Swarms--Another Support for Intelligent Design
Sometimes The National Geographic is, albeit unwittingly, one of the best sources for confirmation of an intelligent design perspective. Case in point? This excerpt from the July 2007 article, “Swarm Theory.”
[American] Air Liquide [industrial and medical gas producers in Houston] developed a computer model based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), a species that deposits chemical substances called pheromones.
‘When these ants bring food back to the nest, they lay a pheromone trail that tells other ants to go get more food,’ Harper explains. ‘The pheromone trail gets reinforced every time an ant goes out and comes back, kind of like when you wear a trail in the forest to collect wood. So we developed a program that sends out billions of software ants to find out where the pheromone trails are strongest for our truck routes.’
Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.
‘It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have,’ Harper says. ‘But at six o’clock every morning we get a solution that says how we’re going to manage our day.’
After untold hours developing the algorithms and computer models, it still “takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have” to duplicate what lowly Linepithema humile ants have been doing for millennia. As much as any complex eye, these social structure functions seem mathematically beyond possibility to develop even over trillions of years. As you read through the entire article, the wonder of how God has arranged ALL of creation seems so clear!
The entire article that details the miracle of swarming, communal behavior in many different species can be found at
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/feature5/
As you read, may the magnificent words of Psalm 8 echo in your mind!
[American] Air Liquide [industrial and medical gas producers in Houston] developed a computer model based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), a species that deposits chemical substances called pheromones.
‘When these ants bring food back to the nest, they lay a pheromone trail that tells other ants to go get more food,’ Harper explains. ‘The pheromone trail gets reinforced every time an ant goes out and comes back, kind of like when you wear a trail in the forest to collect wood. So we developed a program that sends out billions of software ants to find out where the pheromone trails are strongest for our truck routes.’
Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.
‘It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have,’ Harper says. ‘But at six o’clock every morning we get a solution that says how we’re going to manage our day.’
After untold hours developing the algorithms and computer models, it still “takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have” to duplicate what lowly Linepithema humile ants have been doing for millennia. As much as any complex eye, these social structure functions seem mathematically beyond possibility to develop even over trillions of years. As you read through the entire article, the wonder of how God has arranged ALL of creation seems so clear!
The entire article that details the miracle of swarming, communal behavior in many different species can be found at
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/feature5/
As you read, may the magnificent words of Psalm 8 echo in your mind!
posted by hl at
4:57 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home