Why do birds fly in formations? Why do wolves hunt in packs? How does the queen ant direct the activities of the entire colony?
Are birds so very intelligent that they communicate among themselves, decide on a leader and then fly in a specific formation? It has been seen that an individual bird is not capable of planning such a complicated process. These phenomena are nowadays termed emergent behavior, where the individual units are simple, yet the overall system is extremely complex.
The most famous example of an artificially created emergent behavior is the Conway’s Game of Life. You can get an interactive introduction to it on this MIT website. Other examples include the stock market, where there is no single specific global leader or controller and yet the prices remain stable; the internet where any website can be created anywhere and yet they are all reachable from any point. Basically, it has been argued that every complex system can be explained using a simple set of rules.
Another related topic is the Cellular Automata, which is an arrangement of finite/infinite units and the behavior of each unit is decide only by its immediate neighbors. Thus the Game of Life is an example of a Cellular Automation. It has been found that using very simple rules, random numbers can be generated (a very difficult problem for deterministic computer systems) which passes all standard tests for randomness.
These surprising results have prompted people to question whether nature is truly as complex as imagined or whether it is made up of simpler rules which we are unable to find. In his book, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down, Nobel laureate Robert B. Laughlin tries to explain the physical world using these emergent properties. And Stephen Wolfram in his controversial book, A New Kind of Science, studies Cellular Automata and suggests that existing methods of mathematics and the sciences are inadequate to explain certain properties.
For a good introduction to Emergent Behavior and Cellular Automata you can look them up on Wikipedia
6 comments:
do you write stories?
I think you will be a great writer if you do, just like me.
Although I am only a 12 year old kid.
Sounds pretty interesting.
I personally do believe that nature by definition, needs to be pervasive. We still don't seem to see its indications that starkly in our lives (at least most of us), hence it's true pattern must be either ridiculously complex OR totally simple.
I guess all this goes to prove that it tends towards the latter..
Please do realise that emergence dosen't prove anything. All these attempts to explain the physical and natural world are just personal opinions of different scientists and there are many oppositions to these view points.
i want to direct ur attention to a blog specifically dedicated to book reviews.
http://middlestage.blogspot.com
very informative and interesting blogs we expect more in coming years
Post a Comment