This book is very well written and does a great job of presenting a beginner with the concepts of decentralization. Another book that deals with that concept is called Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds by Mitchel Resnick. In this book Resnik goes on to explain the concept of decentralized control by looking at ants. Because humans see the vast complexity of an ant colony, they assume that someone created it. This can be referred to as the watch theory. If we find a watch we assume a watch maker.
However, Resnick shows time and time again that complicated structures that appear designed with intention are actually the results of a distributed system operating on a local level. For ants to find food, no queen ant directs them on how to search. The ant operates on a very simple rule. Wander randomly until food is found. When food is found, pick up a piece and return to the nest, and release a pheromone. The ant doesn't phone home and report to the queen who then relays the message. The ant just leaves the pheromone, and other ants pick up on this at a local level, finding the food and releasing more pheromone, strengthening the trail. Once the food source is exhausted no more pheromone is released and the remaining pheromone gradually evaporates.
I guess my question would be if OSC would have designed the Bugger's differently knowing how differently they operate from our terrestrial bugs. In a sense, as Resnick points out, the Queen Ant is more of a Mother.
Ah well ... just rambling. I just thought it was interesting how different the concepts in The Wisdom of Crowds were different from how the Buggers operated.
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dtjunkie, and ShadowPuppet, welcome to Hatrack.
quote: However, Resnick shows time and time again that complicated structures that appear designed with intention are actually the results of a distributed system operating on a local level.
This is often true...but not neccesarily true. Sometimes "complicated structures that appear designed with intention" are a product of a single unifying principle or mind.
And, at other levels, the mind itself (and body) can be viewed as a collection of smaller units unifying around a common organizational principle, both at the neuron level and at a higher software level, as Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind theory supposes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind_theory So, I think that philotic connections allowing a Queen to control a hive are reasonable.
Shadow, while buggers aren't terrestrial, they do share common genetics with Earth creatures. I am rereading Ender's Game now, and that was actually one thing I found implausible: that organisms with similar genetics could have evolved philotic connections for control and communication and we did not.
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They were not REALLY insectoid - they were called buggers because of their appearance and because of how they AND ants SEEMED to work to ordinary humans.
No one has ever seriously thought that the queen ant somehow gives orders to and controls the workers remotely. "Hive mind" in sci fi is merely a rough analogy to appearances.
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