intelligence

Michael Crichton has based his latest novel "Prey" on a concept called rule based agents. It basically states that a group of entities, each acting on a certain set of rules and having a certain amount of memory, interact with each other and evolve to come up with solutions; which at times are truly out-of-the-box.

What's interesting is that among these agents, there is no single agent which commands and controls how the entire group or each agent ought to work. It is plain, simple interaction and mutual understanding based on a set of rules implanted in them, based on what type of problem they ought to solve. Mind you, these are not a set of rules which, if followed, would lead you to the solution. These are probably rules which tell the agents what situations are illegal( something like division by zero).

The best example of the power of this concept would be wikipedia and the open source movement. I don't think i would have to elaborate on how rapidly things have progressed with these two. Even colonies of ants and bees act as rule based agents ( the queen in this case is nominal. She doesn't direct any ant. However the basic rule implanted in the ants psyche is that she should be protected at all costs). Individual cells of our bodies are all programmed to grow and reproduce before they die. As mentioned in my previous post, it also seems that we all work for the sustenance of the human race.

Though examples of this kind abound everywhere around us, we also come across in our natural world, solutions born out of a completely different and contracdictory concept: heirarchy. This is something people are probably more familiar with and can relate to better. We see heirarchy at work in basically all forms of governance; be it in school, corporates, society, governments, groups of mammals ( pride of lions, herd of elephants etc ). What's intriguing is that entities which are quite small and therefore have very small or almost no brain at all, rely on the rule based agents concept to survive. And man, do they do it in style... the sheer complexity of how the entire system of a mammal works would certainly get even the brightest of people scratching their heads...and this seems to be almost perfect. Yet as we go higher up, we find species having bigger brains and bigger memories, signs of greater intelligence....this ideally should have translated into more complex and amazing ways for survival. But alas, here we see the heirarchial mentality creeping in.

Question: Does heirarchy come into play when there is an element of fear? Or is it the most natural way of problem solving?

Deciding which system is better suited for problem solving is debatable. Whatever the case may be, we live in a world which runs on these two powerful yet completely contradictory concepts, and have been doing so since ages....without a hitch!!!