Fractal planting patterns yield optimal harvests, without central control

The key takeaway from that is the difficulty of social organization. The first proponent of early sowing will be viewed as seeking to gain some private advantage precisely because poverty creates an economic incentive to maximize private advantage. Some open source proponents overcame this reluctance in the 1980s with the Stone Soup metaphor.

This is how visitors from other planets look at us in regard to resource distribution on earth and space exploration.

That story makes no sense. If those farmers of Palanpur can not agree to plant all together at the right time, how come they manage it several weeks later, or ever?

> When farmers are planting at different times, pests can move from one field to another, but when farmers plant in synchrony, pests drown and the pest load is reduced.

The strategy is that if there are several fields planted for the same amount of bugs, each field receive less bugs than if it was the only one planted (on the contrary, if they were planted one after an other, the whole bug population would just jump from field to field).

Basically they are using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predator_satiation strategy to reduce loses.

Its actually that planting "in synchrony" reduced pests. Balancing that with limited water supplies resulted in the fractal pattern, which created close to an optimal yield.

Actually, that is only one type of fractals. Perfectly self similar patterns like the Triforce or Sierpensky triangle are used as toy models for learning . Typically, fractals in nature are not self similar(Branching of your blood vessels for example) . Mandelbrot developed fractal geometry as a way to model nature that captures roughness. It was kind of a rebellion against calculus, where if you zoom in eventually you get smoothness. It's funny that many people think that only self similar patterns are fractals when his desire was to get away from idealized models towards more pragmatic ones

EDIT: I'm actually just learning about fractals, so I'm certainly no expert, but I'm excited to share what I've learned so far.

Look at a line, square, and cube in 1, 2, and 3 dimensions respectively. If you scale down each by 1/2 in all its dimensions, you need to look at how much of the "mass" (for lack of a better term is scaled down

If you cut a line in 1/2, it's mass is scaled by 1/2 as it takes 2 one-half length lines to make the original line.

If you scale a square down 1/2 along all its dimensions, you break into/scale it down into 4 smaller squares, it's mass scaling factor is 1/4....scaling a cube down 1/2 along all its dimensions (1/2)^2 breaks it into 8 smaller cubes...it's scaling factor is 1/8 and you can see the progression here. (1/2)^3. (I imagine a tesseract/hypercube has a scaling of 1/16 as it is the 4D analogue of a cube) The exponent represents the concept of dimension and this is how you can have non-integer dimensions.

So, back to the Sierpenski triangle or triforce example. Let's scale it down 1/2. When we do that, we know we get 1/3 the "mass" of the original since there are 3 triangles contained in the larger triangle at each level. The dimensionality is then (1/2)^x = 1/3 where x is the dimensionality. We rewrite this as log 3 base 2 which gives it a dimensionality of ~1.585.

And that is the definition of a fractal, a shape with a non-integer dimension which gives the shape roughness at every scale. I don't quite understand the more technical definition, but hopefully this helps!

Note, you cannot use length or area as a measurment for a scaling factor, as the length would be infinite and area would be 0. Also, I say mass because the more correct concept is difficult for me to explain without a whiteboard, but basically, it has to do with putting the fractal on a 2d grid, scaling it, and seeing what the ratio of boxes touched is. See, told you I'm bad at explaining it :D

There's no One True Definition of what it means to be fractal, but a lot of working mathematicians use the criterion that a space's Hausdorf dimension is not equal to its topological dimension. Oftentimes (but not always), the Hausdorf dimension will be fractional, which is where the word comes from. Self-similarity is an easy way to satisfy that requirement in a way that's easy to explain, but it's far from the only way.

Something as simple as a contour map could be thought of as intrinsically fractal. It isn't as mathematically rigorous as the fractals we are used to seeing described as such, but it fulfils the criteria.

I agree; the term is drastically misused in this context. Planting is simply 'varied'.

The classical solution to the tragedy of the commons for rivalrous goods is propertization. It's the logic behind contemporary land rights, some very successful commercial fisheries management (north west Atlantic), and emissions auctions in the US (SOx and NOx implementation - but notably not the proposed carbon, which has other wierd factors bolted on)

There's plenty of science against (20th century) top heavy / top down control. The issue seems to be: the current power holders admitting their model is flawed; and those being managed realized they'd be better off without "leadership."

Private property and profit motive are obstacles.

That's an absolutely valid question that doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Generalizing these insights for deployment is absolutely a problem worth solving.

Actually this depends on a monoculture as it is an adaptation to the life cycle of the rice (paddy) plant and its water requirements. If different farmers were growing different crops the requirements would vary.

Fractal doesn't appear in the paper. I'm not sure where phys.org gets the word fractal from.

Here's some figures which might help with satellite image searches.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/05/31/1605369114.figu...

Yes... both profs are external sante fe institute members. That's kindof their chorus.