No Termite Is in Charge

A professor at MIT has been posting items on social media that keep swimming (swarming?) in my thoughts.Markus Buehler runs a lab that studies how systems organize themselves. He’d been running experiments with swarms of AI agents, and he noticed something simple and strange: if you double the number of agents in the swarm, you don’t get twice as many connections. You get about three times as many interacting pairs, and nearly four times as many two-step routes and closed triangles. The network gets richer faster than the population grows.Add more agents, and the web of relationships among them expands superlinearly—faster than the count of agents. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. Engineers have known this is true of networks for a long time. It’s essentially Metcalfe’s law, the principle that a network’s value grows roughly with the square of its nodes. What’s new is watching it happen in swarms of reasoning machines.To explain why this fascinates me, and connects to the dharma, I’ll take you first through a termite mound.......May all beings recognize the swarm of which we are a part.The Kickstarter campaign for my spiritual memoir, From Pain to Peace: How Trauma and Tragedy Teach Us Compassion and Wisdom, runs until September 13. The rewards for backers start at $5. Check it out. Get full access to From the Pure Land at melpine.substack.com/subscribe