According to Konrad Lorenz, marine snails waive their long breathing tubes from side to side in search of food — or, more specifically, in search of scent of food — as they move randomly across the ocean floor. Since they are sensitive to the differences in the strength of a scent at the two extremes of the breathing tube’s motion, the scent of food is strongest when the snails are turned at right angles to the food. But instead of turning at right angles towards the food, they make a sharp reversal (almost a 180-degree turn) and continue crawling so that the scent strikes the other receptor, resulting in a zig-zag path that takes them towards the food.

Drawing from this analogy, public opinion and government policy are very much like the marine snail — in the presence of an external stimulus, they sharply reverse direction. For example, after British police found explosive materials in a water bottled on a US-bound flight, any and all liquids were banned on airplanes (even the ones bought in the shops). In this case, the explosives were the stimuli for public opinion and government policy, and the reversal of direction was the transition from utter obliviousness to complete prohibition. Of course, the system reached equilibrium after some time, and the snail is not hungry anymore.

The marine snails were an analogy for an artificial intelligence algorithm in a seemingly randomly-organized book, Swarm Intelligence by Kennedy and Eberhart. The book converges on the ideas of multiple agent interaction from a range of topics, including mathematics, biology, psychology, history and evolution. Even though I am only 1/4 of the way through the book, I find it a fascinating read, and recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in the field. After all, even if you don’t make any progress in AI as a result of this book, you will surely be able to draw random analogies to random occurrences in the world.