Michael Crichton has based his novel “Prey” on a concept called rule based agents. It basically states that a group of entities, each acting on a certain set of rules and having a certain amount of memory, interact with each other and evolve to come up with solutions; which at times are truly out-of-the-box.

What’s interesting is that among these agents, there is no single agent which commands and controls how the entire group or each agent ought to work. It is plain, simple interaction and mutual understanding based on a set of rules implanted in them, based on what type of problem they have got to solve. Mind you, these are not a set of rules which, if followed, would lead you to the solution. These are probably rules which tell the agents what situations are illegal( something like division by zero).

The best example of the power of this concept would be wikipedia and the open source movement. I don’t think I would have to elaborate on how rapidly things have progressed with these two. Even colonies of ants and bees act as rule based agents ( the queen in this case is nominal. She doesn’t direct any ant. However the basic rule implanted in the ants psyche is that she should be protected at all costs). Individual cells of our bodies are all programmed to grow and reproduce before they die and these rules act as the basis for the kind of functions they perform, given their structural and other constraints.

Though examples of this kind abound everywhere around us, we also come across in our natural world, solutions born out of a completely different and contradictory concept: hierarchy. This is something people are probably more familiar with and can relate to better. We see hierarchy at work in basically all forms of governance; be it in school, corporates, society, governments, groups of mammals ( pride of lions, herd of elephants etc ). What’s intriguing is that entities which are quite small and therefore have very small or almost no brain at all, rely on the rule based agents concept to survive. The sheer complexity of how the entire system of a mammal works would certainly get even the brightest of people scratching their heads and yet this is brought about by individual cells who do not have a brain...and this seems to be almost perfect. Yet as we go higher up the biological ladder, we find species having bigger brains and bigger memories, signs of greater intelligence....this ideally should have translated into more complex and amazing ways for interaction and solving problems based on the rule based agent concept. But alas, here we see the hierarchical mentality creeping in.

Question: Does hierarchy come into play when there is an element of fear? Or is it the most natural way of problem solving?

Deciding which system is better suited for problem solving is debatable. Whatever the case may be, we live in a world which runs on these two powerful yet completely contradictory concepts, and have been doing so since ages....without a hitch!!!