[HN Gopher] What termites and cells have in common
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       What termites and cells have in common
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 37 points
       Date   : 2021-07-24 01:51 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.mpg.de)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.mpg.de)
        
       | zabzonk wrote:
       | > Seemingly headless
       | 
       | Heedless? Termites have quite well-defined heads.
        
         | abstractbeliefs wrote:
         | I interpreted this as without a "head
         | builder"/foreman/architect, which is what makes the structure-
         | out-of-nothing to be a surprise.
         | 
         | There's no head termite in this context, so how are they
         | coordinating such large-scale structure?
        
           | zabzonk wrote:
           | Possibly so (I agree there is no "head termite"). But if you
           | observed humans on a building site, I think it might be
           | difficult to identify a "head". They would all appear to be
           | doing their own thing - more or less.
        
             | Jtsummers wrote:
             | It would be rare to see, for instance, a group of humans
             | spontaneously arrive and assemble a structure without
             | having some pre-coordinated objective. If it's the same
             | structure they've built a hundred times before (say an
             | Amish barn raising), you may not even see any clear or
             | explicit coordination during the work. And on any given day
             | (say when it's being painted) a conventional construction
             | project may similarly appear uncoordinated and headless.
             | 
             | But you can be pretty confident that that morning or some
             | days before what was to be painted and what color was
             | already set out. And when the foundation was laid, and
             | plumbing installed, there was a plan communicated to those
             | workers. Not necessarily the day of, but again sometime in
             | advance.
             | 
             | If we scale to cities and towns, you'll be more likely to
             | see a kind of uncoordinated development. The corner shop
             | wasn't intended to be there on day one (outside of planned
             | cities, at least), but someone recognized that it had value
             | (on a popular foot path, near some homes or offices) and
             | met the need without explicitly coordinating with the
             | others. Of course, this is also tempered by zoning and
             | permitting laws.
        
             | minitoar wrote:
             | Depends on the level of observation. This is pretty
             | detailed, we're looking at pheromones and what not. I'd
             | think the equivalent for humans would be looking closely at
             | the communication between them, through the day. I think
             | that would make it obvious there's a central coordination.
        
           | chongli wrote:
           | They aren't coordinating. The large-scale structure is an
           | emergent property of their collective behaviour. This
           | phenomenon is most famously illustrated by Conway's Game of
           | Life [1]. Non-local patterns emerge from entirely local
           | rules.
           | 
           | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton
        
             | abstractbeliefs wrote:
             | I know they aren't coordinating, I'm presenting why the
             | author writes about it appearing to be "headless".
        
             | dgb23 wrote:
             | Does that mean we could also achieve (or actually are)
             | organisation without coordination?
        
               | anigbrowl wrote:
               | Yes, this is the utopian goal of political anarchism and
               | arguably much market theory. Unfortunately, it's only as
               | good as the right selection of local rules, and it's very
               | possible that what's good for maximizing one thing has
               | many untoward side effects or requires such a degree of
               | homogeneity as to become unpleasantly restrictive.
        
       | yann2 wrote:
       | How is the pheromone gradient maintained in the termite hill?
        
       | re-al wrote:
       | I just don't see how a cell is similar to an insect.
        
         | canadianfella wrote:
         | Here's a good article that explains some similarities:
         | 
         | https://www.mpg.de/what-termites-and-cells-have-in-common?c=...
        
       | Hokusai wrote:
       | > One characteristic of self-organizing processes is random
       | fluctuations that can be amplified by local interactions between
       | agents.
       | 
       | It is going to be amazing when we are able to design self
       | organizing organisms and create emergent behavior at will. Our
       | current infrastructure is efficient but fragile, the same applies
       | to software. Even that we are already moving in that direction.
       | Dozens of pods on Kubernetes are more resilient that a more
       | traditional active/passive architecture. Smaller more numerous
       | components controlled by environment status instead of direct
       | control is getting closer to this type of design.
        
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