipsters, goths, British bankers, Roman Catholic parents from Versailles, programmers living in San Francisco, ...
- serve_yay 12y ago
  It's even simpler than that- the word "hipster" is meaningless by itself so you choose a bunch of people who all look the same, categorize them as "hipster", and they all look the same by tautology.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    Of course. The word derives its meaning from the thing it is assigned to. Doesn't make bearded, tracksuit-wearing, mechanical video camera-wielding men talking way too much about authenticity look less like clowns, though.
    - serve_yay 12y ago
      Agreed, my only addition is that the people who tend to really harp on "hipsters" and how bad they look, often don't look so much better themselves. It's symptomatic, this obsession with who is a "hipster".
    - logfromblammo 12y ago
      Except that clown makeup patterns are considered a form of trademark among performers, and are registered with Clowns International by painting them on goose eggs, or egg-shaped ceramics. It's very bad form for one clown to design a look that is too similar to another. I suppose if an enterprising performer designed a character-type clown based on a caricature of hipsters, they might all look like that particular clown, but I don't think it's fair to slight a profession that encourages authentic individuality in that way.
  - gaius 12y ago
    No hipsters are something different - they are people who hijack the symbols of other subcultures without contributing anything to those subcultures. The guy with the sailor tattoos was never in the Navy - he works in advertising and drinks lattes. The girl with the thick-rimmed glasses has never rolled a D12 or written a line of assembly - she thinks only about cupcakes and "vintage" dresses. That is why they are looked down on by everyone, their sense of entitlement.
spydum 12y ago
so bringing it back to the brain, does this suggest that certain cases of epilepsy are due to neuron signalling delays relative to non-epileptic brains? if so.. that certainly is interesting. It may explain why some epileptics "grow out" of it, as their neurons build new connections, and signal delays get lower.
twelfthnight 12y ago
It seems to me the reason hipsters all look the same is because we tend to lump things together that resemble each other 'close enough'. If a person has thick glasses but is wearing a backward cap, are they a 'bro' or a hipster? It will probably depend on whether there are other hipsters around--if there are, you'll define that person as hipster. If that person is in a sports bar with bros, then you might say that person is a bro.
- emotionalcode 12y ago
  We also tend to make comparisons between ourselves and things that are not ourselves as if they are discrete entities.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
    This. For example, I thought bros were hipsters and vice versa.
eevilspock 12y ago
His premise that hipsters are nonconformists is false. AdBusters has a great article on this: Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
- Gracana 12y ago
  Yeah, this is a common smugly-stated POV on many subcultures. Being a hipster (or goth, or punk, or whatever) may have some counterculture aspect or appeal, but there's a lot more to them than just "not conforming."
- the_cat_kittles 12y ago
  that was an interesting article, though i dont understand the grave tone. what are the actual problems and harm that come of it? people want to feel special, unique, original and authentic... or at least look the part. so what? trying to achieve that by dressing the right way and going to ironic parties is silly, and kind of pointless, but i think thats just "kids being kids". people are usually more shallow when they are young, and deepen as they get older. the writer seems to be committing the bigger mistake by thinking all the hipsters discussed in the article aren't just normal kids looking for a social group. he treats them like a disease- thats a shitty way to talk about someone who hasn't done anything actually harmful.
  - freyr 12y ago
    that was an interesting article, though i dont understand the grave tone. Most likely, the grave tone is intended to be ironic. The article adopts the perennial complaint that "the new generation is the worst generation." But Adbusters has a hipster readership, and magazine targeting their fan base is ironic. Hipsters thrive on irony. The article even describes a woman who fits every hipster cliché, including being critical other hipsters and refusing to self-identify as a hipster, and the magazine/article does exactly the same. Oh, the irony. Finally, a Google image search of the author reveals a young mustachioed man who is, to judge a book by its cover, himself a hipster.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
guelo 12y ago
This is a mathematical model with no experimentation behind it. Basically, a hypothesis. The next step would be for social scientists to device some field experiments.
hyperbovine 12y ago
I don't remember there being any actual proofs in that paper although I only skimmed it. There were a couple of equations and some hand-wavy "it can be shown using... it is not hard to show" remarks. This is the kind of paper that my pure math friends would deride as "physics math" :-)
- noamyoungerm 12y ago
  "physics math" is pretty good for a biologist http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/.
- xico 12y ago
  The whole paper is a proof with the displayed equations representing the key points and solutions. The ‘remarks’ that seem to annoy you are merely the author adjectives to qualify the underlying approach, and to avoid the trivial (for the author) intermediate steps. I highly doubt that you and your ‘friends’ are going to find a single mathematical mistake in this humoristic paper (the actual work of the author being quite full of your standard Lemma/Theorem/Proof sectioning without which you seem to be lost).
  - hyperbovine 12y ago
    I did not claim that the paper contained any mistakes. Rigorous proofs do much more than simply eliminate the possibility of mistakes (though they do that too); they make the argument accessible to a wider mathematically literate audience who may not be familiar with techniques which are standard in the author's field. I know a not-inconsiderable amount of graduate-level probability and a bit of stat phys and yet still this paper is not a trivial read. I'm sure if I stared at it for a day I could figure out the entire argument, but the point is I don't have a whole day. Theorems and Lemmas are a protocol for mathematicians to communicate efficiently. Considering the level of offense you have summoned up, I assume you must be in some mathematical field, so I am surprised you do not appreciate this.
coldcode 12y ago
This type of work makes me wish I were a mathematician instead of a programmer.
- eksith 12y ago
  At their base level both have similarities: Expressing and parsing the world in a funny language. But seriously, there's a lot of math in programming that we wouldn't even consider to be "math" in the general sense.
sauere 12y ago
Didn't we just have this on the front page a few weeks ago?
DonHopkins 12y ago
This reminds me of Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, which can be modeled by cellular automata, or realized by chemical reactions, slime molds, and coral reefs. (Of course, after staring at them for as many hours as I have, everything reminds me of Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions! ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_r... The essence of a cellular automata rule that exhibits BZ reactions is: There are two forces at work playing off against each other: stimulation and inhibition. Stimulation is implemented by observing your local surrounding neighbors. Inhibition is implemented by a delay. The result is beautiful spiraling oscillations! A cell can be stimulated or quiescent (one bit). And it has a timer to remember how long ago it was stimulated (typically another bit). When it's quiescent, and the stimulation condition is true, it becomes stimulated, and sets the timer. In subsequent steps, it finishes being stimulated, then the timer expires, and it can't be stimulated again until the timer expires. The stimulation condition is usually a counting rule, like Life: it sums the number of stimulated neighbors, and then uses that to index into a look-up table to decide its next state. The effect is that waves of stimulation spread out throughout the medium, and the wave's leading edge propagates into areas that are not stimulated, until it hits another wave, and they cancel each other out or reflect waves in other directions. The trailing edge of the wave is caused by the inhibition, and consists of cells that have just been stimulated and won't be stimulated again immediately -- that way the wave spreads in one direction instead of all directions at once. By changing the stimulation condition, you can generate different shapes of waves, which usually develop into interlocking spirals forming around stable nucleation patterns. One metaphor for how this rule works is to the worm-like animals in a coral reef, who come out of their shells to feed, then pull back inside their shells when tickled by adjacent worms pulling back, only to come back out after a short time. That's why this particular CA rule is called "WORMS" (in Toffoli and Margolus's "Cellular Automata Machines" book). Here's some JavaScript code that implements three kind of worms, with three different kinds of stimulus conditions (alarms), which I call "Yuppy Worms", "Hipster Worms" and "Bohemian Worms": https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L5293 https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM... The "Yuppy Worms" are all uptight, geometrical and diagonal. The "Hipster Worms" are more relaxed and rounded. And the "Bohemian Worms" are all rough and fuzzy and organic. // The personality is a key into the dict of alarm arrays, // which are indexed by the count of excited neighbors, // and contain 1 if the cell should be excited or 0 if // not. var alarms = { // This results in spirals with tight straight diagonal diamonds. yuppie: [0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1], // This results in spirals with loose smooth rounded diamonds. hipster: [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1], // This results in spirals with looser rustic fuzzy spirals. // That is due to the anneal-like discontinuity in the alarm table. bohemian: [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1] }[personality]; The Yuppie and Hipster look-up tables vote with the majority (for different definitions of majority), while the "anneal-like discontinuity" in the Bohemian alarm table is kind of like a non-conformist tie-breaker voting the other way when the vote is almost even (which is the essence of the "anneal" CA rule). That causes turbulence and roughness, so it looks much more organic than geometric.
Animats 12y ago
This is similar to a common experiment you can program. Create a grid, and fill it about 95% full with random black and white squares, leaving about 5% empty. Each square has 8 neighbors. If a square at least N neighbors of a different color, it moves to a randomly selected empty square. Iterate this for a while, until stability occurs. You're watching segregation happen. Try different values of N. Even with N=8, meaning nobody moves unless every neighbor is the opposite color, you'll still get a mostly segregated world.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
freyr 12y ago
The idea that any identifiable subculture could be composed of nonconformists seems obviously false. The subculture as a whole could represent a break from the mainstream, but it could only be identified as a subculture once its members have conformed to a set of common traits. It's interesting that the article was written in 2008, at which point hipsters were already ripe for critique, but we're still talking about them. There may be more microbrews and less PBR, more thick-rimmed glasses and fewer keffiyehs, more discussion of Kanye West than indie rock -- but it still is distinctly "hipster." Maybe a subculture based on cooption and ironic detachment is particularly well suited to evolve with changing environmental conditions. Another possible reason for its staying power is that other subcultures have typically made a person look increasingly ridiculous / marginalized / unemployable as they aged (goth, punk, gangster rap, rave), whereas hipster style trends play it relatively safe.
dang 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8556253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8556253

127 points by huherto 12y ago

This quote: “That’s the real role of mathematics,” Touboul said. “To abstract things. To see what is really important.” Is concentrating on things like this really important?

m3rc 12y ago
Maybe not to you, or to someone coming from a pure math area, but to anyone who studies social changes/trends then yes, it would be
ObviousScience 12y ago
Yes? The point of applied mathematics is to understand if the same driving forces which cause clothing trends also govern other human behaviors, and to extract out these commonalities (or what is "really important" about the events) to study in the abstract, as a mechanism free of context, so we can enhance our ability to understand these situations (as well as other situations with similar behaviors) and make accurate predictions of the future. That's the very basis of applied mathematics. Nor should fashion be discounted as a trivial human endeavor: it acts in several capacities, from providing some safety from the elements to appealing to our sense of aesthetics to behaving as social signaling mechanism. Understanding how humans deal with the confluence of these competing forces is hardly a trivial area of research in to human behavior. I'm curious, what exactly you're intending with a clearly out of context quote, seemingly trying to slight the study of fashion with it.
tikhonj 12y ago
In this case, the whole "hipsters" angle was just a cute hook to make the paper more interesting. In reality, it's a neat model of many different dynamic system and a useful mathematical abstraction in and of itself. Even if we didn't have an immediate application now, it would be useful as math and clearly increase the "sum of human knowledge". It's impossible to predict exactly where this idea will lead in the future, whether interesting applications or more math, so it's worth working on just speculatively. Of course, in this case, it also has an immediate application in neuroscience, which is useful in a visceral sort of way that's easier to appreciate.
- barce 12y ago
  I totally agree. Replace "non-comformist" and "conformist" in this paper with "predator" and "prey," and you can speculate on some more interesting biological ideas.
bane 12y ago
Now use it to predict a trend: Bam, you're now in economics, you've just figured out what the next group of ten million people will be wearing and doing and you've employed tens of thousands of people to make that happen. That's a lot of families suddenly being fed and clothed so other people can exercise their compulsive need to belong to a group.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
protonfish 12y ago
That is not the role of math, it is the role of science. If he did actual science, he would also need to try and disprove his mathematical model with experiment. Since, it isn't science, he can skip that step and just publish his idea as truth.

MrBuddyCasino 12y ago

So a random imbalance in a binary pattern triggers an oscillation, if the delay is big enough, because the hipsters all try to be non-conformists. I don't think the delays in real life fashion cycles are what is causing lookalikes, I think people do try to conform to fit a certain subculture. Con-conformist hipsters are a rare breed, as it takes lot a of effort and style savvy. Always happy to see one!

tunesmith 12y ago

This is a funny rephrasing of "systems thinking". Donella Meadows, stocks and flows, etc. When you introduce a delay into adjusting flows, oscillations happen. The classic example is the shower faucet when the hot water heater is too far away from the spigot - you find yourself making it too hot, then too cold, etc.

antsar 12y ago
[OT/Pedantry] The shower faucet thing is caused by a large distance between the spigot (where the hot/cold mixing happens) and the shower head, not between the water heater and spigot.
- tunesmith 12y ago
  thanks, I'm better at systems thinking than plumbing. :)
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  [Pedantry^2] Both effects are important on different timescales. When first starting a shower, the distance between the hot water tank and the spigot is what matters, and this tends to produce a long-period oscillation that manifests as just a single over-shoot at the start. Then there is a short-period oscillation due to the tap/spigot distance. The initial transient is still technically an "oscillation" in the sense it is described by the same mathematics, even though it's a one-off.

jgrahamc 12y ago

This is interesting, but surely not the reason why group X (for any X) all look alike. Members of any group X will look alike because they decide to in order to be part of that group. X can be hipsters, goths, British bankers, Roman Catholic parents from Versailles, programmers living in San Francisco, ...

serve_yay 12y ago
It's even simpler than that- the word "hipster" is meaningless by itself so you choose a bunch of people who all look the same, categorize them as "hipster", and they all look the same by tautology.
- tormeh 12y ago
  Of course. The word derives its meaning from the thing it is assigned to. Doesn't make bearded, tracksuit-wearing, mechanical video camera-wielding men talking way too much about authenticity look less like clowns, though.
  - serve_yay 12y ago
    Agreed, my only addition is that the people who tend to really harp on "hipsters" and how bad they look, often don't look so much better themselves. It's symptomatic, this obsession with who is a "hipster".
  - logfromblammo 12y ago
    Except that clown makeup patterns are considered a form of trademark among performers, and are registered with Clowns International by painting them on goose eggs, or egg-shaped ceramics. It's very bad form for one clown to design a look that is too similar to another. I suppose if an enterprising performer designed a character-type clown based on a caricature of hipsters, they might all look like that particular clown, but I don't think it's fair to slight a profession that encourages authentic individuality in that way.
- gaius 12y ago
  No hipsters are something different - they are people who hijack the symbols of other subcultures without contributing anything to those subcultures. The guy with the sailor tattoos was never in the Navy - he works in advertising and drinks lattes. The girl with the thick-rimmed glasses has never rolled a D12 or written a line of assembly - she thinks only about cupcakes and "vintage" dresses. That is why they are looked down on by everyone, their sense of entitlement.

spydum 12y ago

so bringing it back to the brain, does this suggest that certain cases of epilepsy are due to neuron signalling delays relative to non-epileptic brains? if so.. that certainly is interesting. It may explain why some epileptics "grow out" of it, as their neurons build new connections, and signal delays get lower.

twelfthnight 12y ago

It seems to me the reason hipsters all look the same is because we tend to lump things together that resemble each other 'close enough'. If a person has thick glasses but is wearing a backward cap, are they a 'bro' or a hipster? It will probably depend on whether there are other hipsters around--if there are, you'll define that person as hipster. If that person is in a sports bar with bros, then you might say that person is a bro.

emotionalcode 12y ago
We also tend to make comparisons between ourselves and things that are not ourselves as if they are discrete entities.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  This. For example, I thought bros were hipsters and vice versa.

eevilspock 12y ago

His premise that hipsters are nonconformists is false. AdBusters has a great article on this: Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

Gracana 12y ago
Yeah, this is a common smugly-stated POV on many subcultures. Being a hipster (or goth, or punk, or whatever) may have some counterculture aspect or appeal, but there's a lot more to them than just "not conforming."
the_cat_kittles 12y ago
that was an interesting article, though i dont understand the grave tone. what are the actual problems and harm that come of it? people want to feel special, unique, original and authentic... or at least look the part. so what? trying to achieve that by dressing the right way and going to ironic parties is silly, and kind of pointless, but i think thats just "kids being kids". people are usually more shallow when they are young, and deepen as they get older. the writer seems to be committing the bigger mistake by thinking all the hipsters discussed in the article aren't just normal kids looking for a social group. he treats them like a disease- thats a shitty way to talk about someone who hasn't done anything actually harmful.
- freyr 12y ago
  that was an interesting article, though i dont understand the grave tone. Most likely, the grave tone is intended to be ironic. The article adopts the perennial complaint that "the new generation is the worst generation." But Adbusters has a hipster readership, and magazine targeting their fan base is ironic. Hipsters thrive on irony. The article even describes a woman who fits every hipster cliché, including being critical other hipsters and refusing to self-identify as a hipster, and the magazine/article does exactly the same. Oh, the irony. Finally, a Google image search of the author reveals a young mustachioed man who is, to judge a book by its cover, himself a hipster.
DonHopkins 12y ago

guelo 12y ago

This is a mathematical model with no experimentation behind it. Basically, a hypothesis. The next step would be for social scientists to device some field experiments.

hyperbovine 12y ago

I don't remember there being any actual proofs in that paper although I only skimmed it. There were a couple of equations and some hand-wavy "it can be shown using... it is not hard to show" remarks. This is the kind of paper that my pure math friends would deride as "physics math" :-)

noamyoungerm 12y ago
"physics math" is pretty good for a biologist http://xkcd.com/435/ http://xkcd.com/435/.
xico 12y ago
The whole paper is a proof with the displayed equations representing the key points and solutions. The ‘remarks’ that seem to annoy you are merely the author adjectives to qualify the underlying approach, and to avoid the trivial (for the author) intermediate steps. I highly doubt that you and your ‘friends’ are going to find a single mathematical mistake in this humoristic paper (the actual work of the author being quite full of your standard Lemma/Theorem/Proof sectioning without which you seem to be lost).
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  I did not claim that the paper contained any mistakes. Rigorous proofs do much more than simply eliminate the possibility of mistakes (though they do that too); they make the argument accessible to a wider mathematically literate audience who may not be familiar with techniques which are standard in the author's field. I know a not-inconsiderable amount of graduate-level probability and a bit of stat phys and yet still this paper is not a trivial read. I'm sure if I stared at it for a day I could figure out the entire argument, but the point is I don't have a whole day. Theorems and Lemmas are a protocol for mathematicians to communicate efficiently. Considering the level of offense you have summoned up, I assume you must be in some mathematical field, so I am surprised you do not appreciate this.

coldcode 12y ago

This type of work makes me wish I were a mathematician instead of a programmer.

eksith 12y ago
At their base level both have similarities: Expressing and parsing the world in a funny language. But seriously, there's a lot of math in programming that we wouldn't even consider to be "math" in the general sense.

sauere 12y ago

Didn't we just have this on the front page a few weeks ago?

DonHopkins 12y ago

This reminds me of Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, which can be modeled by cellular automata, or realized by chemical reactions, slime molds, and coral reefs. (Of course, after staring at them for as many hours as I have, everything reminds me of Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions! ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_r... The essence of a cellular automata rule that exhibits BZ reactions is: There are two forces at work playing off against each other: stimulation and inhibition. Stimulation is implemented by observing your local surrounding neighbors. Inhibition is implemented by a delay. The result is beautiful spiraling oscillations! A cell can be stimulated or quiescent (one bit). And it has a timer to remember how long ago it was stimulated (typically another bit). When it's quiescent, and the stimulation condition is true, it becomes stimulated, and sets the timer. In subsequent steps, it finishes being stimulated, then the timer expires, and it can't be stimulated again until the timer expires. The stimulation condition is usually a counting rule, like Life: it sums the number of stimulated neighbors, and then uses that to index into a look-up table to decide its next state. The effect is that waves of stimulation spread out throughout the medium, and the wave's leading edge propagates into areas that are not stimulated, until it hits another wave, and they cancel each other out or reflect waves in other directions. The trailing edge of the wave is caused by the inhibition, and consists of cells that have just been stimulated and won't be stimulated again immediately -- that way the wave spreads in one direction instead of all directions at once. By changing the stimulation condition, you can generate different shapes of waves, which usually develop into interlocking spirals forming around stable nucleation patterns. One metaphor for how this rule works is to the worm-like animals in a coral reef, who come out of their shells to feed, then pull back inside their shells when tickled by adjacent worms pulling back, only to come back out after a short time. That's why this particular CA rule is called "WORMS" (in Toffoli and Margolus's "Cellular Automata Machines" book). Here's some JavaScript code that implements three kind of worms, with three different kinds of stimulus conditions (alarms), which I call "Yuppy Worms", "Hipster Worms" and "Bohemian Worms": https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM6.js#L5293 https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM... The "Yuppy Worms" are all uptight, geometrical and diagonal. The "Hipster Worms" are more relaxed and rounded. And the "Bohemian Worms" are all rough and fuzzy and organic. // The personality is a key into the dict of alarm arrays, // which are indexed by the count of excited neighbors, // and contain 1 if the cell should be excited or 0 if // not. var alarms = { // This results in spirals with tight straight diagonal diamonds. yuppie: [0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1], // This results in spirals with loose smooth rounded diamonds. hipster: [0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1], // This results in spirals with looser rustic fuzzy spirals. // That is due to the anneal-like discontinuity in the alarm table. bohemian: [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1] }[personality]; The Yuppie and Hipster look-up tables vote with the majority (for different definitions of majority), while the "anneal-like discontinuity" in the Bohemian alarm table is kind of like a non-conformist tie-breaker voting the other way when the vote is almost even (which is the essence of the "anneal" CA rule). That causes turbulence and roughness, so it looks much more organic than geometric.

Animats 12y ago

This is similar to a common experiment you can program. Create a grid, and fill it about 95% full with random black and white squares, leaving about 5% empty. Each square has 8 neighbors. If a square at least N neighbors of a different color, it moves to a randomly selected empty square. Iterate this for a while, until stability occurs. You're watching segregation happen. Try different values of N. Even with N=8, meaning nobody moves unless every neighbor is the opposite color, you'll still get a mostly segregated world.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

freyr 12y ago

The idea that any identifiable subculture could be composed of nonconformists seems obviously false. The subculture as a whole could represent a break from the mainstream, but it could only be identified as a subculture once its members have conformed to a set of common traits. It's interesting that the article was written in 2008, at which point hipsters were already ripe for critique, but we're still talking about them. There may be more microbrews and less PBR, more thick-rimmed glasses and fewer keffiyehs, more discussion of Kanye West than indie rock -- but it still is distinctly "hipster." Maybe a subculture based on cooption and ironic detachment is particularly well suited to evolve with changing environmental conditions. Another possible reason for its staying power is that other subcultures have typically made a person look increasingly ridiculous / marginalized / unemployable as they aged (goth, punk, gangster rap, rave), whereas hipster style trends play it relatively safe.

dang 12y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8556253 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8556253