Swarm Theory in Practice

Growing up, I loved playing Towers of Hanoi. I had the game loaded on my TI-83+ in High School and would play it almost every day in my science and math classes, which I excelled in anyway. Once I figured out the puzzle's pattern, I quickly learned and memorized the optimal routes. I then quickly transitioned to blindfolded speed runs! Once you learn the pattern, it is easy to apply it to higher towers, even without looking.

Reading earlier about how a swarm of ants could learn the same pattern and end up only using the optimal path to reach their food source amazed me. Initially, I thought that ants weren't too intelligent, but when a swarm of ants travels through a maze, they somehow relay information to the swarm that a certain path isn't optimal. Bees use the same problem solving approach when searching for food, or solving mathematical equations. When searching for food, swarms of bees actively search for the closest food source and avoid those that are farther away.

These readings partially inspired me to write my third essay on the news aggregator Reddit. Community members actively seek out and upvote the best new posts to be put on the front page, and they downvote those that they dislike or disagree with. This mindset, known as the "hivemind mentality," can be problematic with links in the Politics section of the site, as it has some fairly heavy bias, but the hivemind often works well to promote higher quality links to the site.