Welcome and ~ants~
Welcome! This will be the first of many articles I write documenting my graduate experience learning about complex systems. My goal is to connect concepts I learn in class to the world through real - life examples and simple explanations.
The first time I thought about complex systems (though, I didn’t really know what to call it at the time) was in the summer of 2019 when my siblings and I traveled to Costa Rica for a week. We spent each day in a different town or at a national park, but every day we saw Leaf Cutter ants. We have ants in the US, but I think we noticed these ants (and they became a thing we looked forward to finding every day) because they travel in a way we don’t typically see in the US. They move quickly, some of them carry leaves on their backs, and they travel in a very distinct line. We drove from place to place in a rental car and I began feeling like the Leaf Cutter ants and humans had found the same solution to the same problem. The problem being ‘how to travel en masse in the most efficient way’, and a solution being ‘by highway’. So every time we got to a new forest or our next Airbnb, one of us would inevitably see ants and let the others know, ‘Guys! I found the ant highway!’. It was one of the better memories from the trip (it was not our best trip).
So how does the ‘ant highway’ relate to complex systems? What even is a complex system? Using the wikipedia definition, ‘A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other.’ (Wikipedia) Businesses are complex systems because they are collections of teams and departments working together to solve a problem. Humans are complex systems for a similar reason: they’re a collection of cells that make up organs and tissues and whatever else (I’ve only taken 10th grade bio) to create the human body. Complex systems can be parts of even bigger complex systems. For example, several businesses together make an industry, or a collection of neighborhoods creates a city.
Complex systems have properties that make them able to adapt to their environment. The ‘ant highway’ demonstrated self-organization and emergent behavior, which means that a lot of individual ants were able to come together and create an efficient pathway to collect and transport food for the colony. There is no central figure telling the ants what to do, each individual ant simply follows a pheromone trail to food and the ‘ant highway’ is the result.
My plan is to write about a different topic in complex systems science each week. I learn best by relating difficult topics back to examples in my own life. Some weeks will be about the basics of complex systems and how they work. Other weeks will look at a particular problem or area of study (sustainability, business case studies, the pandemic) through the lens of complex systems.
Sources
Paul Miguel Photography. (2020, August 4). Costa Rica - Leaf Cutter Ants on the March [Video]. YouTube. (7) Costa Rica - Leaf Cutter Ants on the March - YouTube
Wikipedia contributors. (2023, December 1). Complex system. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:34, January 5, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Complex_system&oldid=1187792097
