Slashdot Log In
Swarm Theory Makes National Geographic
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Jul 05, 2007 07:48 AM
from the intelligence-of-crowds dept.
from the intelligence-of-crowds dept.
g8orade writes "Swarm Behavior / Swarm Theory has made the pages of National Geographic. Brief but interesting article with several examples." Swarm theory has been discussed here a few times in recent years.
Related Stories
[+]
Developers: Swarm Intelligence 219 comments
elamdaly writes "Eric Bonabeau, Ph.D, a keynote speaker at the upcoming Emerging Technology conference, is a leader in the field of swarm intelligence and has focused on applying these concepts to real world problems such as factory scheduling and telecommunications routing. The concept itself is borrowed from nature; in this interview, that's where the conversation begins, with ants and other social insects. Dr. Bonabeau takes us from his childhood nightmares of carnivorous wasps to applying the theories of swarm intelligence to solving real problems in the business world."
[+]
Science: Swarm Theory Applied to Music 26 comments
JoeCotellese writes "There is an article in Discover magazine about computer scientist/musician Tim Blackwell and his Swarm
Music software. This software creates improvisational music based on models of swarming
and flocking. The observation was made that interaction among musicians is interdependent and yet independent and this dynamic parallels flock
dynamics. Computer generated music has been around for a while but according to his web site, this project was the first application of swarm theory to music. Sample MP3s are available on his website."
[+]
SwarmOS Demonstrated at Idea Festival 142 comments
PacoCheezdom writes "Intelligent Life has short summary of a demonstration by MIT professor James McLurkin of his new group-minded robots, which run an operating system called 'Swarm OS'. The robots are able to work together as a group not by communicating with all members of the group at once, but by talking only to their neighbors, and model other similar behaviors performed by bees and ants. "
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Nomenclature (Score:5, Insightful)
Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or communism...
Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
More like anarchism. Capitalism has corporate bosses, communism has party bosses.
One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all--at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.
Parent
Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
No, in Communism there is access to luxuries, only they must be produced by the labor of the individual consuming them or appropriated by equal (i.e. no surplus value subtracted) labor from someone who can. Besides, it is narrow to assume that the economic definition of 'luxury' is equivalent to the practical definition of the same. Many here I'm sure can attest that access to sci-fi books and video games, while not strictly necessary for survival, are beneficial to their continued functioning as healthy individuals, and as such aren't really 'unnecessary'. There is such a thing as prioritized consumption.
Parent
Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the article doesn't say anything about the collective selfish actions of anybody. In fact, in almost all the examples given, the actors are behaving unselfishly. The ants don't know exactly why they should go out and follow a given trail, the bees don't really understand why they should choose one nest over another - even a protester wasn't aware of how their movement to a particular street would help overwhelm police.
There is no apparent benefit to any of the individuals in doing any of that. In fact, I daresay that a "free market" ant wouldn't follow any trails, wouldn't bother to smell any pheromones, it would just chill in the nest and eat what the other ants brought, expending the minimum effort for the maximum gain. And free market ants certainly wouldn't automatically tell everyone else where the food-jackpot was that one of them had personally worked to find.
So I agree that swarms are unlike authoritarian communism. They're unlike authoritarian anything, simply because swarms are anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchial - any structure involving a boss or a "chain of command" cannot function as a swarm. However, they're definitely not behaving the way a free market does, either. The key thing to understand is that the actors in a swarm are voluntarily doing non-selfish things because those things, when done by a lot of actors all together, will result in a net benefit for all the actors.
So, swarms definitely have a sort of collectivist, socialist tinge to them, because they require all the actors to base their actions on what will benefit and sustain the group - not them personally. However, because of the lack of authority, swarms are sort of a more pure form of socialism that is inherently resistant to the corruption and oppression by things like governments or leaders.
I think swarms are one of the most important trends in society, because they're the one thing that terrifies all people in power - capitalist CEOs and communist dictators alike.
Parent
Re:Swarm Theory and Free Market Economics. (Score:5, Insightful)
Communism is a tightly hierarchical system in which all decisions are made at the top and everyone has to do what they are told by the chain of command.
I don't want to seem snotty or disrespectful, but please read what someone's written before disagreeing with them. You're right. As I wrote above, authoritarian systems - including communism - are not swarms, and in fact are usually set up to deliberately suppress swarm behavior (which undermine centralized power). So swarms are not a good example of communism.
I think, however, you've fallen into the classic trap of thinking that there are only two economic models: communism and free market capitalism. It reminds me of when I was a young kid and thought that if you weren't Christian, it meant you were Jewish
There are a ton of socio-economic models which critique and are sometimes opposed to free market capitalism - and only one of them is communism. The rest are things like participatory economics, anarchism, gift economies...I would say that swarms are more closely related to some of these models.
Human beings in a free market make decisions based on the information we get from our interactions with others in society
That's true, but irrelevant. All life forms make decisions based on the information they receive, that has nothing to do with swarms. The interesting thing about swarms is that when you get a bunch of actors together, and each one of them follows a pattern of behavior that has no benefit to the individual, you get an overall emergent result which benefits the whole group. Individual humans in a free market environment base their decisions on what will help their personal interests to the exclusion of anyone else's - that's the hallmark of the system.
Swarms are like a proof-of-concept that when people are able to stop being myopically selfish and participate in a collective "organ" that's larger than them, rewards return to them which couldn't have been anticipated with a free market perspective. In one way, this is a kind of creepy realization, since it suggests that the most efficient mode of socio-economic organization would be some kind of Borg-like hive-mind. Obviously, I don't think that'd be a good thing, but I do think there's room for individuals participating in collective swarms when it comes to important matters (like food,clothes,shelter), and going their own ways when it's not.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The theory of "swarm behavior" had already been elucidated in economics several decades ago, and its applicability to biology (and simultaneous co-discovery in that field) was described at that time.
Von Hayek described "swarm theory" and how it operates in the price system of a modern economy. Hayek elucidated how the price system coordinates the activities of millions of people, each of whom has extremely limited informat
Re:Nomenclature (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Nomenclature (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The dynamical system concept is a mathematical formalization for any fixed "rule" which describes the time dependence of a point's position in its ambient space. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a clock pendulum, the flow of water in a pipe, and the number of fish each spring in a lake.
which doesn't sound right to me.
Re:Nomenclature (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Insect swarms are smarter than insects (Score:5, Informative)
Aunt Hillary [lloyd-jones.net] would agree.
To the confused, Aunt Hillary is an ant hill, a character in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher,Bach; an Eternal Golden Braid. The chapter she's featured in is subtitled "...Ant Fugue". (Which is the chapter following one subtitled "Prelude...")
I have a sneaking suspicion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You want another example? (Score:2)
Alternatively (Score:5, Funny)
But apparently...
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - Kay
Re: (Score:2)
Which adequately describes the /. effect.
Re: (Score:2)
But the moderators say Funny and we all know that the majority is always right.....right? everyone? or is that just with ants?
Re:Alternatively (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, that statement is assuming that the group is put into a situation where it has to make a decision. Human groups are notorious for bad/slow decision making because our psychology tells us that in new situations where we are not familiar with what to do, we should do what others around us are doing (even if that's standing there doing nothing). This is why leaders around the world can take advantage of groups of people to the point of it being ridiculous, and how several people can watch someone get murdered without anyone calling 911 [freerepublic.com], or how people can step over a dying woman [chicagotribune.com] in a store.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Lets have a group of 10 people and the highest IQ of them all is 140.
so 140/10=14. Or we have a group of 3 people, with the highest IQ of 60 so the formula is:
60/3=20.
So by that logic, it would be preferable to be in the latter rather than former group. But I don't think it makes much sense, because I made a secret presumption that everyone in the first group (except the guy with IQ of 140) has IQ of 139.
"Practical Applications" of Swarm Theory (Score:4, Interesting)
who killed the bees? (Score:2)
So that is what killed all the bees!
Unmentioned in the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Which would have a fascination all its own, since I don't think anyone's ever argued that DNA has anything we'd call intelligence. If all of life arises out of swarm behavior at the molecular level, we've managed to take intelligence completely out of the equation.
Which, in turn, just makes this another facet of the belief that the entire universe is an emergent phenomenon of a vast set of simple items following simple rules.
The truly intriguing observation (from my point of view, anyway), though, is that this emergent phenomenon contains examples of exactly the same mechanism at so many levels of complexity. It wouldn't necessarily have to be true that simple interactions at the fundamental particle level would give rise to higher-order behaviors that can be macroscopically described as simple interactions at that higher level. It's the fractal nature of the mechanism that is most intriguing, I think.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
(That said, I haven't actually bothered to read ANKoS, so maybe I'd distance myself from the idea if I had)
But, really - if the search for a theory of everything isn't an expression of the belief that the universe can be distilled down to (comparatively, at least) simple rules, I don't know what would be.
Re: (Score:2)
Just because he's a bit of a kook doesn't mean that everything he says is wrong.
I never said anything about anyone being wrong OR a kook for that matter... who are you talking about, Wolfram or the grandparent, anyway? ;)
I was just making a joke. Grandparent seems to subscribe to the same set of beliefs that Wolfram does -- all observable phenomenon can be reduced to a simple set of rules.
But, really - if the search for a theory of everything isn't an expression of the belief that the universe can be distilled down to (comparatively, at least) simple rules, I don't know what would be.
That sounds about right to me.
Re: (Score:2)
In any event - I plead ignorance on the matter. I'm not familiar enough with what Wolfram believes (aside from the general idea of emergent behaviors from simple rules) to know if I'm agreeing with him or not.
OTOH, I've really given too much thought to what was originally a joke so...forgive me for being a humorless curmudgeon.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't fault Wolfram's idea in general, but I think the main criticism is that he makes associations that are unwarranted. Combine that with the tome he wrote over a number of years in almost complete isolation, claiming that it would totally revolutionize science, it makes him come off as a little crazy. If it weren't for the fact that he is a genius, and he has contributed immensely to various fields, I think people would dismiss him as a total nut. But even product
Re:Unmentioned in the article (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I don't really see this as "swarm intelligence" so much as a system with self optimizing behavior.
Take the example of the gas producer / distributor. They have a system of equations linking variables (the routes that trucks can take, cost to operate the trucks, and price of the product at various plants) which is solved for an optimal solution. The optimization is simply to find the maximum profit - it's a very simple optimization problem. (For mathematical definitions of "simple".) The fact that it's not intuitive doesn't really mean anything other than intuition isn't a good method for optimizing systems.
The interesting thing is that the biological system of an ant hive developed to be an "optimization solver" - which isn't really that surprising considering the whole point of a biological system is to minimize some potential (as happens with all physical systems). It just so happens that with biological systems, minimizing that potential also increases the probability of the system existing for longer periods of time (in other words, perpetuating the species). I think ant hive behavior is kind of anthropic - if hives were not optimized that way, ant hives wouldn't exist because all the ants would be dead.
So, yes, this is nifty stuff, but I don't see it as "intelligence" so much as an optimization problem.
Of course, it may be the case that "intelligence" is the result of an optimization, but it may also be the case that "intelligence" falls into "Godel space" (i.e. that space where something exists but can't be proven because logic, being sufficiently powerful, is incomplete).
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
At the risk of falling into the trap of excessive reductionism (rather, falling into it again, as a sibling post to yours pointed out), that's exactly what I was getting at. One point of view would be to look at human intelligence as an optimization from the point of view of DNA reproducing.
As far as not being able to demonstrate intelligence goes, I would be more amenable to the idea that we can't prove/disprove/adequately an
Re:Unmentioned in the article (Score:4, Interesting)
Without critical study, we seem to have the inborn idea that the individual mull-cellular organism is intelligent. Humans are intelligent, dogs less so, plants, not really at all. If a group of organisms is acting intelligently, we assume that each one of them has to be pretty smart, or else the whole group couldn't be smart. In the case of swarms that exhibit intelligence, none of the organisms seem to be that smart -- or at least, they don't have the complete set of smarts that is shown in the group behavior. In fact, they are pretty simple when it comes to interacting with groups.
So when studying ant colony behavior, there was kind of a conundrum in the field for a while. If individual ants are dumb, why does the colony behave so intelligently? People where then looking for the hidden smarts inside each individual ant. Or, another possibility is that colony behavior really isn't that smart, despite it seeming so to us.
But it turns out colonies really are smart, *but* there are no hidden smarts in the ant. The ant really is dumb. It's only when you combine their simple behavior in the swarm that you find intelligence. It's not in the ant; it's in the colony.
This is a paradigm shift in the understanding of complex behavior of multicellular organisms. We have had good evidence of individual organisms acting smart, that was never in question. But until now, we have never had good scientific, mathematical evidence of intelligence at the group level. People may have suspected it, but now they have evidence to convince skeptics.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And just about anyone who knows more than one language understands the fallacy behind this s
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This bad reductionism has been called alternately 'nothing buttery' and 'Greedy Reductionism'. (Greedy Reductionism [wikipedia.org].)
In this case we just need to be careful not to suppose that if intelligence might perhaps be
Re: (Score:2)
I also apologize for falling prey to recognizing no difference between description and explanation - especially
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
DNA doesn't but the process of evolution manages to make perfect designs from swarm like rules I think. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that all intelligence is emergent behaviour from swarms actually.
The truly intriguing observation (from my
Sentient Groups & Algorithm Difficulties (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone with some algorithm design experience knows that you can get complex behaviors (often known as bugs) with a set of simple rules. Unfortunately, the wide range of problems to which we apply computers, generally by business demands, require rigorous certainty. We want to know exactly how many beans were shipped, not an estimate. Individual instances of an algorithm cooperating via simple rules inherently introduces uncertainty or reflects a very inefficient approach to solving a certain problem. This goes against the grain of classical training and thinking about computing.
Collective intelligence may also depend on all individuals having some level of variation, yet cooperating through simple rules. In this case, the emphasis goes to the protocol and not the algorithm. I believe that further research will find that some level of individual variation will become recognized as an essential element of perceived group intelligence, important to breaking recursive feedback loops and deadlocks. Unfortunately, attempts to emulate this in computing will run into the issue that group perceived intelligence may not be determined so much by design, but by fitness for a particular, narrow purpose, with truly remarkable group intelligence requiring many iterations exposed to actual operating conditions or good simulations thereof.
Re: (Score:2)
Alternatively, you can replace individual variance with pure randomness - that is, individuals may react to the same stimulus differently, but only accor
The brain is a swarm (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlikely. A swarm is composed of units that are functioning individuals as well, with their own individual complex behavior patterns.
That's what makes swarm theory so interesting. if they were all working together because they were effectively cogs in the swarm "machine" then the fact that the sum is greater than the parts wouldn't be interesting at all.
Antsdot (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I disagree. Ants get smarter when put into large groups...
What a great way to stop an ant population! (Score:3)
Article Missed a Major Point (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment Missed a Major Point (Score:3, Informative)
By the way there are many papers on the topic, although it's quite recent, ju