Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: A Book Review

There has been a lot of talk recently about OpenClaw, Moltbook and "sentient" (?) behaviour. So this is a good time to plug one of my favourite books ever.

I first came across "Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds" around 15 years ago when I borrowed it from my mentor Dorai Thodla. After returning it back, I went and bought my own copy.

The book covers topics like complex adaptive systems, self organisation and how emergent behaviours can arise from interaction of simple rules at scale.

Code is given at each point on how to simulate these scenarios and see the outcomes first hand. And interestingly, all the code is in LOGO -- yes, the same language that was designed for middle school children

Highly recommended.