LOCAL INTERACTION + INPUTS OF GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE (THE PLAYER)
The video game Lemmings has the basic idea, lemmings have no brains, they have no decision-making mechanisms and for that reason the player has to assing the lemmings some tasks, as they walk constantly around. If there is a stair, they climb, if there is an obstacle they turn around, if there is a gap, they fall and die. The user input is to give them specific tasks to make them survive with no brains at all. Assign some task to some of them, sacrifice some of them for the good of the whole family.
LEMMINGS (VIDEO GAME) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_%28video_game%29
HAVE SOME FUN HERE http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/
LOCAL INTERACTION CREATING GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE
No brain single cell organism makes you find the best way may be?
The emergence of intelligence from little rules and local interactions, as happening on the street level in bigger organism like the “city” where people are living together occasionally or on purpose. The text from the book EMERGE from STEVEN JOHNSON makes the question appear: Where does the organism start and what is the motivation of the smallest element.
Is a forest an organism as a whole? Can we call a city or a human being an organism? Is every cell an individual organism or every person in a city? Single ant is an organism or every cell of an ant, may be the colony is the organism? The cell cannot survive without other cells around in a human body as a city can not survive without different groups of people accomplishing different tasks. So we have individual cells of individual human beings and individual people of the organism “city”. The incredible network makes the sens of scale disappear and the uncountable interactions make the whole system work in a specific way which is not specified anywhere.
Ant colonies are not just a lot of tunnels underground, they are the ants behaviour. Ants, who cannot see the whole picture and make simple decisions about what they should do. They cannot count and calculate how many tunnels the colony needs or how many workers are in total required. They can never see a section or plan of the colony but the complex system of an ant colony succeeds with simple individuals making decisions according to their local vision and neighbour inputs.
Interaction with the closest ant. That is all it takes, without seeing the whole picture, ants track patterns of chemicals to do what they do even they do not understand the local cluster. You sense too much carrier ants? Go do something else. Too many ants digging the tunnels, you should try to protect them. No ant has a decision of “liking” the task. They just do it. This level of stupidity is necessary to make the whole system intelligent. Little reactions to little interactions make the whole system alive.
Changing the scale and looking at living organisms, as we call human bodies, as they grow up from one cell to two and four, the cells make decisions (wich are not decisions) according to the local part where they are, as they have the whole dna in them, cells choose what to read from the dna according to their position in the body. A cell on the fingernail cannot locate himself on the map of the body, but according to his neighbours, he can know what to do. Even every cell dies in your body and gets replaced by a new identical one, you are you whatever cells you are consisting of.
The scale changes, to the city, even the globe, little interactions change the whole.Even there are some inputs like laws and city planning, the little interactions shape the behaviour. There is no definition for “poor areas” or “ethnical neighbourhoods” in the plans, or a map of security problems, none of these are planned. Street level interactions on the sidewalk define all of these interactions.
The Example of the video game Simcity shows the simplicity and mimicable nature of the whole. You put simple rules; people cannot live near big piles of garbage, business should be connected to the transportation then you leave the simulation work, the system goes on if every simple rule is working. The whole does not have an intelligence but just set of rules create the logic.
Another example can be thought as some web sites, yahoo answers, wikipedia, various forums and user content filled web sites. They have simple set of rules, and that defines their overall character, the users change but the character of the whole does not.
Final question comes to mind: designing the whole or designing the simple local rules and interactions? Which can create the whole? Applied to architecture, taking user input on the smallest scale as the possibility to have a whole design, with no end user knowing the final product while shaping it.
http://www.mrwong.de/myhouse/
