Tuesday, January 30, 2007

a room full of monkeys with typewriters . . . will they eventually make Shakespeare?

What makes a group of blind and completely unintelligent ants work together in such a beautifully choreographed way? How can thousands of fireflies in Thailand blink with complete synchronization? These questions fall under the scientific exploration of emergence, which attempts to explain . . . well . . . all sorts of things, like how the brain works, how a collective mind is always more intelligent than a single individual and how neighborhoods were shaped. It is particularly relevant to the development of the "bottom-up" phenomena that has emerged on the internet (Google, Amazon, ebay, youtube, etc), open source software, and the history of the internet itself. Anyways, here's a link to a fantastic radio special I was fortunate enough to listen to on my way home tonight. It's an hour long, but you can probably get the gist of it in far less time than that. I ended up sitting in my car for half-an-hour after I got home just to listen to the whole thing. There also seems to be a bunch of other very cool radio shows on this web site.

The next and seemingly obvious question (at least for me) is: "How can a study of emergence be a generator of architectural forms?" One simple answer involves circulation on a college campus - eventually students will wear in a dirt path if a paved one does not exist. Mimicking emergent forms in nature (such as termite mounds) is another potential use of emergence as a form generator. Perhaps we can study this a bit in 670.





2 comments:

JTH said...

i sat in my car for an extra 10 minutes listening to that on wamu. then i ran in to my apartment and laid on the floor listening to the rest out of my stereo.

if there were a gagillion monkeys, in a giant maze of hexagonal towers, then yes.

but if you add to the equation a swarming attack from a small pack of (hungry non-vegetarian) wolves, you may have to wait a while.

for the record, i guessed exactly how much the bull weighed all by myself. not even 1 pound off.

i beat you to the link, by the way. see my new del.icio.us site:

http://del.icio.us/jthealey/emergence

5-0. can't move from the waist up.

bdickson said...

true, but I was slower because I spent 15 minutes finding the cheapest deal for Steven Johnson's book on Amazon, which will be arriving in 4-5 short days.