Unsettling the Centralized Mindset

Researchers in the field of adaptive behavior are quite familiar with the idea of higher-order complex global patterns emerging from the lower-level simple local interactions of components in a distributed system. Our artificial ants form colonies and self-organized foraging expeditions; our robots and simulated birds flock and cooperate on tasks; our genetic algorithm populations form species spontaneously; and our neural network and subsumption architectures work to create intelligent navigation and exploration. But to most people, these sorts of ideas remain unfamiliar and counterintuitive. Instead, the typical reaction when seeing organized behavior in a group of individuals (be they ants, plants, or people) is to assume that there is a leader directing the activities of each group member, or that there is some organizing structure such as a food patch already present in the environment. How can we overcome these centralist tendencies and help people to appreciate self-organized emergent behavior where it exists? For several years now, Mitchel Resnick has been thinking about the origins and implications of the centralized mindset, and devising ways of educating people to overcome this mindset and see emergent phenomena in a new, distributed light. His new book, \fITurtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams,\fP presents an overview of his research on these issues. At the same time, Resnick provides insights into selforganization and decentralization that will be enlightening even to those already working in this area. This book is important reading for all of us interested in communicating our research on complex emergent behavior to others both inside and outside our field, and for everyone wishing to share in the excitement of understanding behavior in a new way, a feeling of discovery that is evident throughout the pages of this work.