Sync Swarms/Change Without Change

If you open a number of these in browser tabs you begin to hear the noise of swarming insects, and rhythms begin to emerge, then diverge. You can go a step further and have swarms of browser tabs running on multiple machines, and you begin to grasp what happens in nature, the differences being how the patterns are perceived. In music, rhythms (symmetry) must emerge at some point as a release from noise or dissonance. In nature, fractal patterns emerge from what seems to be noise. It’s all the results of simple rules that if looked at in isolation would seem boring and insignificant, or not capable of creating interest.



Frank Wilczek made the interesting observation in an interview on OnBeing, that even in art, it is all essentially "change without change." The individual components or sets of rules or constraints are fixed, but the results are varied for the purpose of creating identifiable patterns that can be interpreted as beauty or serve some other universal function or attribute.