Swarm Theory Makes National Geographic 213
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.
Nomenclature (Score:5, Insightful)
Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Kind of like tribalism? It worked pretty well as an organizational system for pretty much all(99.9%+) of human history (except for a few cultures that developed in the past few thousand years.)
Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Where does Marx discuss luxuries? or is this your personal addition to the theory?
Yeah, you must be one of those people who believe that Christianity is simply the "stuff that Jesus said". Please. Communism is not restricted to Marx's writings; he laid the foundational theoretical work for the system he was describing; the evolution of the idea did not stop with his death.
But, beyond that, it doesn't take much assuming to fit a theory of luxury commodities into a Marxist framework. Since his major cr
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The problem with this is our only link to what Jesus may have said comes from a book assembled a few hundred years after his death by a bunch of guys who had their own reasons (such as suppressing various inconvenient sects) for determining what Jesus may or may not have said, from a huge number of various conflicting accounts, m
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I give you Julius Caesar, Augustus, Herod, and countless others in the same timeframe whose history is much more thoroughly documented than the shady figure of Jesus of Nazareth.
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I am not arguing that there was substantial disagreement between what Jesus said and what he was quoted as saying in the Bible. I am arguing rather two different points:
1.) Christians today have many ceremonies, beliefs, and practices that cannot be substantially derived from the Bible itself. Thus, Christianity today is much more than simply the "teachings of Jesus" and include exegetical, dogmatic, and apologetic doctrines and works aimed at clarifying what was previously unclear and readjusting the st
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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.
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For a long time Darwin's theory of evolution was suspect because it did not explain the behavior of ants or other social insects except through group selection which did not really explain anything. Why should the workers toil to help the queen have more children instead of having children themselves? How is their social contract enforced? With the advent of selfish gene theory the reason
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Okay, I think I understand. You're saying that the worker ants aren't "laboring selflessly", but are in fact feeding the queen because of a selfish desire to create more related offspring. But the fa
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Bee swarms.
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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.
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The closest the article's aut
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The fact that humans in groups always seem to have leaders could be one of the reasons behind the common observation that, unlike ants and bees, humans in groups typically show less intelligence than we do as individuals. Anyone who has ever worked in a bus
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No, it isn't. In real communism there's not even more a need for a state, a government or a leader. In theory at least.
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I think there are some Amish over there waving their hands trying to get your attention.
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..except for the regulation (Score:2)
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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
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Re:Nomenclature (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Nomenclature (Score:5, Informative)
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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)
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John Nash is a good place to start reading, if you're interested.
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)
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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
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Which adequately describes the /. effect.
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But the moderators say Funny and we all know that the majority is always right.....right? everyone? or is that just with ants?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You used the Kitty Genovese story as an example of a group of people acting dumb, then linked to an article about how most the story is urban legend, that most of the witnesses weren't eye-witnesses, there were at most one to three actual witnesses and that the police were called after the initial attack by one of those witnesses.
Its a terrible, tragic incident, but it's actually not a very good example of groups of people acting dumb. A
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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.
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Now, you've got the low IQ guys, whose first thought may be "Der...maybe we should just kill him." The other two guys, not having any better idea, happily go along with the first.
"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.
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(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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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It shouldn't be too difficult to understand why, either. Humans have a large brain with lots of neurons that interact electrically and ch
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This sort of reminds me of the the Chinese Room Argument [wikipedia.org]. The gist is that a person is isolated in a room with a complex instruction manual, and that person receives cards with Chinese characters. Using the instruction manual, the person translates the characters into English.
The argument is that the person in the room doesn't really understand Chinese. He's executing instructions that lead to a Chin
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And just about anyone who knows more than one language understands the fallacy behind this s
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Yeah, but we've known that theoretical tidbit for nearly thirty years; Conway's Game of Life, and its explorations, have yielded that spatial singularities with only three simple rules can be used to create logic gates and memory, and machines can be built using those elements that are Turing Complete. It's not that this isn't amazing (simple elements yield complex behaviors == awesome!!!111!!!1!), but rather that it's old news. Just taking that insight into a slightly new computational context isn't near
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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
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I also apologize for falling prey to recognizing no difference between description and explanation - especially
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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
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evolution does not make perfect designs
I tend to agree, however, evolution is a process that is ongoing, not something that has happened, there is no reason to suggest that if it is possible for a perfect design to exist for a given environment (and that environment does not change) that evolution would not achieve it. The problem is that 1) evolution is ongoing and 2) environments change leading to 3) the criteria for natural selection is altered both by changes introduced in other evolving organisms and changes in the environment. So I gue
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Obviously some of our behaviour is deterministic, but I'm still not sure it ALL is, and quantum theory is the only place that allows for non-deterministic behaviour.
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In the former, you've got your behavior determined by particle interactions and dice rolls.
Neither is "free will."
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What if it's not random after all?
What if it's a hallmark of conciousness?
I"m not saying it IS of course.. that's quite a leap. But, it is the only thing we know of so far that is not purely determnisitic and COULD, perhaps, just maybe, allow for free will to be a reality. And since it SEEMS like free will IS a reality... well, perhaps it's worth thinking about
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When discussing free will, though, the dead end I always end up in is that it's a moot point, because it's untestable. The premise of free will is that a given person can choose either A or B - but all we ever get to know is whether that person did choose A or B. Since the brain is a one-directional, feedback-driven state machine (making the assumption that the bra
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Testable? Perhaps not. Knowable? Perhaps not. But never more than perhaps
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.
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Alternatively, you can replace individual variance with pure randomness - that is, individuals may react to the same stimulus differently, but only accor
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You have a good point about individual variance expressed as random reaction to stimulus by any individual. However, that's where we deviate from discussing group intelligence to discussing the definition of individual differentiation. Obviously, two in
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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)
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I disagree. Ants get smarter when put into large groups...
What a great way to stop an ant population! (Score:3)
Swam Intelligence (Score:2)
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
How to Kill the Bad Aliens Now? (Score:2, Interesting)
Where is the intelligence? (Score:2)
Swarms are smart? (Score:2)
Old News (Score:2)