4.4.4. Application examples |
| 4.4.4. Application examples |
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There are lots of examples of finding solutions from nature. Analogies found in other technical fields are quite common, too. In training for analogical reasoning, the question of how transfer from historical sources can be made and asking for illustration, often appears,. Therefore, we have chosen two examples from historical sources (see K. H. BUSCH).
The “Rat catcher of Hameln” is a story well known in Germany. People of the German town Hameln suffered millions of rats and mice. In 1284, as the story goes, a man wearing a strange looking vest appeared in the town and told the citizens that he would be able to free the town from the plague.
The citizens promised him a good reward. He took out off his pocket a small pipe and started to play. All the rats and mice came out of the houses and followed him. He went right away into the nearby river; the animals followed him and drowned…
For those who do not know the German story, we are going to tell it to the end.
The citizens were very happy but “forgot” to reward the man who had freed them from the plague. He went away very angrily but appeared again, early in the morning of the 26th June.
He started to play his pipe again but this time, many children appeared to follow him. They went out of the town to a hill where they disappeared forever …
Another example:
Perhaps you remember the story of HERAKLES who had to solve the problem of how to clean out the big stables of King Augias in one day. Three thousand cows had been living there for years so that there were mountains of dung. It seemed impossible to solve the task.
But HERAKLES didn’t do what was expected. He dug a channel to the rivers nearby, let them flow through the area to take away all the dung, and solved the problem.
A lot of examples of how analogical thinking is applied can be studied on the internet, especially from the field of BIONICS, the transfer of systems from nature to human needs and solutions, e.g. http://www.bionicdolphin.com/tom/source/tarcodesigns.html (a water scooter using dolphins as a model) or http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/09/25/bionic.arm/ (an artificial arm which is linked to the brain creating communication between the brain and the outside object that needs to be moved).
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