[HN Gopher] Why can't programmers be more like ants? Or a lesson...
___________________________________________________________________
Why can't programmers be more like ants? Or a lesson in stigmergy
(2015)
Author : yamrzou
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-01-12 13:43 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ubiquity.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ubiquity.acm.org)
| jerojero wrote:
| Perhaps something like this can be used in AI based development
| teams.
|
| After all, as it says, ants are not very intelligent themselves
| yet manage to do amazing things due to stigmergy.
| MrLeap wrote:
| Probably related to a common desire to be creative and operate
| with a degree of autonomy.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| This pretty much. Ants are basically powerless on their own
| yamrzou wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Why Can't Programmers Be More Like Ants? Or a Lesson in
| Stigmergy (2015)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10866532
| - Jan 2016 (28 comments)
| nalinidash wrote:
| Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240527161552/https://blog.ubiq...
| Vampiero wrote:
| Because that entails giving up your own autonomy?
| jebarker wrote:
| No it doesn't. It might involve giving up some of your
| individuality, but I don't think that's true either.
| trhway wrote:
| more? i think in the mindlessness of my work i'd beat any ant.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Me too well except for leaf cutter ants. I just can't compete
| with those guys.
| xeckr wrote:
| Can't access the site. Did one of you get offended at the title
| and then give the server a tight hug?
| nalinidash wrote:
| Archive link available below.
| olau wrote:
| I'm personally attracted to this way of thinking. I did write a
| post about it many years ago, probably triggered by this article:
|
| https://ole-laursen.blogspot.com/2016/01/stimergy.html
|
| Part of the mindset is that when you see a co-worker end up in
| the wrong place with some new code, you ask yourself, can I do
| something to our code base to lower the probability of it
| happening again?
| patrulek wrote:
| > Why Can't Programmers Be More Like Ants?
|
| Because ants dont have business units. Most of us, programmers,
| are slaves to the business and we have to do what they want from
| us, not what we want or think is optimal to do. And the
| requirements can change often. How fast those changes would be
| notified by others in decentralized "ants approach"? Would the
| business survive with this approach?
| lingonland wrote:
| Because we are humans and do not work like ants.
|
| "Why can't an orange be more like apples?" - The title is very
| stupid clickbait and the reason why people are clicking on it.
| zepolen wrote:
| Are you sure about that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHpu7ngQxwE
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Sites down, but do ants have standups every day just to tell the
| team what they are doing? Are they forced to attend scrum
| ceremonies? Do they have a scrum master insisting they set an
| arbitrary "sprint goal" every two weeks that everyone, including
| the scrum master, is going to forget about but management will
| frown at when they realize we didn't work towards? Oh, I'd love
| to be able to produce like an ant.
| ktallett wrote:
| Do ant colonies have a scrum master who have no clue how
| realistic goals are or not but decide to set them anyway? Do
| ant colonies avoid listening to those with actual knowledge and
| skillsets that goes against their unrealistic expectations?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yeah, we can't leverage stigmergy because there are actors
| outside of the code always shifting priorities and applying
| pressure to system that, in this article's reckoning, should
| grow in an obvious and natural fashion.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The ants know what to do and we don't.
| slt2021 wrote:
| Because humans are not interchangeable economic units.
|
| The position that all humans are just interchangeable resources
| where you can have 80 lbs of human resources or 180 lbs of human
| resources, like a coal or oil, is ultimately a nihilistic view
| that strips us all of all humanity.
|
| if you, capitalist, want developers as interchangeable economic
| units, you can use LLMs
| jebarker wrote:
| This isn't what the article proposes. The article is about top-
| down organization/planning versus individual programmers having
| the autonomy to figure out the next right thing to work on
| based on indicators left by prior work, e.g. emails, todo
| items, issues. If anything I'd say this gives individual
| programmers more autonomy and influence over the direction the
| software takes. I think this makes a lot of sense.
| slt2021 wrote:
| We are already living and working like ants in a colony.
| Human corporation is not much different from ant colony. Ants
| have queen, humans have CEO. Ants have spec:
| worker/warrior/support, humans have work specialization:
| sales/developer/support/etc.
|
| the same pattern emerges at the state/country/economy level:
| taxpayers/military/elites: a human only exists to work, pay
| taxes and pay bills
|
| the ultimate emergent goal is total subjugation of a human
| economic unit to the needs of a colony
| jebarker wrote:
| This is a very pessimistic view of the world. In return for
| contributing to the needs of the colony you benefit from
| all the colony has to offer.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The problem is that the business doesn't trust programmers to
| build the software in the direction they want. Which is
| honestly a valid concern, I'd spend way more time than they'd
| want refactoring and optimizing the code to be cleaner and
| more extensible, and that gets in the way of piling up the
| features.
| Juliate wrote:
| But would managers accept that most programmers be idle most of
| the time?
|
| Case in point: "Only 30% of the ants do 70% of the work."
| https://blog.thefabulous.co/idle-time-productivity-lesson-an...
| teddyh wrote:
| _"I'd like to study ants," I said._
|
| _He laughed and laughed, as the window blue was turning darker
| and darker. Finally he regained his composure, sat upright, and
| asked me seriously:_
|
| _"Why ants?"_
|
| _"Ants never fail. Computer networks, I don't care which one,
| TYMNET ARPANET INFONET CYBERNET CYPHERNET MICRONET MIDINETTE
| TELENET they fail regularly, several times a day, somewhere they
| fail. And the big computers too, you can't rely on them, sooner
| or later, they go south and they leave you high and dry, if we're
| really going to teleconference on this thing it should never
| fail. The only thing that never fail are insects."_
|
| _"I said, why ants?"_
|
| _"Look at an ant. Talk about microminiaturization of the ant!
| Even with the best chips from Silicon Gulch do you know how big a
| computer would have to be to do all the things an ant does? Tons!
| Tons! And the ant does all that in its little head and when it
| finds a twig it has one program: 'If you recognize something
| which is long, made of wood, and hard, pick it up and put it on
| top of the ant-hill.' Now that I call a program. And if the ant
| can't do it by itself, another one will come and help, and
| another, until they do it. And you can step on them it won't stop
| the ultimate result, and a crazy Frenchman named Remi Chauvin who
| is a genius explained to me how he would put twigs in tall
| glasses to see what the ants will do and he digs cliffs for them,
| yet they always manage to complete their program. A computer
| scientist who doesn't understand ants is a man who doesn't know
| what reliability means."_
|
| _"So you would build the computer equivalent of the ant, in
| hardware?"_
|
| _"Right, and it would be so cheap, it would have its own little
| memory and it would have its own little programs, and it would go
| around looking for places to apply itself, and it would be
| disposable, disposable computers by the millions, crawling around
| and keeping their society going no matter what, so we humans can
| always find one when we need it and make it do something useful,
| make it work for us."_
|
| -- The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist,
| Jacques Vallee (1982)
| <https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA206>
| dpflug wrote:
| > "Ants never fail."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
| BitterCritter wrote:
| Computer networks do have packet life which I guess would be
| a fix for this, but don't quote me I'm not a network
| engineer.
| iLemming wrote:
| Because ants have the biggest brain-to-body-mass ratio in the
| animal world. If programmers had brains as big like that, they
| wouldn't be able to come to this world naturally, consequently
| programming-motherfucker.com wouldn't have real meaning and that
| would be a very sad world.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-14 23:01 UTC)