Re: how would we define "kin"?

[glen e. p. ropella]

Could we back off and use "kinship" as either synonymous with
or slightly more specific than "relationship?"  It seems obvious
to me that with ideas like ontological-kinship (genetic/phenotypic
similarity), epistemological-kinship (knowledge of relation), and
behavioural-kinship (learned mannerisms?), that "kinship" will 
not be well-defined for Alife systems in general.

It might be good to simply say that any set of agents are "kin"
if they are related in a historical sense.  I.e. if the event
traces of any two agents have, at one point, intersected (were
causally dependent), then they are kin.  This is more specific
than "relationship" and excludes, I think, similarities in 
behaviour from providing sufficiency for kinship without necessarily
excluding kinship from implying similarities in behaviour.

In fact, it doesn't even require that kin behave similarly, just
that they have affected each other in the past.  Imagine if we
all behaved like our siblings and parents!  There would have been
no cultural revolution in the US during the 1960s. [grin]

The one hitch of viewing kinship in this way is that we would have
to tie a descendents event trace to it's parent's.  In reality, this
is no great feat, even if there's no nurturing by the parent.  [grin]
The site of birth and the time of birth are enough to set initial
conditions such that the event trace is unique.  However, in most
of our simplified worlds, we throw away so much information that
this might not be the case.

glen
-- 
{glen e. p. ropella <address@hidden> |  Send lawyers, guns, and money!  }
{Hive Drone, SFI Swarm Project         |            Hail Eris!            }
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