Tag Archives: emergent behavior

Aunt Hillary and the Anteater

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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”.

Chemical Determinism – Motor Proteins

It was reading Peter Hoffmann’s 2012 book Life’s Ratchet that drove home the role of determinism in biological processes, which he characterizes as a ratchet, a process that filters random behavior into a particular “purposeful” direction. Since Hoffmann is a biophysicist, his presentation is heavily guided by the physical principles of energy conversion, thermodynamics, and entropy, which makes for a fresh approach to a traditionally biological subject. The startling thing Hoffmann’s book introduced me to was the subject of molecular machines or motor proteins. These were amazing engines that harnessed the chemical and physical energy within a cell to act like miniature workers hauling materials around and constructing other molecules. The intelligent design crowd would go bonkers. See Chemical Determinism – Motor Proteins