Lock Step

Amy Farrah Fowler, Sheldon's "girlfriend" in " The Big Bang Theory," once made an interesting observation ... that a group of women in close proximity for a while will synchronize their periods. Now I don't know if this is true, but a parallel idea struck me today while watching the ruling class's reaction to Donald Trump's proposal that we stop all Muslim immigration for a while.

Without taking a position on this statement, I have been amazed by the degree of spontaneous congruence in the opinions of politicians and the press (the ruling class) being voiced about Trump's comment. These lock-step denouncements had about as much space between them as the stonework at Machu Picchu.

I suppose that, taking a step back, that this is not surprising. Man, being a social animal, normally does not want to be an opinion outlier ... and so will modify true feelings to conform to what the group-think seems to be forming. This is kind of like how flocks of birds or schools of fish often seem to form one undulating mass ... swooping and turning in remarkable unison.

Again, not taking sides in this Muslim immigration cage match, one of Donald Trump's appealing qualities is that he doesn't swim with the schools or fly with the flocks. But I think that I, and a whole lot of other people, would like to figure out to the beat of what drummer he is marching.

The Game of Life

Many, many years ago there evolved a simulation called the “Game of Life.” I think it was first popularized by John Conway in Scientific American magazine (see: Ibiblio Entry). Basically this game consisted of a two-dimensional checkerboard of infinite dimensions in which each cell was either populated or empty. When an initial set of populated cells is created (Garden of Eden condition) with the placement of counters, then a sequence of moves is begun under a rigid set of genetic rules. These rules can change, but Conway’s were (quoted from this article):

1. Survivals. Every counter with two or three neighboring counters survives  for the next generation.
2. Deaths. Each counter with four or more neighbors dies (is removed) from overpopulation. Every counter with one neighbor or none dies from isolation.
3. Births. Each empty cell adjacent to exactly three neighbors--no more, no fewer--is a birth cell. A counter is placed on it at the next move.

When this game was programmed into a computer (I can’t recall for sure, but I think maybe my son and I did such a program on the TRS-80), fascinating patterns were created which often performed spellbinding repetitions.  The game ends with one of three outcomes (again quoted from this magazine): 

[F]ading away completely (from overcrowding or becoming too sparse), settling into a stable configuration that remains unchanged thereafter, or entering an oscillating phase in which they repeat an endless cycle of two or more periods.

 Obviously changing Conway’s genetic rules within this same framework will create different outcomes. You might want to play this game for yourself at one of many Internet sites or download it (Google them). Here is one such on-line site: Kongregate Games .

Now comes the real point of this post … this game-of-life concept has just been brought into the physical world by scientists at Harvard University. They have created simple robots (bots) that can be made cheaply in great numbers and can communicate via infrared signals with one another ... and live by an updated set of rules to form complicated and often life-like learned patterns … see: Wired Magazine Story. Such social behavior often mimics the motion of flocks of birds or schools of fish and obviously may produce remarkable results. Although these Cantab scientists can (I assume) mimic deaths in these bot populations .., they have not yet been able to have them reproduce ... nor allow them to set their own objectives. Once this is accomplished, we may be in for some exciting and maybe even dangerous science-fictional outcomes.