Bali's famous rice terraces, when seen from above, look like colorful mosaics because some farmers plant synchronously, while others plant at different times. The resulting fractal patterns are rare for man-made systems and lead to optimal harvests without global planning.
To understand how Balinese rice farmers make their decisions for planting, a team of scientists led by Stephen Lansing (Nanyang Technological University) and Stefan Thurner (Medical University of Vienna, Complexity Science Hub Vienna, IIASA, SFI), both external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, modeled two variables: water availability and pest damage. Farmers that live upstream have the advantage of always having water; while those downstream have to adapt their planning on the schedules of the upstream farmers.
Here, pests enter the scene. When farmers are planting at different times, pests can move from one field to another, but when farmers plant in synchrony, pests drown and the pest load is reduced. So upstream farmers have an incentive to share water so that synchronous planting can happen. However, water resources are limited and there is not enough water for everybody to plant at the same time. As a result of this constraint, fractal planting patterns emerge, which yield close to maximal harvests.
"The remarkable finding is that this optimal situation arises without central planners or coordination. Farmers interact locally and take local individual free decisions, which they believe will optimize their own harvest. And yet the global system works optimally," says Lansing. "What is exciting scientifically is that this is in contrast to the tragedy of the commons, where the global optimum is not reached because everyone is maximizing his individual profit. This is what we are experiencing typically when egoistic people are using a limited resource on the planet, everyone optimizes the individual payoff and never reach an optimum for all," he says.
The scientists find that under these assumptions, the planting patterns become fractal, which is indeed the case as they confirm with satellite imagery. "Fractal patterns are abundant in natural systems but are relatively rare in man-made systems," explains Thurner. These fractal patterns make the system more resilient than it would otherwise be. "The system becomes remarkably stable, again without any planning—stability is the outcome of a remarkably simple but efficient self-organized process. And it happens extremely fast. In reality, it does not even take ten years for the system to reach this state," Thurner says.
Spatial patterning often occurs in ecosystems as a self-organizing process caused by feedback between organisms and the physical environment. "The centuries-old Balinese rice terraces are also created by feedback between farmer's decisions and the ecology, which triggers a transition from local to global scale control," explains Lansing. "Our model shows for the first time that adaptation in a coupled human-natural system can trigger self-organized criticality."
The Balinese rice fields could serve as an example that under certain conditions it is possible to reach sustainable situations that lead to maximum payoff for all parties, wherein every individual makes free and independent decisions.
Explore further:
Phase transitions of rice farmers may offer insight into managing natural resources
More information:
J. Stephen Lansing et al, Adaptive self-organization of Bali's ancient rice terraces, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1605369114
rrwillsj
5 / 5 (1) Jun 09, 2017Unfortunate that we live in a society that trumpets greed and selfishness as holy gospel.
Homebrook
not rated yet Jun 09, 2017Homebrook
1 / 5 (2) Jun 09, 2017What is exciting scientifically is that this is in contrast to the tragedy of the commons, where the global optimum is not reached because everyone is maximizing his individual profit. This is what we are experiencing typically when egoistic people are using a limited resource on the planet, everyone optimizes the individual payoff and never reach an optimum for all,"
So this guy thinks it is remarkable that everyone looking out for their own interests actually works! Well, it has always worked. The "tragedy of the commons" is a steaming load of ..., which thankfully his research has debunked. Although I doubt it will overcome the overwhelming and false political bias this 'scientist brings to the table.
Eikka
5 / 5 (3) Jun 10, 2017Actually, what makes this case work is the unequal access to the main resource: water.
The farmer upstream actually controls the availability to the farmer downstream, but he has an incentive to share in a way that his profit is maximized when everyone's profit is maximized. It just happens to be so by coincidence and circumstances. What we have here is not actually a situation of the commons.
The tragedy of the commons arises where everybody has equal claim to a resource - that's why it's called "common" - where sharing means giving up your own profits. In those circumstances the common resource gets overused to the point of destruction because even as the resource starts to dwindle, there is an incentive to increase consumption lest your neighbor gets more than you.
Eikka
4 / 5 (4) Jun 10, 2017That is so exactly because the collective does not eliminate the greed of its individual members, and it ends up in the destruction of the collective property. The people can't maintain a lasting agreement about who gets how much, and it ends up Hatfield and McCoy.
Even as you try to regulate access by authority, at best you run into crony capitalism where close buddies of the regulator get the first pick and the biggest profit. This was seen in the communist countries where everything from industrial pollution to simply maintaining the public infrastructure went neglected because nobody in particular was responsible of it - so it all fell on the easily abused central authority to decide.
Da Schneib
not rated yet Jun 10, 2017antialias_physorg
5 / 5 (3) Jun 10, 2017Looks like fractal patterns are a sort of 'defense in depth' approach where pests that can take advantage of one particular planting frequency eventually meet up with a planting frequency (at another scale) that they can't handle. I like it. seems like this could have applications to all kinds of distributed systems (power management, waste management,...)
No. Read up on the 'tragedy of the commons' (which they even reference in the text)
https://en.wikipe..._commons
Most of the time everyone looking out for themselves does not work optimally.
Eikka
1 / 5 (1) Jun 10, 2017...in a shared resource situation. The tragedy of the commons is not a universal rule, or some sort of argument against "capitalism" or the free market as it's usually misunderstood.
It's just pointing out that the attempt of collective ownership tends to lead to unoptimal solutions when the individuals are greedy. In the opposite case of private ownership, greedy individuals try to best maintain their resource instead of overusing it.
rrwillsj
not rated yet Jun 10, 2017The majority of commentators cogently expressing their viewpoints in a collective atmosphere of collegian competition.
Nice!
EmceeSquared
not rated yet Jun 10, 2017https://www.ted.c...anscript
African and Balinese (pre-European/Arab and pre-Islamic Indonesian/Malaysian) design was organized in fractals, rather than by angular Eurasian symmetries. These were probably the dominant design orientations of all human material culture before the last couple millennia, and still persist
EmceeSquared
5 / 5 (1) Jun 10, 2017Private ownership has its own existential problems: greedy property owners find their property advantages their accumulation of more, concentrating the property and devaluing that of others - so the greedy property moguls can acquire even more of it. Financial capitalism has another layer of existential problem, where the financial kingpins externalize the costs of acquiring and operating their property to either other property owners or to the commons.
Corporate raiders who game systems to acquire capital cheaply then exploit its most accessible value before wasting the rest they abandon is quite common.
Humans are disruptive and tend to waste regardless of the systems we live in. Everything has to be dynamic and honestly self-critical to achieve any kind of sustainable balance, let alone fairness.
Eikka
not rated yet Jun 11, 2017I don't think you know what that word means, but do go on.
I don't see how this "concentrating of property" devalues other people's property through greed. Can you explain your point?
For the financial markets, you are correct, because the whole "services" economy - for the part that doesn't serve manufacturing and production - is a bunch of nonsense to abuse the rules placed on ownership in order to gain tokens of value.
EmceeSquared
not rated yet Jun 11, 2017I assume you mean "phrase": "existential problem". It's a problem upon which one's existence depends - or upon its solution.
EmceeSquared
not rated yet Jun 11, 2017The concentration of property itself devalues other people's property by giving the concentrators disproportionate power over the property. But far more often, though less directly, the concentration simply gives the concentrators power disproportionate to their share of the property they use to game the system, which they apply to devaluing others' property, so as to acquire it under advantage.
EmceeSquared
not rated yet Jun 11, 2017You'r'e just refusing to value labor in favor of valuing only property. That is in fact the precise definition of capitalism. And it's a fallacy: exchanging value or its tokens for labor or for property is valid. And that's not financial capitalism.
Financial capitalism is the system that values only the tokens. Damage to the value itself is secondary to protecting tokens. Its masters live in two worlds, including the real one where the value itself is also valued. But they're driven by the financial, so the tokens are perversely valued higher - the tokens should have minimal value.
The financial map is not the value territory, so they game the system through the mismatches. Primarily externalizing costs while capturing benefits.
"Too Big to Fail"
Spaced out Engineer
not rated yet Jun 11, 2017Greed makes a great equalizer in spaces open for topos theory.
https://bitrumago...-theory/
If you cannot get honesty, you wield metrics.
Lessons from boson sampling do not ask.
We are but one bump away from the cyclic conformal anthropic, if not chasing its shadow through non-communicative properties in multiple substrates.
EmceeSquared
not rated yet Jun 11, 2017People on drugs should not drive.
rrwillsj
not rated yet Jun 12, 2017Cause I'd thought he'd be satirizing us bombastically pendantic opionaitions.
Whew! I missed hitting that bullet.
EmceeSquared
not rated yet Jun 12, 2017You're welcome. I'm being charitable assigning the blame for your and their posts to hitting the pipe :).
johnqsmith
not rated yet 14 hours agofs137
not rated yet 5 hours agoThe fractal structure here is probabilistic. The chance of viewing a certain pattern when your field of view is 100 sq mile is the same as the chance of viewing a similar pattern when your field of view is, say, 10000 sq miles.
rrwillsj
not rated yet 3 hours agoRepetition in visuals. Repetition in private decisions that have a communal benefit. Repetition in social communications across individual preferences. Repetition in sharing the benefits of social stability.