Scientists Crack the Mathematical Mystery of Stingless Bees’ Spiral Honeycombs

Scientists Crack the Mathematical Mystery of Stingless Bees’ Spiral Honeycombs(smithsonianmag.com)

61 points by MarkOfColor 5 years ago | 3 comments

beaker52 5 years ago |

Learning that surprisingly complex behaviours can emerge from simple rules was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. The Game of Life is the premier but Schelling's segregation model is one of my favourites.

There are a bunch of these models available in the standard library that ships with NetLogo.

https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

twic 5 years ago | |

I vaguely think that the lesson is not that complex behaviours can emerge from simple rules, but that some behaviours aren't as complex as they seem. There's a sense in which those beehives are actually very simple, but we don't see them that way.

They're not complex in a Kolmogorov sense, for sure.

What's more of a mystery to me is what metric we instinctively use for complexity.

beaker52 5 years ago | | |

Good point!