Waggle dance of bees - story of randomness

Waggle dance - the story of randomness

It's not only humans know how to dance and convey a message. Honeybees also do this, not for burning calories after full stomach, but to inform other bees of potential direction of flowers. If one bee finds out there are flowers in a part of the forest, after returning they would do a waggle dance in front of other worker bees to show exact location of the honey patch. Most of the bees would follow this advice but 20% of the bees ignore this. They would take a random journey to a different direction. Venturing out looking for better hunting grounds.

Waggle dance

Explore and exploit

When you think about a big company, like amazon, and Google and even Wall mart or Starbucks, they exactly imitate the behavior of bees. The majority of their budget and resources are utilized for the purpose of exploiting current affairs. Improving their own system, in an Iterative manner so they can increase their margins of profit. These actions are generally guaranteed a measurable outcome. As an example, increase in number of unit sales or a reduction in production cost. However approximately 20% of their effort would explore random ideas. Seemingly stupid, seemingly irrational seemingly crazy like a bee who chose to take a random walk despite proven paths. However, this is not by chance, but by design, as Jeff Bezoes and every CEO of these companies know what it means exploring randomness. Major discoveries are made not by the formal process but a mixture of random events which happens to people and environment. (Chaos theory)

Fat tailed distribution.

The reason behind this kind of organization, or rather disorganization in life and nature is the principle of "power law" or "fat tailed distribution" if you know some statistics and mathematics. Compared to normal distribution, things which work in power laws have a fat tail, which skew the average markedly to right. Business venture is such a distribution. As Jeff Bezos puts it, in baseball home run can earn you four points. But In business home run can earn you 1000 points in his case a trillion points. But how can someone achieve that is by playing around with resources, taking a limited risk.

Fat tail

Experimentation mentality.

What helps one in such a venture of hitting a home run in any discipline is having an experimentation mentality. This is the explore part of your equation. If you are an artist, go and run a business for some time. And quit if it doesn't work for you. If you are an engineer, go and study marine life or a chloroplast. If you're a zoologist, learn how amazon sorting algorithm works, and learn the principle in action in a group of buffaloes that you study. 😉 you can call it a detour, if you're walking in a park. But all the wrong turns do not end up in disaster, they just change the future dramatically for everyone in long term. (Chaos theory again) even the seemingly trivial ones. Story of randomness is fascinating. You're here because of it!