Pandemics and scapegoats

Emperor Marcus Aurelius

Human beings have an irresistible tendency to blame others for our misfortunes and our mistakes. In fact, this is a symptom of low maturity, very clear in children, who when they are caught red-handed doing something they shouldn’t, they always try to justify themselves by blaming someone else. But the trend is so widespread that it applies not just to children, but to most human beings.

In the particular case of pandemics, this is seen quite clearly. Epidemic diseases were almost unknown before the invention of cities, which took place some 10,000 years ago. But for a pandemic to be possible (an epidemic affecting a considerable part of the world), the world had to wait until there were great empires, with many internal and external commercial relations.

Literature and Science: Huxley and Heisenberg

Aldous Huxley

In 1963, the year of his death, Aldous Huxley published an essay titled Literature and Science. In it, he raises the existence of two different specialized languages, literary and scientific, different from the vulgar language, each of which is directed towards a specific objective:

• The purpose of literature is to describe, in the best possible way, man's most private experiences, especially those that deal with our feelings. To do this, it creates a specific language, where the ambiguity of words is the fundamental element giving strength. For Huxley, the term literature can be applied to all possible forms of the art of writing: poetry, drama, novel and essay, whose relationship with science he analyzes successively.
• Science, on the contrary, seeks to univocally describe the public (or less private) experiences of man, those that have to do with objective reality. To do this, the scientific language must be as far as possible free of ambiguity. Each term must have a univocal and unambiguous meaning. In the best case (as in physics) scientific language can be reduced to mathematical formulas.

Ant colonies, real and virtual

Formica fusca

Ants, hymenoptera related to wasps, are social insects. An anthill or ant colony can contain, from a few dozen individuals, to over half a million. The number of castes varies, depending on the species, between three (fertile males and females, sterile female workers) and over twenty. The feeding a larva receives decides the caste to which it will belong.

Strange forms of parasitism have arisen among ants, as in Amazons ants (Polyergus), whose workers specialize in fighting and starve in the presence of food, unless a worker of Formica fusca feeds them. To seize these auxiliaries, the Amazons attack the nests of Formica fusca, kill their queen and enslave the workers. In extreme cases, such as ants of the Anergates genus, the queen invades a nest of Tetramorium, supplants its queen, and fed by the workers of the other species, produces eggs that become queens and males, but no workers, which are not needed.

Evolution in social insects probably reached the highest levels of instinctive complexity that can be achieved with a nervous system as limited as that of arthropods. In the tens of million years since the origin of these societies, evolution has introduced secondary changes, which have led to great diversity: there are more than three thousand species of ants, but there seems to have been no progress in their social structure. They are highly successful animals, very abundant, and spread throughout the world, but stagnant.

Mathematics of the pandemic

The May issue of the Spanish magazine on popular science Investigación y Ciencia, associated to Scientific American, contains an article authored by Bartolo Luque, Fernando Ballesteros and Octavio Miramontes, in which they apply to the current pandemic a mathematical model that dates back over a century. This model describes the first phase of the pandemic, the exponential rise of the first part of the logistics curve that I referred to in a previous post in this blog, and makes it possible to compare the evolution of the disease in various countries, depending on the virus containment measures that have been taken in each of them. It could also serve to explain why Spain has become the country with the most cases in Europe and with the most deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the world.

What is artificial life?

Thomas S. Ray

As I said in an earlier post, artificial life is a branch of computer engineering that builds programs that emulate the behavior of living beings: artificial living beings, or colonies of living beings, such as anthills or hives. Since I have worked in this field, I’ll tell here a little about artificial life.

In 1991, Thomas S. Ray built a program he called Tierra, where a series of artificial organisms evolved and competed for the available resources in the computer. These resources were essentially the computer memory, which was limited, and execution time. The objective of each individual was to copy itself into a piece of available memory. When copied, however, errors (mutations) could be introduced, so that the organisms in question were able to evolve.

The execution took place in a virtual machine equipped with a simple machine language, with 32 different instructions. The individuals were programs made of instructions written in the machine language. Some basic instructions were relatively complex, such as asking the operating system to allocate a certain space. Although very simple, the original program was able to copy itself (with mutations) in the allocated space. The execution of individuals is carried out in parallel, i.e. all are executed together, at the same time.

The Game of Life and the multiverse

John Horton Conway

As I said in the previous post in this blog, The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by John Conway. Let's see how it works, in a little more detail:

This cellular automaton acts on a potentially infinite two-dimensional space, divided into square cells. In each cell there is a simple automaton, or if you want, a program with two states that we can call alive and dead, or 1 and 0. The program in each cell takes as input its own state and the states of its eight neighbors. If it is alive (i.e. in state 1) and two or three of its neighbors are alive, in the next instant it will still be alive. If it is dead (in state 0) and exactly three of its neighbors are alive, in the next instant it will become alive. In any other case, it will become dead. Let's look at a figure to make it clearer:

Cellular automata and the game of life

John Horton Conway

On April 11, the mathematician John Horton Conway, age 82, died of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Conway became famous during the 1970s for inventing a very special cellular automaton, the Game of Life, which turned out to possess peculiar properties.

Contrary to what is done with most scientific discoveries, Conway did not publish his invention of the Game of Life in a typical scientific journal. It was first published in the Mathematical Games section of the Scientific American magazine, written by Martin Gardner. The article, titled The Fantastic Combinations of John Conway's New Solitaire Game 'Life', appeared in the October 1970 issue.