Over the weekend we were to read the second and third chapters from the book emergence. I thought that these two chapters were really interesting and I am starting to like this book even more. The second chapter talked a lot about ant colonies in general. The chapters explained that ants are very simple creatures with not a whole lot going on in their brains individually but then talked about how many of them are able to form a complex colony. Each ant acts locally but their collection produces global behavior. There are five principles in order for macro intelligence to form from local behavior. These include, 1. More is different 2. Ignorance is useful 3. Encourage random encounters 4. Look for patterns in the signs and 5. Pay attention to your neighbors. A common topic mentioned in these five is that when ants encounter other ants this informs them about the state of the colony based on the frequency of encounters and whatnot. One thing I didn't understand is how a colony can go between infant, adolescent, and mature stages because all the ants die within a year so there is never really a bunch of old "mature" ants. The difference between ants and humans is obviously that individual humans are very intelligent so the social patterns we form are much more complex.
The third chapter talked a lot about how the internet is thought of as a big brain. I agreed with most of the ideas that the author agreed with. I think the internet isn't really a true brain, it just forms relationships between sites and its not really forming new information by itself. Alexa, the website sorter thing, doesn't appreciate things and it doesn't have a specified goal in mind when searching through sites. This is like the little activity we did in class on Amazon.com where if you typed in some book you liked it would find books that other people enjoyed that had also enjoyed the books you liked. Its not really thinking about you in specific just common trends. Another question, are things like match.com emergent? because all they do is just match people who answered alike to certain questions right?
2 comments:
I didn't think the book described the way the colony goes through a life cycle very deeply either. My guess is that it definitely has to do with the ants just "knowing" naturally their place in a colony. Do you think that the fact humans are so much more complex prevents us from emergent behavior? I agree with your views on the internet too, and as far as match.com, I'd say it is emergent the same way that amazon's recommendation is.
I was a little confused by the author's connection between the brain and the internet. I think maybe he was saying that Alexa can be thought of as "brain-like" because it makes connections really fast and spreads information quickly, much like neurons in the brain.
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