Path-dependent ants and the dangers of the pheromone trail

Ants always follow other ants; Thank god humans sometimes stray from the beaten path
By George ILIEV

Ants are famous for following each other's pheromone trail. This is how ants find their way home or to a food source. If given two possible paths, the shorter path ends up winning because more ants will follow it in a given time and more of them will leave their pheromone trace. Thus the signalling on the shorter trail will become more pronounced and this route will trump the longer trail.

An interesting conundrum, however, is presented to ants when a new food source appears that is not on their path. The ants still keep following their old path and rarely manage to reach the new food source. This form of stigmergy leads to absurd situations known as an "ant mill" where ants that have lost their original pheromone trail end up marching in a circle following each other and eventually die of exhaustion.

Human organisations and societies are different thanks to the existence of dissenting groups. In feudal times these were called rebels. Nowadays they are called "inventors", "early adopters" or "divergent thinkers" - people who do things differently.

Many prominent thinkers, from George Bernard Shaw to Elon Musk, have encouraged people to be different and start new things. G. B. Shaw says: "Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."

Yet, often times human society has found itself following the wrong pheromone trail. You may recall the VHS versus Betamax videotape format wars in the early 1980s, in which VHS won not because it was the superior standard but because more customers and producers had chosen it originally.

Another prominent case of path dependence in business is the establishment of the QWERTY standard of typewriters over another more modern standard.

We could even broaden the path dependence argument to religions. Once established they profoundly shape human culture and turn an area's population into conformist collaborators working towards the religion's objectives. Groupthink is not confined just to small groups but applies to entire societies.

So after all Kafka was right: at times we are human but there are times when we turn into insects. Beware of the pheromone trail.

Photo: Ant trail. Source: Wikipedia

Natural selection drove violin design in Renaissance Italy

Market pressure resembling natural selection forced unwitting Italian violin makers to lengthen their violin holes
By George ILIEV

Violin holes kept evolving in 16th-century northern Italy
Early Italian violin makers designed their instruments with a round hole in the middle. None of them knew that this was sub-optimal. Acoustics and sound resonance improve not by increasing the size of the hole but by lengthening the edge of the orifice, according to a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Gradually, customer feedback influenced the workshops of the Stradivari and Guarneri families in Cremona during the Renaissance. Through trial and error they kept increasing the length of the hole's edge until we now have the optimal known design with a typical "f" shaped hole.

Market selection resembles natural selection
Interestingly, the feedback loop of the market closely resembled natural selection: a process entirely based on customers choosing violins that they perceived as having the best acoustics. This, rather than conscious R&D attempts by the makers to "fiddle" with the sound, made the producers prosperous and ensured that the successful designs would be passed down the next generation in the luthier's family.

Unwitting violin makers did not know the recipe for their own success
The producer of the violins with the best sound would simply be favoured by the buyers, even if the producers themselves didn't know why. Violin-making is a complex art of tweaking multiple variables, so the luthiers may have thought that the varnish or the strings they used made their product superb. Yet, in the end it all boiled down to the hole.
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Violin photo attribution: Wikimedia Commons

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In times of corporate crisis: domesticate corn!

On bleeding and seeding in companies, animals and plants
By George ILIEV

When someone is seriously injured, bleeding is often the primary cause of death. When a company is in crisis, employees leave en masse. What makes the situation worse is that the best employees are the first to leave.

An analogous phenomenon called shattering can be observed in the wild cereal plants, though a bit earlier in their life cycle: the seeds break off from the corn cob (or the wheat ear) as soon as they have ripened. This evolutionary adaptation of the plants works well for them in the wild, as the seeds are scattered in all directions, but this makes their harvesting by humans almost impossible.

Domestication of corn

This is why when prehistoric farmers at the dawn of agriculture set about domesticating cereal crops, the first trait they bred out of maize (corn) and wheat was exactly shattering. Only after they had managed to hold the seeds together for harvesting could they focus their attention on other traits for selective growing such as drought resistance and improved nutrition.

Image contribution: Wikipedia


Lessons for the CEO:

The first thing medics do  when someone is wounded is try to stop the bleeding. When a company is in crisis, stopping shattering is the prerequisite for corporate recovery.

Damned with great success: antibiotic overkill and overshooting torpedoes

By George ILIEV

Antibiotic overkill

There was a little noticed but most astonishing facet of the groundbreaking story about the discovery of the first antibiotic in almost 30 years: the deep initial disappointment of the research team who first thought they had discovered yet another detergent or bleach - so powerful an antiobiotic that it would kill any living cell and hence serve no use as a medicine. Later tests showed to their jubilation that they were wrong and the new compound, teixobactin, only affects germs. So a little less of the killer sauce seems to be a good thing.

Torpedoes that overshoot the target

From germs to warfare: in the 60s the US developed the Mark 45 nuclear torpedo: so powerful a weapon that it would destroy not only the targeted submarine but also the very submarine that launched it. The only way the weapon could be used was to explode the torpedo way after it had passed by the targeted submarine, so that the blast effect on the launch vessel would be reduced to tolerable. Yet, these overshooting torpedoes were just as effective at destroying the enemy target.

Lesson learned: take one less hair of the dog that bites you and you'll be just fine.

Photo attribution: Wikipedia

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