Students could visit each other's virtual cities to learn about different approaches to common problems. Students can write simple programs for each individual turtle, then observe the global patterns that arise from the interactions among the turtles. Logo provides students with an unusual opportunity to design, observe, and experiment with collaboration. For example, one pair of students programmed a simulation of termites collaboratively gathering wood chips into piles. One reason is that people seem to have difficulty reasoning about interaction and collaboration.
People tend to underrate the capabilities of decentralized collaboration.
It is too dangerous and costly to send human astronauts to this planet, so we decide to send a spaceship with several thousand small robots. Once the spaceship lands on the planet, we want the robots to explore for gold and bring the gold back to the spaceship. Ants generally solve the problem in a very decentralized way. They begin by searching randomly. When an ant finds food, it carries the food back to the nest, emitting a chemical pheromone as it walks.