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By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
-- Carl Zimmer for The New York Times
It is also noted that these findings may have implicatation for, say, how the brain makes sense of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. How living multiplicity becomes a stable and useful unity. E pluribus unum.
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By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
-- Carl Zimmer for The New York Times
It is also noted that these findings may have implicatation for, say, how the brain makes sense of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. How living multiplicity becomes a stable and useful unity. E pluribus unum.
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Date: 2007-11-13 02:01 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-11-13 04:23 pm (UTC)From: