The doctrine of the organization .. How do ants think?

We humans tend to organize things with what we know about what words like “organization” mean. We prefer, for example, to agree to establish an elected government of the people headed by someone to manage matters at the level of central planning. After that, the government takes that plan and creates programs, then the implementation of programs begins through individuals. belong to those departments.

Four hundred years ago, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1) imagined that we are selfish creatures by nature, each of us is keen on his own interest, which may create intense competition between members of society, so we must move from what Hobbes called the "natural state" that state in which we fight In it with each other, to modern society, this happens through an agreement (Social contract) between us as members of society to surrender a large part of our freedom to the ruler who organizes matters and separates us, along the same line concerned with understanding the natural state, John Locke was less severe in dealing with that situation.

That is what we know about the process of organizing. It is a plan that everyone follows, a hierarchical method in which the leader with the most general plans stands at the top of the pyramid, then orders a work team - of a higher specialized degree - to implement it, and this team in turn orders - individuals higher than it specialized - To carry out well-defined plans, here is what we call: a system.

It sounds so self-evident. We see it every day in running states, mobile phone companies, homes, TV series, Scorsese and Tarantino films, each managing a whole crew to make a great movie;

But things are - really - not as we think, let's study some different worlds and learn a little about them.

Let's start with flocks of birds and fish.

Contrary to what we might expect, these groups are run without any central control, only through a set of simple rules that individuals adhere to that enable them to establish a complete system.

To understand how this happens, Craig Reynolds (2) developed in 1986 a three-dimensional computer simulator called "Boid". This hypothesis says that every bird - Boyd - commits itself only to three simple rules:

Now let's imagine that there are 80 fish in an aquarium with a width and length of 5 meters. The fish move completely randomly at first. Each fish is self-programmed to apply the three rules. One fish approaches another, avoiding collision with them;

But it keeps pace with it, and stays close to it. Another fish, passing by chance, approaches them;

The rules are also applied and organized with the moving team. This happens in several areas of the huge basin, then the small groups move little by little;

To join each other, forming one huge group.

It is - then - not that difficult, all the fish / bird needs;

It is only looking at the neighbor;

And their simple "laws" apply.

Now let's see what happens when we apply Reynolds' three rules to a flock of "electronic" units that start with a random pattern:

To understand how simple rules can help an entity composed of a large number of individuals organize itself;

Let's learn a little about fireflies, a type of beetle that can emit light pulses, and those pulses appear in beautiful, regular synchronization in the great assemblies of this type of beetle;

Meaning that a group of - say - 2,000 fireflies will all pulsate together at one uniform frequency, the fireflies can create this regular pattern by the same simple rule: follow your neighbor, suppose there is a clock in the brain of each firefly in the team, this clock only consists of 5 Numbers in its circle, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, the hand of the clock rotates between them regularly, and releases its light pulse - only - when the hand reaches the number 5, then the light stops, and so on, but every firefly can reset the clock to 1 at any time.

If there is a firefly A and a firefly B its neighbor, they each pulse once every 5 seconds, but A starts at a different time than B, the simple rule of firefly says:

•  Pulse once every 5 seconds.

• When you see your neighbor's pulse, reset your watch immediately.

Here A will try to get close to its neighbor B by resetting until it synchronizes perfectly with it, then the groups of fireflies in the sides of the group start to apply the same rules, gradually, and with time we get a regular mega pattern, the small groups are attracted to each other in the same way to become a group synchronized one.

In this emulator you will find a similar pattern:

The ant is a simple creature, with very weak mental and physical abilities. If you leave one ant in a plastic box, it will spin a lot and then die from exhaustion after a short period. In fact, you can say that about one ant, and about ten, and about a hundred ants;

But when we talk about half a million ants it is different, let's do some experiments to understand that story.

Suppose the ant has to pass either of the roads A and B to get food, in a maze like that, the members of the herd will start entering from the two openings randomly, but the ant secretes a chemical called "pheromones" that leaves it in its walking position, the herd ants can smell these matter easily, and it turns towards it, but as usual we have a simple rule that controls all of that, the rule says:

• Orientation toward the highest concentration of pheromones.

Here, when the ant crosses the shortest path A, it reaches the apple faster and returns faster to the starting point. If the length of the path A is for example 1 m and the length of B is 2 m;

The ant will cross from A twice as many times as it crosses another from B in a specific period of time, which means that the concentration of pheromones will be higher in the shortest way, and this will push the rest of the ants to automatically go to the shortest path.

This technique is used to solve a well-known mathematical problem called the "Traveling salesman problem". A merchant has arrived in a country with a number of cities equal to x. The salesman must visit each city in the country only once, with minimal travel time between cities.

Although it seems easy to solve at first glance, it does not have a fast algorithm known to solve it, if there are only 50 cities then it would take more than a thousand years to find the solution.

Let's give another example. It has to do with one of the problems we have with ants;

Where we always wonder: How does the ant flock know where the closed sugar jar is?

Herds of ants go out in straight lines when they leave the colony, they keep walking until they get food, when that happens the ant returns to the colony, detaching pheromones, here the rest of the herd members gather one by one on the path of the ant that found food, and they join it.

This also happens by touching the antennae of the ants as they wander outside the colony in search of food.

Well, perhaps by now we are more familiar with the idea: individuals operating by simple laws combined with local interactions with neighbors give rise to a complex system with qualities greater than the sum of its members.

This develops what we call collective behaviour, which leads to what we call "collective intelligence", in which this group can solve problems that individuals cannot solve alone.

The swarm is useful in driving predators away from its members;

From afar, it appears as a gigantic organism, helping males to attract females and facilitating the movement of members of the groups and their protection for one another. This explains to us why such states of extreme organization have developed in the animal world;

However, the research process still exists to understand the mechanism of action and emergence of these decentralized processes.

Our study of these complex systems helps advance our understanding of human interactions on social networks, which are also a complex and decentralized system just like gulls, helping us understand how societies behave in recessions, and how parts of the device interact. nervous and immune;

It extends its influence to the study of free markets and international politics. These new types of scientific vision help us create artificial intelligence networks and decentralized modes of interaction on the "Web".

Google itself is a decentralized system that follows the same swarm methods.

It also helps us develop more efficient management systems for organizations.

We are - then - in front of a world view that is completely different from ours, yet it achieves fundamental results in adapting to the changes in reality, as it makes - through a set of simple laws - one of the most complex and most organized and specialized societies on our planet, it is the view of the ant.

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Additional resources:

• understanding

• Boys

• Complexity Science- a guided tour Melanie Mitchell