Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams

* Book: Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds. By Mitchell Resnick.

Summary

Reading notes from Michel Bauwens, 2006:

The topic of this book are self-organizing systems, that run without an organizer or coordinator. It also describes a tool, 'Starlogo', that helps children understand these important processes. It is a book about the decentralized mindset, needed to understand such realities.

Chapter 1: Foundations

This chapter explores examples of decentralization.

The centralized mindset looks for centralization and leaders even when there are none. For example, in a flock of birds, there is no 'chief bird'. The author sees his task as probing this mindset, and to to develop conceptual and computational tools, so that people may start to think in decentralized ways. Decentralized thinking is not new.

Examples are the ideas of Adam Smith, the invisible hand, and Darwin's evolution, but today there is a massive shift towards this paradigm in organization, technologies, scientific models, theories of self and mind, and theories of knowledge.

In business, vertical integration has been replaced by reliance on outside markets. CPU-based computers are being replaced by 'parallel computing'. Newtonian physics stressed cause and effect, not mutual interaction. Systems and complexity theory started to emphasize decentralized interactions and feedback loops. Cybernetics was an attempt to combine insights in different fields into a unified systems view. This evolved to the study of nonlinear dynamics which gave rise to chaos theory.

- "Self-organizing systems are the related opposite of chaotic systms: in the former, orderly patterns emerge out of low level randomness; in the latter , out of low level deterministic rules."