David Castro taking a shot at an awesome courtship swarm of Bigeye fish at Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico.
Caption provided by Octavio Aburto (via National Geographic Photo Contest 2012)

A critical analysis of the book Swarm Intellignece – Neil Leach, Roland Snooks

What to underline

The bee builds the next cell starting on the corner of other cells, wich are already have two walls built. This simplicity protects the natural growth of the hive,  the contuniuty is necessary for success. Mıcroscale generates simple inputs, wich collectively form the whole. As the organism gets bigger, the possibility to bring the whole information at any given moment to every individual becomes impossible. The set of simple rules and tracable information patterns allow the individual to make decisions. Ant body collectors are not able to sit on a desk and decide how many dead bodies should be carried in wich direction, they just follow little patterns and the job is done.

Relationship between a human and the city, a bee and an orchid, an ant and the colony, differ on many levels on scale and purpose. One thing that remains obvious is these relationships are consisting of feedback loops. The city gives inputs to the individuals and the individuals shape the city by their inputs. This mutual interaction is the key to growth and stabilitiy of the whole. A city grows on its small scale economic and behavioral rules of the neighbours.

“The whole is greater than the sum” , the mathematical addition of all entries create a statistic, but if the input of “interaction” is added creating the “whole” as a system including the intelligence. It is like the soul of the whole. Individuals are “stupid” and the whole has a intelligence. It is not possible to say, one neuron is intelligent, but the whole organism can generate intelligence on extremely complex levels. To generate an understandable model and usable in architecture, our tools are visualisation and computational techniques.

Data collection in microscale inputs is the key, that is what we can extract from the book. Instead of designing a whole, architects need to design  a system, wich can interact, evolve and update himself. The idea of having huge monumental buildings “perfect” as they are is going to be romantic and historic. Now the building, the city, the neighbourhood should be respectfull to the user, interact and collect data from the user, at any time. Generate solutions at the system to those issues wich can be solved by design. Respect and democracy found in nature should be coming back to the output of architecture. The City.

The swarm intelligence exeggerated:

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 intelligent slime

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/

PROTESTOR GUARDING HIS TREE /  POLICEMEN GUARD THE DESTRUCTION

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM A PARK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_protests_in_Turkey

Summer of 2013 something happened in Istanbul, the monetary system wanted to take the only green space left in Taksim, the GEZİ PARK, wich was the last public breathing point for the people and the reason to do so was to build a SHOPPING MALL

Like Toyo Ito says, the rapid economical growth was there, trying to reach every corner of the city, every valuable space was being occupied by big “bosses” to be sold. The park was tried to be destroyed with the help of police force. People resisted, the resistance spread to the country, that mall was not built. This shows if people themselves have the respect to the nature, we have a lot to learn from a tree, everything startet with a tree at gezi park but of course had political background.

 WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM A TREE

Toyo Ito mainly focuses on the idea of creating a connection between nature and human living environments “cities”. There is the example of the tree, which can grow vertically but also create harmony with his surroundings and in itself by sharing the sunlight with every leave democratical as neighbours living in harmony. He asks the question why humans today “lost” that connection wich he had with the nature in rural horizontal cities, what did we miss trough the inevitable proccess of going vertical in the city.

Ito runs his office for over 40 years and he talks about the different eras of arcitectural growth of the city, and for him the word city means “Tokyo”. The swimming in the sea of consumption, extreme fast economical changes influence architecture and create almost impossible relationships in the city texture. He and his colleagues ask the same questions in every era, even if  rules of the game changes in every 10 years period. Who is the architect, how much an architect can influence the world in this rules and for whom is architecture practiced and how can we learn from the nature.

He accepst and creates an anology with the rules of the game in the human world, in the the ecosystem “the forest”, when if only one tree tries to abstract himself form the system, gets eliminated, as this fight between spiecies creates their harmony. Harmony comes from the constant fight, which fight brought us to live worse. Instead of creating indusry for sustainability, we should simply learn from nature.

Modern times create so called fictional architecture, Ito states, as we architects fix on an image and miss the importance of building creation proccess and humanitary needs also naturality. His own Sendai Mediatheque building period is for him an example of, how reality changes the mind of an architect by time, the end product may vary from the idea or image, but get better qualities after facing reality. The imaginary idea dies, leaving huge amount of construction work behind. However your image is idealised, the building is real.