What does the internet have in common with an ant colony? More than you might think.
It doesn’t have much in common with the common ant, of course. As the anteater in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach puts it, “Just as you would never confuse an individual tree with a forest, so here you must not take an ant for the colony.”
It’s a fanciful chapter: the anteater claims to be a close friend of a “witty” ant hill named “Aunt Hillary”, despite being feared by her comparatively simple-minded component ants. But Hofstadter uses Aunt Hillary and her ants as a metaphor for human minds and their neurons, and computer programs and their ones and zeros.
via priceonomics
