I watched something
pretty amazing on TV last night – gestalt Pong. The footage was of a
demonstration, or experiment, run by a computer graphics specialist, Loren
Carpenter. Five thousand people file into a conference room; on each chair they
find a little paddle, red on one side, green on the other. At the back of the
room a camera linked to computers scans the crowd and monitors the position of each
paddle, and whether the person holding it has it displaying its red or green face.
At first this information is simply translated into a red or green pixel on a
screen in front of the participants, by flipping one’s paddle back and forth
each person can locate ‘their’ pixel on-screen. Then, with nothing more than a
request for the number 5, everyone flips their paddle based on their position and,
with a little experimentation, the number resolves itself. With a little
practice the participants can bring up any shape or figure requested extremely
quickly, all with no planning or organisation.
Things get freaky when
a game of Pong is put on the screen. The crowd is dived into left and right; displaying
the red side of your paddle ‘votes’ to move the Pong bat upwards, displaying
green is a ‘vote’ to move the virtual bat down. But if all the participants on
one side show red the bat moves up extremely quickly to the top of the screen -
a mixture of green and red is required to move the bat with more finesse. None
of this is explained. Loren has simply put up a game of Pong and said “folks on
the left of the auditorium control the left bat; folks on the right control the
right bat. Go!” Thirty seconds later the crowd is playing an increasingly quick
and skillful game of Pong.
Flocking patterns can
be simulated with simple rules, but what is the rule that governs the Pong
players? A small percentage of the group unknowingly reversing the directions
(believing that, by displaying the red side of their paddle they are moving the
Pong bat down, when in fact they are voting to move it up) providing the
balance to move the bat more fluidly? This seems less likely than the more
unlikely explanation – that two ‘mob intelligences’ are somehow playing the
game. Awesome.
Related (and
unverified) folklore….
-
a swarm of
bees is as intelligent as a dog
-
the part
of the brain that causes you to yawn when you see someone else yawn is the same
part that is involved in the flocking of birds
