In this moment when the collective actions of humans seem to be hurtling towards several cataclysms (burning up the planet, ending the American Experiment), I am reminded of a powerful image that invaded my psyche some 45 years ago.  It was from Douglas Hofstadter’s magnum opus, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) and concerned his investigation of what became popularized as “emergent behavior” and “self-organization.”  This was in the early days of chaos theory and Holland’s emerging complexity theory.  Conway’s artificial life cellular automaton, the Game of Life, was the screen saver on countless computer terminals and burgeoning personal computers.  It was also the time when neural nets were beginning to capture the imagination of machine learning researchers among the artificial intelligence community.

Hofstadter’s aim was to explore these ideas as they related to understanding the brain and he used the vehicle of an ant colony.

See Aunt Hillary and the Anteater.

Also see the excerpt Ant Fugue (2.5 MB) and the Atlantic article “What the Microsoft Outage Reveals”.