Peter Bentley Digital Biology The Creation of Life inside Computers and How it Will Affect us Headline Book Publishing 2001

KEYWORDS : self-organising systems - amplified fluctuations - pg 116 Amplified Fluctuations The final process that self-organising systems need is the ability to amplify fluctuations. You may have heard of the butterfly affect, according to which are butterfly flapping its wings on one continent causes a hurrycane on another continent, all the story of the kingdom being lost because of the lack of a nail for a horse's hoof. This is the same idea, but let me give you an illustration that is a little closer to home. In Britain, we have a National Lottery. Balls randomly picked by machine twice a week, and if the numbers on your ticket match those on the little rubber ball to win. Many thousands of people around the world have become millionaires through this kind of game. Their lives and their lives of people around them are changed in dramatic ways - sometimes good, sometimes bad. This is an example of amplified fluctuations. In the normal course of your day, you really should not care if a few rubber balls are picked out by machine. Let me do something similar now: I'm putting my hand into my desk drawer without looking, and I've picked up a whole punch. It's not really really interesting, is it? But because the result of the rather uninteresting random "rubber ball event" is amplified to the extent that it could change your life, it becomes significant.

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