'Experiments in Understanding' was a blog I started writing back in 2007, where I intended to collect my thoughts on some interesting concepts like Emergence, fractals and the possibilities of the future.

While in college I was very impressed by the concept of Emergence as discussed in Steven Johnson's book titled: 'Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software'. Ever since then bottoms up system have never ceased to amaze me. 

Ants represent a fine example of how individual self sustaining units with clear interaction protocols with other units can create a bottoms up system with no central leadership, but nevertheless a very functional system on the whole. An ideal Democracy would be another great example of such systems.

Fractals are another concept that intrigues me, though more for its philosophical implications than for its mathematical beauty. As i understand it, the size of a fractal depends on the scale we use to measure it. This means a sea shore can in essence be of length tending to infinity in case we find a scale small enough to measure it. This concept is philosophically so fundamental to everything around us. We can perceive only as much as the capacity of the device or sense organ we use to perceive something. But essentially everything is infinite. It just that our senses and the devices that we have developed can only look so far.

Related blog posts can be found here: experiments.nitinpande.com