Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams : Explorations in massively parallel Microworlds

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Does every group have a leader? Does every pattern have a central cause? Most people tend to think so. Increasingly, decentralized models are being chosen for the organizations and technologies they construct in the world, and for the theories they construct about the world. But even as ideas about decentralization spread throughout the culture, there is a deep-seated resistance to them. This text examines how and why this is so and describes innovative computational tools and activities that can help people (even young children) develop new ways of thinking about decentralization, with examples in many different domains.