It is a perfect 32 degrees. A light and cool breeze flirts with the sands of the desert. The windows roll down, the sunroof rolls up. The spirit soars to the beats of some classic, soul wrenching music. The fog of a routine existence dissipates. An orgasmic euphoria erupts within. It is great to be alive again.
It is the same car. It is definitely the same life. However the concoction served through the intersection of the perfect 32 degrees, perhaps the sudden blast of a favorite song or even the breeze waving through the hair, results in a completely different connection in our brain and suddenly euphoria sets in.
Life lives and thrives at the intersection.
Ants and other life forms have discovered a unique form of collective intelligence. Leaderless, extremely federated, super-efficient. Ever wonder how ants form such a uniform pattern to/from their home and their source of food? Or how huge swarms of locust, millions of them, move in such harmony, without the long-haired conductor doing his/her bit in the center? It is quite amazing that such basic life forms in nature are able to achieve such colossal, coordinated feats.
A few folks from the homo sapiens cadre got quite intrigued by these advanced accomplishments of smaller, fellow inhabitants of mother earth. So they broke the shackles of linear learning and went and studied ants, bees, fireflies, locusts and even water droplets at a level of detail. Besides a number of PhDs, this research also resulted in some critical insights and the birth of a new term viz. ‘swarm intelligence’.
The agents (ants or locusts) apparently operate completely on their own, in their local context. However they are connected to each other and their environment through a set of very simple rules. There is no central co-ordination or leadership and also no grand goals which the community sets for itself. However federated, local actions based on a simple set of rules result in global achievements which many a team would aspire to achieve.
An ant for instance emits a substance called pheromone as it moves out of its home to look for food. The pheromone evaporates over a period of time – this is where the environment comes into play. The simple rule that ants follow is “go on the way where your little nose smells the most pheromone”. So as multiple ants move from their home looking out for food, soon some of them will go on the shortest route and on this route the smell of pheromone will be the strongest. Subsequent ants will use the simple rule and follow this route and this will further intensify the pheromone smell on the route. As a result, globally the majority of the ants will follow the shortest path to the food!
The discovery of this highly effective pattern in nature has been intersected with a number of our day to day optimization problems such as finding the shortest route from source to destination for a set of packets over a telecom network. This kind of intersection has already spurred a whole lot of innovation in multiple fields of life. An Airline ran an experiment in 2008 to see if airplane allocation to gates worked better if it were based on swarm intelligence i.e. each pilot is like an ant acting in his/her local context to get to the gate, while overall guided by a set of basic rules. Apparently, the net allocation of planes to gates on the day was much more efficient when based on swarm methods as opposed to the normal optimization algorithms.
I wonder if we have seen the full potential of this intersection yet. Imagine how we could apply this highly decentralized, leaderless pattern to other walks of life. The implicitly federated Internet environment comes to mind. Imagine the internet as the “environment” and all things connected to it as agents. If these agents could all have some basic rules under which they can operate, can their local actions tie up into a connected whole, a whole much greater in intelligence and capability than its parts? I guess the challenge will be to write and then execute the thin layer of software on each agent which will ensure that the agent follows a set of pre-defined basic rules. However if we could somehow manage to get the software installed and executed each time an agent connects to the Internet, then there is a possibility of morphing the Internet into a collective intelligence unit (brain) which is able to solve our problems based on the rules currently configured on its agents. Perhaps the next big evolution of the www after the internet of things!
The key point however is that the next wave of innovations and successes will emanate from the intersection. Linear learning in various fields has perhaps reached its zenith or will result only in incremental advancement in our thoughts. Those bright sparks of fresh thinking and innovation will only be found at the intersection.
At the intersection of different fields and disciplines.
At the intersection of different cultures.
At the intersection of different religions and belief systems.
At the intersection of Eastern myths and Western science.
At the intersection of ying and yang.
So when your angel, your daughter walks up to you and says she has decided to take up ‘nanofractalmedicine’ taught in 6 semesters across India, Europe and America be prepared to say yes, foot the bill and proudly walk her to the intersection!
