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How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized?
Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. But that's
not the way it works. Bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without
an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other
systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same
way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams is a
wide-ranging exploration into the counterintuitive world of decentralized systems
and self-organizing phenomena. Increasingly, researchers are choosing decentralized
models for the organizations and technologies they construct in the world, and
for the theories they construct about the world. Yet many people continue to resist
these ideas, assuming centralized control where none exists, and imposing centralized
control where none is needed. Drawing on ideas from computer
science, education, psychology, and systems theory, Michael Resnick examines how
and why people resist decentralized ideas, and he describes an innovative new
computer language, called StarLogo, that he designed to help people (even young
children) develop new ways of thinking about these ideas. For example, a student
can use StarLogo to write simple rules for thousands of "artificial ants,"
then observe the colony-level behaviors that arise from all of the interactions.
Resnick discusses how high-school students have used StarLogo
to create new types of computer simulations, and he examines how their thinking
changed in the process. He concludes by proposing heuristics for thinking about
decentralized systems, aimed at helping people move beyond the centralized mindset.
Mitchel Resnick is Assistant Professor in the Media Laboratory
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has consulted widely on the use
of computers in schools, and has developed educational products for the LEGO Group
and for Sunburst Communications. His academic honors include the National Science
Foundation's Young Investigator Award. |
