Hive Mind — an emergent metaphor 🐜🐜🐜🐜🐜
from the ants creating a cortex in my sugar jar when left unattended for a week.
It’s fun to ponder how this happened, creating what appears to be a surface area maximization. Our view from above emerged from the iterative application of simple rules copied across many agents (ants). For example, the ants leave a pheromone trail as they search a landscape for food, initially in a bit of a random walk. They circle back to the hive after a good find. Their trails evaporate over time, so the cumulative deposition of many ants following a trail over time to the food will “discover” the shortest path between hive and food, as has been replicated in studies. Shortest-path-finding is an emergent behavior from a simple and identical iterative algorithm embedded in each ant.
In this case, we have an additional detail: the surface of the sugar was hardened, as if melted together from countless ant “piss” trails over time… and perhaps that is difficult for their mandibles to gain purchase (or becomes unpalatable to their tastes).
Oh, and if you squint at the shading, our emergent brain has yin-yang mandala-shaped hemispheres, but that’s just their container casting some shade. ☯️
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