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Scientists Crack the Mathematical Mystery of Stingless Bees’ Spiral Honeycombs (smithsonianmag.com)
61 points by MarkOfColor on July 30, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


Learning that surprisingly complex behaviours can emerge from simple rules was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. The Game of Life is the premier but Schelling's segregation model is one of my favourites.

There are a bunch of these models available in the standard library that ships with NetLogo.

https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/


I vaguely think that the lesson is not that complex behaviours can emerge from simple rules, but that some behaviours aren't as complex as they seem. There's a sense in which those beehives are actually very simple, but we don't see them that way.

They're not complex in a Kolmogorov sense, for sure.

What's more of a mystery to me is what metric we instinctively use for complexity.


Good point!




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