Those occupied brain cells prove useful after all

One of the recent readings in my Business Analytics class was a Harvard Business Review article by Eric Bonabeau called "Don't Trust Your Gut," (free registration required for full article) an excellent read discussing cognitive biases and software models for analytical decision making, including artificial evolution and interactive evolution.

When I was reading it, I got to the section of the article about "agent-based modeling," specifically the quote ""a computer creates thousands, even millions, of individual actors; each of these virtual agents makes decisions, providing an accurate model of a complex system's dynamics," (p. 120), and I immediately thought of an article I once read about a software program designed based on how ants navigate.  Ants lay down a pheremone trail that fades quickly, and if one finds food, when others follow the trail the scent is reinforced, which strengthens it and attracts more ants.  They end up being very efficient at finding the best routes.  And the software was modeled on this and used for determining things like efficient delivery routes.  But of course, I read the article some time ago, before I used Evernote to track things I read and interesting quotes.  So I had no idea where or when I'd read it.  But it had been taking up space in my memory for a while, and there have been several times when I've wished I could remember the source.

Well, a few days ago I decided to try google it, especially when I thought I remembered something about traffic in Brazil being an example in the article.  Well, when I googled "ants software brazil traffic," I got to an article in the Economist that talked about swarm intelligence and the work of Dr. Marco Dorigo in creating software modeled on how complex social insects solve problems.  Now, I don't think this is the exact article I read, but it has much of the same information.  So I googled Dr. Dorigo.

And what do you know, but in the top three "Scholarly articles" on the results page, there are two articles co-authored by Dr. Dorigo and Eric Bonabeau, the very author who inspired my search in the first place!  And now I have articles and names to cite to the next time I need them.

And another similar example - in my first discussion post in Business Analytics, I had made mention of software that used analytics to predict music hits.  I didn't know where I'd initially read about it, but some googling at least found me some relevant materials on Mike McCready and the companies he's used the software with.   Well, in last week's discussion, the instructor mentioned Epagogix, a company that predicts movie hits based on the scripts, and she mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell had written about them.  Then another classmate (thanks, Aric!) posted a link to a 2006 video of Gladwell speaking at the New Yorker festival about Epagogix and their hit predictions.  In that video, he also mentions Mike McCready and his music hit predictor.  And I recognized everything in the video, though I know I'd never seen it.  So I checked Gladwell.com for his 2006 articles, and sure enough, there it was, "The Formula," the article I'd initially read from which I remembered the story of the music hit predictor.  Over 5 years I'd been remembered that article.

Finally, another memory loop closed.  And at least those occupied brain cells were put to good use.  I've gotten good grades on all my discussion posts for class so far, which included references to and discussions of the above articles.  :)

I am LOVING the fact that the all the things I've been interested in for *years* are turning out to be completely applicable to my current studies. :)