Editor's Note: This article comes fromOrange Book (ID: chengpishu), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.

Editor's Note: This article comes from

Orange Book (ID: chengpishu)

Orange Book (ID: chengpishu)

Recently I was reading a book "The Story of Ants: The Birth of a Society" [1]. One of the most interesting features of this insect is its widespread social and gregarious lifestyle. For example, they have different social classes, and each identity has a very clear division of labor. Therefore, ants have a very strong ability to cooperate, so that the community can build a very large nest in the canopy layer, and the nest can also build very complex passages and "rooms" of different layers.

And how did this architectural miracle happen step by step?

One of the details is impressive. Ants don't plan to build their nest into a big maze from the beginning. They are slowly building more and more layers of rooms according to the needs of the entire community. These different floors and rooms need to use leaves as materials, and many ants (leaf weavers) are connected to form a chain, bite two different leaves, and then "glue" them with the silk of the larvae.

And the beginning of all this is often because an ant feels that the nest is too crowded, it is forced to go to the side, and then pulls the edge of the leaves from time to time. Then when other ants saw it, several of them joined in. As the leaves slowly rolled up and bent, they attracted the attention of more ants. At the most critical moment, countless ants connected their bodies into a line and worked together to pull the two leaves together. The whole process is: Work leads to success—success leads to continued work—and continued work leads to greater success.image descriptionSource: Illustration from The Ant's Tale

The construction method of ants reminds me that to build a complex network that is far larger than itself, it usually requires a process of continuous superposition. And the initial part of the original work does not necessarily have to be such a grand plan, as long as it can attract the attention of a small group of people, and then continue to build on this basis.

i wrote before

The TCP/IP Protocol Wars

—— Retric， 2020.11.02