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  • Johnson Emergence 2001

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    177 vizualizări27 pagini

    Johnson Emergence 2001

    Încărcat de

    hidden856

    Drepturi de autor:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Descărcați ca PDF, TXT sau citiți online pe Scribd
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    din 27
    EMERGENCE THE CONNECTED LIVES OF ANTS, BRAINS, CITIES, AND SOFTWARE @) STEVEN JOHNSON INTRODUCTION Here Comes Everybody! Tr August of 200 Japanese scientist ame Toshiyuki Nakagaki announced tha he had trained an amoebalike organism called slime mold to find the shortest route through a maze, Nakagaki ad placed the mold ina small maze comprising four posible routes and planted pices of fod at two ofthe exit, Despite is bing an incredibly primitive organism (a close relative of ntinary fang) with no centralized brain whatever, the aie mold man ‘gpd to plot the most ficient ots tothe food, stretching its ody through the maze so that ie connected directly to the two food sources, Without any apparent coi rsourees, the slime mld had “ove the maze pal Forsuch a simple ogi, te line mold hasan impressive inlet edie. Nakagais snouncement was ony the test in long chain of investigation ino the mabvetis of hie mold behavior. For sins tying to understand systems that we rh- tively simple components to bull higher-level inteligence, the slime mold may someday be seen as the equivalent of the inches and tortoises that Darwin observed onthe GalipagosIlands ow di such lowly organi come to ply wich an important ‘cientifc role? That story begins in the late sss in New York City with cients named Evelyn For Keller. A Harvard PhD. in physics, Keller had writen her dsseration on molecular biology, tnd she had spent some time exploring the nascent ld of non- equilibrium thermodynamics,” which in later years woald come to heassointed with comple theory By 1968, he was working a, 1m asocate at Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan, thinking abou the application of mathematics to biological problems, Mathematies ‘nd played such tremendous ole in expanding our understanding ‘of physics, Kellrthought—so perhaps it might alo be weil foe understanding ving stems Tn the spring of 1968, Ker met visting scholar named Lee Sege, an applied mathematician who shared her interest. I was Sega who fst introduced er to the bizarre conduc ofthe slime ‘mold and together they began a series of investigations that woud help transform not just our understanding of biological develop ment but aso the disparate weds of brain science, sofware design, and urban studies, youre reading these words during the summer ina suburban ‘crural par ofthe word, chances ae somewhere nea you a slime rnold is growing, Walkthrough a nomally coo, damp seeton of forest on a dey ad sunny day, sift through the bark muh that lies ona garden loos, and you may find a grotesque substance coat- ing afew inches of ring wood. On fin inspection, the edsh orange mass suggests thatthe neighbors dog has eatea something lisagrecale but if you observe the slime mold over several dayr— or even beter, capture it wth time-lapse photography—youl ise corer that it moves, ever $0 slowly, across the sil. Ifthe weather conditions grow were and cooler you may eur othe same spot and fnd the ees has daappeare altogether. Ha it wandered off to some other par ofthe frst? Or somehow vanished int thin ig ke a ple of water evaporating? ‘Avi tums out the slime mal (Dison diideum) bas done something for more mysterious, 2 tick of biology that ha confounded seis for centres, before Kelle and Sel began thie clabortion The sme ml behavior was odin it thay ulerstading it eauied thinking outside the Boundaries of wa tional dscpliner—vhich maybe why took a molecular biologi wih physics PRD. instince to une the slime moi mystery. For hatin no disappearing act onthe gaaden foe The slime ml ‘pend uch of ie as thousands of distin single-celled unis cach moving separately from its ober comrades. Under the ight conto, shoe myriad lls wl ole agin int asin, ge onanism, which then begins its leisy cra acs the gad for consuming ting eves and wood ait moves out. When the envionment isles hospitable the lime mold act single gas when the weather tun cane andthe tol ejos Inne food supply” beomes a they” The slime mold oxilates berneen being ingle restr and x em ‘While slime ma cells re lave spe, they have stated 4 isproportionate amount of tention from a number of diferent {isiplines—embrology mathemati, compute sience—becase they display such an ineguing example of coordinated group ‘behavior. Anyone who his ter contemplated the great mysey of ‘Taman phsilogy—how do all my cells manage to work so well ‘ogeter'—wl nd something sonantin the slime mos swam. fe could only figure ot how the Dicyetam plc of, maybe ‘we would gun some insight on oar ow baling togetherne “Iwata Sloun-Keterig in the biomsth deparment—and it ‘was very small department,” Keer sys today, laughing, While {the fel f mathematical biology wasrelatiely new in the at = tes, it had a fscintng, if enigmatic precedent in a thea-lile own essay writen by Alan Turing, the brillant Engh code-breaker fom Workd War Tl who alo helped invent the digi tal compurce One of Turing lst pulsed papers, before his death in 1954, ad sued the side of morphogenesi—the capacity fal life-forms to develop evr more baroque bodies out of impos simple beginnings. Tering paper had focied more a the reuing sumer pans of fower but it demonstrated using mathematical ols how complex organism could semble ite withou any master planner calla the sho “Lvs hiking about slime mold aggregation as « model for ‘hiking about development and T came across Tarings papes” Keer ays now, fiom her fc at MIT.“And I thought Bingo” Forsome in, scaher had undesod that sine cells emit- ted a common substance called acrasin (ao known a eyce AMP), which was somehow vod in the agreation proces But until Keller begun her investigations he conventional belt ‘deca that dime mold awa formed the command ope snake” cells that ordered the oher cell o begin ageing In 1962, Harvard B. M, Shafer showed how the pacemakers could we etic AMP ana signal of sort orally the troops; the lime rnold genes would reese the compounds atthe appropsat moments, igen waves of eel AMP that washed though the ‘enti community at each ialated cell layed the sgn it reighbor lime mold aggrenation, in fey, was a giant gue of| “Telephone—but only afew elite cells placed the original all. Te seemed ike «perf rtonabe explanation. Wee natu lly predispose to think in tems of pacemakes, wheter wei talking abou fang, polite stems, of our own bode. Our action seem governed fo the most part bythe pacemaker els in ur brains ad for milepnia weve uit borate pacemakers ll into ou social ongnization, wheter they come in the form of ings, dictators, or ct councilmen, Mach ofthe world around us can be exphined in ere of command systems and hirahies— ty hoa ibe nye fr the sie mols? But Shafer theory fad one sal problem noone could fod the puemaers. While ll observer agreed that waves of ei [AMP did indeed flow through the lime mold community before sgaseation, ll the cells inthe community wee ffivly ner changeable, None of them pss any distinguishing cancer isc that might ert them to pacemaker statu Shafer theory td presmed the extence ofa cellar monarchy commanding the maces, but a it turned out al lime mold eels were raed coy. or the twenty years tha fllowed the publation of Safes vial ex, nyoogits ase that the ming pacemaker cells wera sign ofnefcen dt, or poly designed expe ments The generals were thee someere inthe mi the scholar swum —they jot did’ know what thee ufos looked ike et But Keller and Segel ook another, more ail approach. Tur ings work on morphogenesis had sketched out a mathemati ‘model wherein ipl agents following imple rules oul generate amazingly complex structures; perhaps the aggregations of slime ‘ood calls wera re-word example ofthat behavow Tang had focused primacy on the interactions Berween cll in a single onan, ba it was pfctl reasonable to ase hat the math would work for agreation of fe-Bouing ells, And so Keller started t thinke Whatif Shafer adit wrongall along? Whatifthe commnity of dime mold cells were onpninngthemseive? What ifthe wer no paceman? Keller and Segels husch pid off dramatically, While they lucked the advanced visazaton tol of todays computes, the two scratched out a sees of equation sing pen and paper, equ ‘ios that demonstrated how sine cell could rigger aggregation vith flowing leader, simply by tering the amount of jtic AMP they relied individual, then filling tril of the Pheromone that they encountered hey wandered though their ovironment. Ifthe ame cells pumped out enough cic AMP, clusters of el would stat form. Cel would begin allowing sereated by other el, crestng positive feedback oop that cocourged mor cells join the cuter each solace a sim ply leasing eye AMP based on town loc anesment ofthe enc eonditions, Keller and Sepel argued in a pape publshedin 1968, then the larger ime mold commit might well beable to ggegnte based on global changesin the evionment—all without 4 pacemaker el eling the shot “The response was very interesting” Kelle says now "Fo any~ one who undestod appli mathemati or ha any experience in hid dynamic ths wa old hat to them. But oso, i ida snake any sense. would give seminar biologists, andthe sy, “Sue Where's the founder el? Where's the pacemke Ie dia provide any suisfiction to them whatwocree” Indeed, the pace- maker hypothesis would continue a the reigning mode for another decade, until a series of experiments convincingly proved thatthe slime mold cel were orguinng from belo. Te amazes ‘me how dat tis fr people to thnk in tems of olive phe- omenon” Kee ys toda. ‘Thy yeas after the two rescuer fest sketched ou thie theory on pape, lime mold aggregation is now recognied as 4 classic as study i botorn-up behavior. Keller colegue at MIT ‘Mitch Resnick ha even developed computer simulation of lime mol cells aggregating lowing tudents to explore the ex ai ible hand of se onanization by altering the number of celia he cavionment, and the lees of eye AMP dsbuted.Finttine uses of Resse’ simulation iavarably say tha the on-screen images—beiliane clusters of re clls and green pheromone trails— remind them of vdeo games, and in ict the comparison reveals a secret lineage. Some of today’ most popular computer games resemble ime mold cells because they ae Ioosely based on the equations that Keller and Segel formulated by hand in the late ties, We ike to talk sbout life on earth evolving out of the primr- dial soup. We could just as eusly sy thatthe most interesting Agta life on our computer screens today evolved out ofthe slime sacl. ‘You can think of Segel and Keller's breakthrough as one ofthe fist few stones to start tumbling atthe outet of a landslide. Other stones were moving along with theier—some of whose tnjectories ‘wel follow in the coming pagee—but tha initia movement was nothing compred tothe avalanche that followed over the next two decades. At the end ofits course that landslide had somehow con jure up a handfil of ily credited scientific disciplines, a global network of research labs and think tanks, and an ene patois of burewords. Thirty year after Keller challenged the pacemaker hypothesis, sudents now take courses in “sel-onguizaton stud- jeg and bottom-up software helps orgasie the Web's most lively sirtal communities. But Keller’ challenge did more than help trigger series of intellectual wend, It also unearthed secret his- tory of decetralied thinking history that had been submerged for many years beneath the weight ofthe pacemaker hypothesis and the traditional boundaries of scientific research. People had ‘ben thinking about emergent behavior in all its diverse guises for ‘centuries, if nt millenia, but all that thinking had consistently heen ignored as unified body of work—because there was noth ing uni about its bod: There were isolated cells pursuing the mysteries of emergence, but no aggregation " Indeed, some of the great minds of the lst few centures— ‘Adam Smith, Feedrch Engels, Charles Darwin, Alan Tuting— contributed to the unknown science of sel-organiaation, but because the science didnt exist yet as a recognized fel, their wor ended up being led on more fui shelves. From a certain angle, those tmionomies made sense, because the leading figures of this ew discipline didnt even themselves realize chat they were strg- sling to understand the Ins of emergence. They were wresting with loa issues, n clearly defined fields hove an colonies learn to forage and built nests; why industrial neighborhoods form along las lines; how ou minds lean to recognize faces You can answer all ofthese questions without resorting tothe siences of complex- ity and self-organzaion, but those answers ll share a common pater, as clear asthe whors ofa fingerprint. Bu to seta pat- ‘tern you needed to encounter tin several contests, Only when the pattern was detected did people begin to think about studying sel ‘organizing «ystems on thie own merits Keller and Sege saw it in the slime mold assemblage; Jane Jacobs saw it inthe formation of city neighborhood; Marvin Minsky in the distibuted networks of the human bai, ‘What features do al hese systems share? In the srplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid ele~ sents, rather than singe, intelligent “executive branch" They are botom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smart fom below. Ina more technical language, they are complex adaptive sye- tems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents resid- ‘ng on one seale start producing behavior that es one sale above ‘hem: ans create colonies; urbanites erate neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software lars how to recommend new books. ‘The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence. Imagine « billiard table populated by semi-intligent, motor- ined biliad balls tha have been programmed to explore the space of the table and alter their movement pattems based on specific interactions with other balls. Fr the most part, the tables in per~ ‘manent motion, with balls eollding constantly, switching diee- tions and speed every second. Because they are motorized, they never slow down unles thee rales instruct them to, and ther pro- ramming enables them to take unexpected turns when they ‘encounter other balls, Such a system would define the most ele- rental form of comple behavior: a system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple way, following loca ules and oblivious to any higher-level instructions, But it wouldnt ru be ‘consiered emergent until those local interactions resulted in some kind of discerible macrobehavio. Say the local rules of behavior followed by the hall ended up dividing the table into two chsters of even-numbered and odd-numbered balls. That would mask the beginning of emergence, higher-level pattern arising ut of par~ allel complex interctons between local agents. The balls aeit programmed explicitly to cluser in wo groups; theyre pro- rammed to fllow much more random rules: swerve left when they collide with 2 soidcoloed; accelerate after contact with the thee ball top dead in their tacks when they hit the eight ball and soon. Yt out of those low-level routines a coherent shape emerges Does that make our mechanized billiard table adiptive? Not really because «table divided between two clusters of balls isnot terribly wef either tothe bili balls themselves orto anyone ke in the poo ll. But, like the proverbial Hamlet-wrting mon ‘keys, if we haan finite numberof tables in our poo hall, each following a diferent set of rules, one of those tables might ran- domly hit upon a rue et chat would arrange all he ball ina per~ fact triangle, leaving the cue ball across the table ready for the ‘break, Tht would be adaptive behavior inthe larger ecosystem of the poo! hall, assuming chat it was inthe interest of ou biliards system to attract players. The system would use lca ules between interetng agents to create higher-level behavioe well uted to its ‘Emergent complexity without adaptation is like the intricate erysal formed by a snowflake: t's a heuutifil patter, butt has no funtion The forms of emergent behavior that we'll examine in this book show the distinctive quality of growing smarter overtime, and ofesponding tothe speci and changing neds oftheir envi- ronment. In that sense most ofthe systems wel lak at ae more pater programmer sya feature nota bug, Emergent systems can row unwieldy when their component parts become excesively complicated. Beer to build «densely interconnected system with simple clement, and let the more sophisticated behavior trickle up. (Thats one reazon why computer chips trafic in the sweamined language of zeros and ones) Having individual agents capable of. Airey assessing the overstate ofthe sytem can be a el ai ity in swarm log; for the same reason that you dont want one of the newons in your rain to suddenly become sentient. Encourage random encounters. Decentralized systems such as ant colonies ely hewily onthe random interactions of ans ‘exploring a given space without any predefined orders. Thee encounters with other ants ae individually aciteary, bur because ‘there are so many individuals inthe sytem, thos encounters eve ctw te indi gage andere macro ofthe rom ind Wau ho pal econ ecb lt ei ong a er od me “ising ne mire odio “Took for pacer nthe sia We he ont clan ern vc ud weno tte ulin, ‘hyde ron patent enim ey dee A abel phavacns lads em dads ie aig high anf rex hlen t fages neous Shen Thick oat dteion aow met ination cee hg coy ign bog Smuling he perenne forget eu it tecling te pce ly fg ne pn hut ipa shh af cy. Poy ttnion co your neighbor. The ny rel te he tpn eon tha i ns give nd he ne wih te mow facing comes. You an rte “Teal ifmatin cn led gal wis” Te ima nctasan of mnt intercon ve etbosing tinh la aga eth oc ech oe honor tlie pling hess aon the nex. ding tooth ol ten vl rte morn bere tron and wil omngunty cnet olny i whe pen and ae elf aoe fle: Wi hr {oo snbng io oe natn ei won et ee [ar ncn of nt egiane aan wt ee Gordon's harvester ant colonies contain another myptery. If we understand how local interactions can lead to global problem- solving, we sll dont have an answer t0 the question of how colonies develop overtime, Thi one of those scientific questions se that nobody thought to ask because the phenomenon had gone unobserved. And that phenomenon had gone unobserved becatse people had been thinking about ants—and watching ant+—ing the wrong sale. Until recently entomologee studied colony behay- for in snapahots, surveying given nest foe days oF months at a time, then moving onto other nests or back to the lab, Bet success- fil colonies can ive s long a fifteen yeare—the fe span of the ‘eagrlying queen an, whose demise signals the final death ofthe

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