
The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness - electic
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/science/ants-worker-idleness.html
======
kartan
When I was in Japan it was strange to see how slow some trains are. You will
see that sometimes they stay more time in a station and will accelerate way
faster than usual.

But when one train arrives it is common that there is another one arriving at
the same time. People exchange lines from one train into another in a few
seconds and then both of them depart.

My feeling is that the optimization is not for the speed of the trains.
Japanese trains do not go as fast as they can. But all the train system is
optimized to reduce waiting time. Each individual train is slightly slower.
But the mean time that Japanese travellers spend is reduced.

I would love to see some study about this, as it was just my travel
experience. It would be cool to compare that on how ants behave. It will not
be the first time that ants have resolved an optimization problem way before
even humans existed.

~~~
analog31
I noticed something similar in Switzerland. First time we went there, it was
before cell phones, and we went from A to B by going to the station and
telling them where we wanted to go. We were given tickets and a little
itinerary. At one station, our "layover" was 1 minute. I protested: "We will
never catch our next train." The agent looked at us and said: "You will catch
your train." Sure enough, we did.

The other thing I noticed was that when one of our trains was delayed a bit,
it seemed like they slowed down the entire system so that nobody would miss a
connection, and then made it back up on the trip to the next station. We never
missed a connection, and the only times when we had to hustle, was because we
were nervous Americans accustomed to US air travel. Even the buses were
synchronized with the trains.

~~~
panarky
In Eliyahu M. Goldratt's "Theory of Constraints", you can't increase the
throughput of a factory by making each step in the manufacturing process
faster [1,2].

That only results in building up inventory which actually decreases the
efficiency of the entire process.

Instead, identify and fix the biggest bottleneck. Even if you do that
inefficiently, with more labor, or with a sub-optimal machine, fixing the
biggest bottleneck increases total throughput.

Once that's done, then focus on the biggest bottleneck of the newly revised
process.

The counterintuitive result is that by focusing only on constraints, the
process steps that are unconstrained will be idle much of the time.

Inexperienced factory managers see people standing around doing nothing and
think this is inefficiency to be eliminated. Experienced managers realize that
idleness is _essential_ at unconstrained stations, and trying to eliminate it
will actually decrease total output.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_\(novel\))

------
andrewfong
> If this distribution of labor operates this way in your office, however,
> (the 30 percent may laugh knowingly now), there’s no real solace to be taken
> from the ant experiment, unless you are digging a tunnel perhaps. Assuming
> everyone has their own computer, phone and cubicle, they could all be
> working all the time.

I think this generalizes to knowledge work better than the author gives credit
for. You don't have literal traffic jams (well, maybe you do with commuting)
but you can have too many people in one meeting. Or too many coders touching
the same file. Or too many designers on a product. And so on.

~~~
probe
The Mythical Man-Month :)

------
snovv_crash
Scheduling theory says you need idle units to take up required work, otherwise
your latency increases by the time remaining for the next task completion.

Given how poorly people multitask, I'm surprised things like devops aren't
over-filled so that failures that need responding to don't affect schedules.

~~~
derekp7
I'm reading through "The Phoenix Project", and this is one of the items
mentioned, is that the less idle time a resource has, the higher the work
backlog (WIP). Of course, in a factory setting (as presented in the book), I
can see this working -- although you have an expensive machine, you aren't
paying it by the hour to while it is idle. Of course, for devops work, if you
don't want your human resources to be idle, then I could see scheduling
easily-interruptible tasks (such as reading tech articles or HN) during idle
periods, so that when a task is ready for you to work on you can jump right to
it.

~~~
tetha
This is what we're doing. We're distinguishing project work, which requires
longer and more constant focus on a problem and other, smaller stuff. For
example, setting up configuration management for an entirely new application
is a project. Writing and deploying an icinga check, a telegraf collector and
such is smaller stuff.

With this, we schedule some people to be on project duty and they shall not be
interrupted. Other guys are on interrupt duty and tend to do tasks which just
require an hour to half a day of attention so they can easily close something
they're doing and jump on something urgent.

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dmos62
The title is misleading. As far as the article goes, this pertains only to
tunnel digging. That's at least in part because the "dig, move rubble, dig"
task is vulnerable to congestion.

~~~
pier25
Is programming vulnerable to congestion?

~~~
tedmiston
If anyone still uses centralized version control where only one person can
check out a given file at a time, that's the epitome of programmer congestion.

------
bchjam
reminds me of a recent article about how Messi walks more than other players
[https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/messi-walks-better-
than...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/messi-walks-better-than-most-
players-run/)

------
throwaway45423
This reminds me of how you are supposed to keep a sizable percentage of an
investment portfolio in cash, earning nothing, so it is available when the
time comes to make further investments in a market downturn.

~~~
loco5niner
That's opposite of what I've heard.

The phrase I've always heard is "Time in the market beats timing the market".

Of course, it depends on who you listen to.

------
lifeformed
How do the ants coordinate the 70/30 ratio? I'm assuming there isn't much
communication going on, rather that there's some procedure they follow so that
the ratio occurs emergently.

~~~
iamwil
ants do communicate with chemical trails of some sort.

------
digi_owl
Reminds me of an article on crows, and how some that were slackers most of the
time would step in to take care of the young when the more active members of
the group got ill.

------
jacob019
The ants in the video appear to have been painted bright colors for enhanced
visibility. It's quite striking.

------
OtterCoder
I feel like most DoT road crews have this already figured out.

------
TheSpiceIsLife
So the ant-secret to alleviating vehicular traffic is to just have 70% of
drivers just stay at home.

Anyone who's work in a large corporation has probably noticed about 30% of the
employees do 70% of the work.

I often read comments here saying they don't understand why more IT folk don't
work from home. Turns out we may have been approaching the problem from the
wrong angle.

We ought be espousing the benefits of not-working from home.

~~~
mulmen
I get a lot more work done from home than I do in my distraction filled open
office hellscape.

I also don’t get hit by errant nerf darts from the new batch of SDEs that act
like the office is a daycare.

There’s nothing valuable about the modern corporate tech office space. Any
work accomplished there is in spite of the work environment, not because of
it.

~~~
user5994461
>>> I also don’t get hit by errant nerf darts from the new batch of SDEs that
act like the office is a daycare.

This is clearly an issue with your current employers that should not be
generalized to all companies.

~~~
mulmen
It's a "startup" thing and since corporate America loves to sell the idea that
we are all startups it happens in a lot of places. And it's stupid. Just like
open offices. This article makes it about gender equality but I'm male and I
still don't think it is fun.

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ez3mde/dear-
start...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ez3mde/dear-startups-
fuck-your-nerf-battles)

------
gweinberg
"Daniel I. Goldman, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and
his colleagues, found that the secret to efficient tunnel digging by fire ants
was that 30 percent of the ants did 70 percent of the work."

That's astonishing. Why isn't it 20/80?

~~~
plussed_reader
Or 1/99?

/s

