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A baby sweater generated by Conway’s “Game of Life”!

This is excellent: Apparently, cockroaches make group decisions. Some Belgian scientists took 50 of the humble Blattella germanica and put them in a tank that had three little cockroach huts, each of which could hold 40 cockroaches. The roaches divided themselves up perfectly into two groups of 25 each, and left the third hut vacant. When the researchers repeated the experiment so that it had three huts with a capacity of 50 each, all the cockroaches assembled in a single hut, and left the other two vacant.
How weird is that? Cockroaches not only have rules of socialization — they have quantum rules of socialization. And they appear to make their grouping decisions in a democratic fashion, with each roach counting as a single vote in the group’s decision-making process. As one of the scientists, Jose Halloy of Department of Social Ecology at the Free University of Brussels, told Discovery News:
“Cockroaches are gregarious insects (that) benefit from living in groups. It increases their reproductive opportunities, (promotes) sharing of resources like shelter or food, prevents desiccation by aggregating more in dry environments, etc. So what we show is that these behavioral models allow them to optimize group size.”
The models are so predictable that they could explain other insect and animal group behaviors, such as how some fish and bugs divide themselves up so neatly into subgroups, and how certain herding animals make simple decisions that do not involve leadership.
I amend that: Not only do cockroaches have quantum rules of social engagement, they have anarchically derived quantum rules of social engagement. They will truly inherit the earth.
(Thanks to Digg for this one!)
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
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