Wildness Community

Wildness Community

Wildness is to describe an open system which contains massive individuals. Therefore such a theory may not be applied will to a house which is small and just used by limited persons. However, it might be applied to a residential community, where the amount of individuals is big enough for wildness theory to describe.

One great example of wildness theory, which I studied, is how ants find the best path to their food, which in computer science is called Ant Colony Optimization. In the real world, ants initially wader randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at random, but to instead follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food. Because the shortest path allows ants to go and return more times in a certain period, this will make the pheromone stronger and attracts more ants to this best path.

However this is not the most beautiful point of this example. Because ants accidently do not follow the strongest pheromone trails, there are always some random moves. Therefore if the random move happens to find a better path, then the pheromone on this path begins to accumulate and finally exceeds the previous path. In this way, ants change their way to a better one.

In this example, although ants have very low intelligence, but they form a very robust and adaptive system to find the best path. This path is not designed by any clever guy; it is formed naturally by all the ants and can evolve during the time. Actually, the rule that ants follow in this stem is really simple: 1 follow other's pheromone 2, break the first rule sometimes. Therefore, I am questioning myself, whether a community can act in the same way. There are no right plan and right path arranged by architects. All the houses in the community are movable and people who live here follow some basic rules which designed by architects to form any shape of community which totally cannot be expected but can evolve all the time.