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July 16, 2004

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Biomorphic Software

Hitchhiker’s Guide to Biomorphic Software:

“Consider the following facts. In nature, swarms of wasps work together without central control to build complex nest structures. Individual ants forage for food, and by laying down a chemical signal promote the emergence of an optimal path to the food source for other colony members to follow. As a survival mechanism, individual slime mold cells join together and act as a single, multicell organism to weather periods of famine. In each example, self-organizing groups of simple, cooperating individuals join together to perform complex operations in a distributed, parallel manner.

Furthermore, the behavior exhibited by the group is not directly encoded within the individual members, but emerges from the interactions of the members. Consider that the membership is not static but is an ever-changing group of individuals, as members are added and removed in an unpredictable manner. To make it even more interesting, there is no central controller explicitly orchestrating the action of the individual parts. And in the midst of all this seemingly chaotic interaction, still the organism forms, grows, lives, repairs itself, adapts, and survives. If only my computer environment were as successful. Perhaps it can be. “

Just the other day I was walking along The Oracle with a friend when we saw a flock of around a hundred sparrows flying about the shops as if they were a unified blob of matter, deforming over structures, elongating and then snapping back into shape.

My friend didn’t get shat on. That time.

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Posted 2:05 pm by Wrighty —

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