ANOTHER INTERESTING THING: I haven’t done all that much yet with the StarLogo simulation program that I downloaded (available to all on the MIT web site). I did get a chance to look at some of the example programs they give you. It is amazing what those little pre-programmed independent agents can do. Organized behavior appears to just happen out of nowhere, even though all of the little things are acting on their own, totally disorganized.

But what if you try to program StarLogo to simulate intentional cooperation? I tried something fairly simple — I set loose a bunch of independent little boxes (“Turtles”, as they call them) to drift around randomly. Each box has a certain assigned characteristic, really just a number from 1 to 8. However, each box wants to be close to another box with the same number. If a box bumps into another one having that characteristic, the two boxes will “fall in love” and will randomly drift as one, till death do them part. I allowed for chaining, i.e. couples could become threesomes, threesomes could become foursomes, etc. The immediate results weren’t all that interesting — things eventually clump together into a handful of big groups. What was interesting was what happens to the program itself. StarLogo itself starts getting tapped out by all this love. The program gets slow and can’t keep up, such that the groups are constantly spreading out and trying to regroup. Sometimes strange things happen that shouldn’t, like a member on one end of a group “falls in love” with a member on the other end, and starts the group moving in a constant direction, chasing its tail in effect. The problem is that the program is being overwhelmed and isn’t calculating fast enough. Thus, important steps sometimes happen out of sequence. If you put in additional programming steps to insure that things happen in the proper sequence, it eats up even more program power, and things get really slow.

What does this all mean? Well, perhaps it shows that love isn’t easy. You can see why nature depends on getting organized results from disorganized agents who just follow rules and stick to their own little zones and don’t look at the big picture. When you start thinking about what a loved one is doing and you try to coordinate with that, and they in turn try to coordinate with you, and back and forth like that, it burns up a whole lot of energy. At some point the coordination process drains the both of you, and things just don’t go right.

Anyone who is or has been married knows what’s up with that.