Towards the interpretation of emergent spatial patterns through Go game: The case of forest population dynamics

In this paper we present the preliminary results of an ongoing research that aims at supporting ecosystem management in the study of forest systems according to a distributed modeling and simulation approach. The Cellular Automata For Forest Ecosystems (CAFFE) project is an interdisciplinary research involving computer scientists of the Department of Computer Science, Systems and Communication of the University of Milano-Bicocca and urban planners, biologists and ecosystem managers of the System Research Department of Austrian Research Center (ARC). In particular, we focus here on the part of CAFFE project that concerns the design of a method to support the analysis step of simulations of forests according to a distributed approach (such as those based on Cellular Automata or Situated Multi-Agent Systems). To this aim an innovative analysis method inspired by the Chinese Go game is under design. The originality of the approach concerns the detection within system configurations of known patterns whose interpretations are well-known by expert Go players. In this paper, after a brief presentation of the CA-based model of forests, we focus first on the set of Go patterns that we currently studied, then we present some preliminary results on experiments we conducted to validate the proposed approach to spatial patterns interpretation.