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Fig. – First Difference Engine. This impression from a woodcut was printed in 1853 showing a portion of the Difference Engine that was built in 1833 by Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor, and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer.
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like to you as a nail” ~ Abraham Maslow, in “The Psychology of Science“, 1966.
“Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple. […] Impart the same principle or show the same machine to an American or to one of our Colonists, and you will observe that the whole effort of his mind is to find some new application of the principle, some new use for the instrument“. ~ Charles Babbage quoted in Richard H. Babbage (1948), “The Work of Charles Babbage“, Annals of the Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, vol. 16.
At the beginning of the 1820’s, Babbage worked on a prototype of his first difference engine. Some parts of this prototype still survive in the Museum of the history of science in Oxford. This prototype evolved into the “first difference engine.” It remained unfinished and the completed fragment is located at the Museum of Science in London. This first difference engine would have been composed of around 25.000 parts, weighed around fourteen tons (13.600 kg), being 2.4 meters tall. Although it was never completed. He later designed an improved version, “Difference Engine No. 2”, which was not constructed until 1989–91, using Babbage‘s plans and 19th century manufacturing tolerances. It performed its first calculation at the London Science Museum returning results to 31 digits, far more than the average modern pocket calculator. (check Charles Babbage Wikipedia entry for more).
Soon after the attempt at making the difference engine crumbled, Babbage started designing a different, more complex machine called the Analytical Engine (fig. above). The engine is not a single physical machine but a succession of designs that he tinkered with until his death in 1871. The main difference between the two engines is that the Analytical Engine could be programmed using punched cards. He realized that programs could be put on these cards so the person had only to create the program initially, and then put the cards in the machine and let it run. It wasn’t until 100 years later that computers came into existence, with Babbage‘s work lying mostly ignored. In the late 1930s and 1940s, starting with Alan Turing‘s 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” (image below) teams in the US and UK began to build workable computers by, essentially, rediscovering what Babbage had seen a century before. Babbage had anticipated the impact of his Engine when he wrote in his memoirs: “As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.“
Video by Yoav Ben-dov www.ybd.net [Hanoi, Vietnam, 24 Feb. 2009] – A nice example of self-organization as described by complexity theory. There are no fixed “top-down” laws (i.e. traffic lights), and yet the incredible traffic flows continuously. In complexity terms, the collective motion emerges from the multiple local interactions between the “agents” (drivers and pedestrians), mediated by horn sounds, eye contact, and body gestures.
“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” ~ Sun Tzu, “The Art of War“.
During the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War (Yom Kippur War) highly strategic manoeuvres occurred on the Suez canal. It was crucial to surpass it on time. Rather quickly. The war was fought on October, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria, and it began when the coalition launched a joint surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, which coincided with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Egyptian and Syrian forces crossed ceasefire lines to enter the Israeli-held Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights respectively, which had been captured and occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War [Wikipedia]. The conflict led to a near-confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, both of whom initiated massive resupply efforts to their allies during the war.
Anyway, the war began with a massive and successful Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal during the first three days, after which they dug in, settling into a stalemate. The Egyptian army put great effort into finding a quick and effective way of breaching the Israeli defences. But the Israelis had built a large 18 meter high sand walls with a 60 degree slope and reinforced with concrete at the water line. Egyptian engineers initially experimented with explosive charges and bulldozers to clear the obstacles, before a junior officer proposed using high pressure water cannons. The idea was tested and found to be a sound one, and several high pressure water cannons were imported from Britain and East Germany [Wikipedia]. The water cannons effectively breached the sand walls using water from the canal.
photo – Egyptian forces crossing the Suez Canal on October 7, 1973 [Source: Wikipedia]
After that success, however, a swift passage of the entire army over the Suez canal was needed. The problem was that the Egyptian army had to make a rather quick passage with several different convoys of tanks and regular logistic trucks, over very tiny bridges (fig.) as quick as possible. Some say, that the Egyptian general in charge did not halt any of the convoys, in order to give precedence to some in particular. Instead, contrary to logic, he gave an order for them to continuously flow, without having any official at the bridge entrance to organize them. Any right convoy tank that felt that the other left convoy truck should enter first, he would stop some seconds, and only after that, should make his own bridge passage over Suez. What’s history now, is that the decision, was entirely left to them, locally… and fluid. No “traffic lights” at all, … contrary to the usual hard strict regulaments of any army we know today. If that’s not wise tactics, tell me what it is?! …
“With an eye for detail and an easy style, Peter Miller explains why swarm intelligence has scientists buzzing.” — Steven Strogatz, author of Sync, and Professor of Mathematics, Cornell University.
From the introduction of, Peter Miller, “Smart Swarms – How Understanding Flocks, Schools and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making and Getting Things Done“. (…) The modern world may be obsessed with speed and productivity, but twenty-first century humans actually have much to learn from the ancient instincts of swarms. A fascinating new take on the concept of collective intelligence and its colourful manifestations in some of our most complex problems, Smart Swarm introduces a compelling new understanding of the real experts on solving our own complex problems relating to such topics as business, politics, and technology. Based on extensive globe-trotting research, this lively tour from National Geographic reporter Peter Miller introduces thriving throngs of ant colonies, which have inspired computer programs for streamlining factory processes, telephone networks, and truck routes; termites, used in recent studies for climate-control solutions; schools of fish, on which the U.S. military modelled a team of robots; and many other examples of the wisdom to be gleaned about the behaviour of crowds-among critters and corporations alike. In the tradition of James Surowiecki‘s The Wisdom of Crowds and the innovative works of Malcolm Gladwell, Smart Swarm is an entertaining yet enlightening look at small-scale phenomena with big implications for us all. (…)
(…) What do ants, bees, and birds know that we don’t? How can that give us an advantage? Consider: • Southwest Airlines used virtual ants to determine the best way to board a plane. • The CIA was inspired by swarm behavior to invent a more effective spy network. • Filmmakers studied flocks of birds as models for armies of Orcs in Lord of the Rings battle scenes. • Defense agencies sponsored teams of robots that can sense radioactivity, heat, or a chemical device as easily as a school of fish can locate food. Find out how “smart swarms” can teach us how to make better choices, create stronger networks, and organize our businesses more effectively than we ever thought possible. (…)
Drawing (Pedigree of Man, 1879) – Ernst Haeckel‘s “tree of life”, Darwin‘s metaphorical description of the pattern of universal common descent made literal by his greatest popularizer in the German scientific world. This is the English version of Ernst Haeckel‘s tree from the The Evolution of Man (published 1879), one of several depictions of a tree of life by Haeckel. “Man” is at the crown of the tree; for Haeckel, as for many early evolutionists, humans were considered the pinnacle of evolution.
Chemoton § Vitorino Ramos' research notebook 
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