e-mail+about+effect+of+environment+entropy+on+complex+adaptive+system+entropy

I had an idea after our discussion about how to model how the entropy of the environment affects the progression of entropy in a complex adaptive system. I don't think I have to hard-wire any type of "desires" into the complex adaptive system. In other words, it doesn't have to have hard-wired rules to become more complex. It could just become complex based on simple underlying rules. I could just use one of the Class IV complex cellular automata from Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. One of the complex parts from this cellular automata would represent the "organism" whose entropy could be calculated. Then I would take that pattern ("organism") out of the environment of black and white squares that it is in, and I would place it into different types of environments of black and white squares with different entropies. I could then analyze how these changes in environment entropy cause the pattern to thrive or die out to nothing (just all white or black squares and lose it's intricate pattern) over many time steps.

One issue about this idea is that I would prefer to think of and visualize systems as networks rather than black and white squares. However, it looks like people have already performed work representing cellular automata as networks as seen here

@http://www.wolframscience.com/conference/2006/presentations/materials/nochella.pdf and @http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.4509

Just some thoughts.