Working together in smart groups, we can lessen the impact of uncertainty, complexity, and change, whether our groups are small ones like problem-solving teams in companies or huge ones such as the multitudes who maintain Wikipedia, writes Peter Miller in ‘Smart Swarm’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com).
He adds that, as members of such groups, we don’t have to surrender our individuality, because good decision-making comes from competition as much as from compromise, from disagreement as much as from consensus.
We add something of value to a team or organisation mainly by bringing something authentic and original to the table, something that springs from our unique experiences and skills – not by blindly copying others, taking advantage of others, or ignoring our better instincts, explains Miller. “At times this means paying our fair share, sacrificing for the good of the group, or accepting the way things are done. At other times it means standing up for what we believe in, lobbying for a cause, or refusing to go along with the crowd.”
Digital ants
The intro chapter, titled ‘When in doubt, turn to the experts,’ opens with the ‘open seating’ problem that Southwest Airlines had to wrestle with. “Of all the major airlines, Southwest was the only one that let passengers choose where to sit once they got on board. The airline had done it that way for more than thirty-four years, and it took pride in being an industry maverick.”
But some customers, especially business travellers, were complaining that the free-for-all to get on the plane was no fun. So, the airline wanted to find if assigned seating would make people happier. Doug Lawson, an analyst in the airline, decided to seek an answer through computer simulation of passengers boarding a plane, based on the behaviour of ants.
The book describes how Lawson’s digital ants, like the real counterparts, followed a few simple rules to guide their behaviour. “Each ant was allowed to go down the jet ramp and wander onto the plane. If we were simulating open seating in that run, each ant had its own idea of a good place to sit, based on actual passenger data, and it would look over the situation and say, well, I see that seat is open. I’m going to try to get over to that one.”
Waiting rule
After studying a few raucous simulations, Lawson had to add a ‘waiting’ rule, because all these ants were trying to get in through the galley, pushing and shoving and bouncing off one another! To get a feel of reality, the airline staged a full day of experiments using employees on a real plane, one learns.
A significant finding about the time to board, from repeated simulations for every feasible pattern, was that the difference was only a minute or two, not compelling enough to make the airline change its tradition of open seating. Southwest, however, took a close look at the way passengers were lined up at the gate, because a possible real problem was that people did not like competing for a spot in the line-up at the boarding gate.
As a result, a new system was put in place by the end of 2007, according to which passengers’ place in line would be held as soon as they checked in, whether in person or online. That way, as the intro elaborates, passengers would not have to show up hours ahead of time and hold their places.
Pheromone-like signals
Another example of how inspiration can be drawn from ants is from Hewlett-Packard’s lab in Bristol, England, where scientists created software to speed up telephone calls. “Using a simulation of British Telecom’s network, they dispatched antlike agents into the system to leave pheromone-like signals at routing stations, which function as intersections for travelling messages,” reads the narrative.
Pheromones, for starters, are chemicals that come from glands near the tip of the ant’s abdomen, and they act as powerful signals, telling other ants to follow their trails, as the ‘ants’ chapter instructs.
Using the pheromone trail, ant colonies have evolved an ingenious way to determine the shortest path between two points, notes Miller. Not that any of the ants are doing so on their own, he clarifies. None of them attempts to compare the length of, say, two branches independently. “Instead, the colony builds the best solution as a group, one individual after another, using pheromones to ‘amplify’ early successes in an impressive display of self-organisation.”
Similarly, in the HP case, if a station accumulated too much digital pheromone, it meant that traffic there was too congested, and messages were routed around it. “Since the pheromone evaporated over time, the system was also able to adapt to changing traffic patterns as soon as congested stations opened up again.”
Towers of mud
A chapter on ‘termites’ leads you to the savannah, to see conical towers of mud ten feet tall or higher, looking like witches’ hats. Local folks call them ‘ant heaps,’ but they don’t have anything to do with ants, observes Miller. These pointy structures were erected by termites, and, despite their odd appearance, they represent one of nature’s most sophisticated architectural achievements, he extols.
Intellipedia finds mention in the ‘termites’ chapter as an example of swarm sharing. Set up on a trial basis in 2005 under the auspices of the Director of National Intelligence’s office, the project has expanded to include a whole suite of software tools that are now used by some hundred thousand individuals on three security levels, viz. non-classified, secret, and top secret, the author informs.
The busiest of these tools, so far, is the original wiki-based software, which attracts five thousand or so entries or edits a day, he adds. “Like its enormously successful model, Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001 and now has more than 5 million articles, it functions through a process of indirect collaboration that resembles what we see in smart swarms in nature.”
Seed of an idea
More importantly, indirect collaboration that makes it easy for almost anyone to get involved is one of the secrets of Wikipedia’s success, Miller states. He cites a quote that compares wiki to a termite nest, thus: “One initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball), which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.”
An instance of such a ‘mudball’ was a stub created on Intellipedia, about the use of chlorine in IEDs, when intelligence officers discovered that insurgents had started to use chlorine in improvised bombs. The stub quickly attracted the attention of a number of individuals with useful information, the book records. “Over a period of about three days… twenty-three people – some collectors, some analysts scattered around the world – put together, using Intellipedia, a perfectly respectable collection directive…”
On the question whether Intellipedia can revolutionise the way intelligence is gathered and interpreted in the US, the author concedes that the verdict is still out. He acknowledges that, although it has proved its effectiveness at pulling together information from disparate sources, it has not yet gained wide use as a platform for collaborative decision-making. After all, it is not easy, as Miller reminds, to transform highly structured bureaucracies like the nation’s intelligence agencies into flexible, adaptive, and self-organising systems.
Graphic birds
For bird-loving techies of old times, it should be of interest to read about Boids, a deceptively simple program created in 1986 by Craig Reynolds, a computer graphics expert. In his program, Reynolds gave birdlike objects, or boids, three rules to follow, the author reminisces: Avoid colliding with other boids, stay close to nearby boids, and fly in the general direction of these other boids. And the result was a ‘convincing imitation of flocking’ as boids moved across a computer screen.
Reynolds set up a kind of bubble around each boid, which he described as its ‘neighbourhood,’ Miller writes. “If other individuals entered this neighbourhood, then the boid responded to them. If they didn’t, it ignored them. The size of this neighbourhood was defined by a distance measured from the centre of the boid and an angle measured from the boid’s direction of flight. By following this relatively simple system, boids were able not only to stick together with their flock but also to dodge stationary obstacles, like pillars or buildings, in a lifelike manner.”
Recommended read, ideally in a natural setting.
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Tailpiece
“It is only after downsizing the company to the bare minimum that we realised...”
“The folly of not having done it earlier?”
“No, we’d forgotten to harvest the wisdom of the crowds before letting them go!”
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