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This is a note from John Scott to New England Complex Systems Institute Forum , October 25, 1999. The note was posted as a bead by the review committee, October 26, 1999.
To New England Complex Systems Institute Forum
The game begins with a bead.
A localized bead is a coherent statement about something put forth during a discussion. This bead can be mixed with other beads to produce a different object called the entangled bead.
The entangled bead combines localized beads in such a way as to produce a new view point for the discussion. This viewpoint is offered by the Bead Master in response to the play of localized beads by Players.
Players tell one story and the Master tells the same story. The Master's task is to summarize and direct. The Players task is to create localized beads that are focused, single purpose and illustrative. The Master creates conceptual affordances by recognizing the needs of the Players to make an expression of knowledge. The Players respond by fulfilling the needs that come to be expressed in the Master's entangled beads.
How does the entangled state come to be? In this game the Bead Master creates a category policy, see discussions about the voting procedure, for the free beads. Free beads are beads that are not yet gathered together into a forward link, they will have been attached to a privious entangled bead (which can be seen using the back link).
The category policy poses a kind of question that is crafted together to form a new object with some coherence and similarity.
There are two viewpoints within this game; one is the Bead Master’s, the other is the individuals as they ‘step’ through the discussion landscape. From the Master’s point of view all beads are visible and available for combination. The Master creates the category ordering policy for the entangled beads from the free beads. The Master acts like the environment imposing certain constraints and allowing for play to proceed in a coherent fashion.
From the point of view of the user only the previous move is present as memory and the next move is available as anticipation. There exist multiple, but finite moves the user could make within the entangled bead. This view resembles a node within a Bayesian network where after reviewing prior (past) probability within a background context and including additional evidence, a posterior probability can be generated.
The posterior (future) probability will encode the most likely path the user will follow. In this way we can break down the multiple path entangled bead diagram from above to produce category policies and theme spaces to provide meaning for what the discussion is about.
- John
