Feb 12, 2018 08:51 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/the-most-importan...-the-local
EXCERPT: We live enmeshed in networks. The internet, a society, a body, an ant colony, a tumour: they are all networks of interactions, among people, ants or cells – aggregates of nodes or locations linked by some relation. The power of networks is in their local connections. All networks grow, shrink, merge or split, link by link. How they function and change depends on what forms, or disrupts, the connections between nodes. The internet dominates our lives, not because it is huge, but because each of us can make so many local links. Its size is the result, not the cause, of its impact on our communication.
[...] Engineers designing robots to search a burning building, or another planet, are using systems like those of the ants, based on networks of local communication. These swarm methods can be simpler, cheaper and more robust to failure than a system using central control. If each searcher has to relay information back to a central station that in turn makes a map and tells each player what to do, sophisticated central control is required, and if it breaks down, all function is lost. By contrast, local interactions have redundancy; if one doesn’t work, another might.
Local interactions regulate many natural systems. Ecological networks show an enormous variety of types of links: one organism can live inside another, stick to it, climb along it, eat it, feed it by gathering or digesting its nutrients, help it reproduce by carrying its pollen or dispersing its seeds. All organisms operate in some kind of ecological network; no living entity operates independently. Even each of our cells contains organelles joined together in an ancient collaboration among bacteria....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-most-importan...-the-local
EXCERPT: We live enmeshed in networks. The internet, a society, a body, an ant colony, a tumour: they are all networks of interactions, among people, ants or cells – aggregates of nodes or locations linked by some relation. The power of networks is in their local connections. All networks grow, shrink, merge or split, link by link. How they function and change depends on what forms, or disrupts, the connections between nodes. The internet dominates our lives, not because it is huge, but because each of us can make so many local links. Its size is the result, not the cause, of its impact on our communication.
[...] Engineers designing robots to search a burning building, or another planet, are using systems like those of the ants, based on networks of local communication. These swarm methods can be simpler, cheaper and more robust to failure than a system using central control. If each searcher has to relay information back to a central station that in turn makes a map and tells each player what to do, sophisticated central control is required, and if it breaks down, all function is lost. By contrast, local interactions have redundancy; if one doesn’t work, another might.
Local interactions regulate many natural systems. Ecological networks show an enormous variety of types of links: one organism can live inside another, stick to it, climb along it, eat it, feed it by gathering or digesting its nutrients, help it reproduce by carrying its pollen or dispersing its seeds. All organisms operate in some kind of ecological network; no living entity operates independently. Even each of our cells contains organelles joined together in an ancient collaboration among bacteria....
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-most-importan...-the-local