Lawmakers seem to forget they are all part of the same flock

As a person trained in complex systems science, I feel that I can offer useful insight into how good people who work as legislators and their aides can produce laws that permit corruption to continue (“Editorial: Impotent laws,” May 12).

The hypothesis I’m going to offer will come down to the well-known fact that people do what’s in their hearts, but I hope to clarify how that idea applies.

To begin, please consider the swarming flocks of birds that put on such beautiful displays above Washington Avenue just west of the Capitol.

In the early days of computer graphics, people tried to simulate the motion of flocks of birds. In 1986, Craig Reynolds developed the Boids program, from which he produced realistic swarming. Each boid, or simulated bird, in the program, follows three simple rules governing how to change direction and speed relative to nearby boids. The wonderful result is that large-scale coordination occurs, as can be seen in swarming flocks that cohere and move as if governed by a single mind. Even though each boid reacts only to nearby neighbors, the correlation between distant boids emerges.

Emergent behavior, patterns absent from the rules but likely to happen because of them, can result when many small events add together. Like swarm motion, laws result from myriad decisions by autonomous agents. At the bottom, I think one problem is that humans regard themselves as many separate flocks, rather than a single big one.

James Lyons Walsh Albany