Swarm Theory Makes National Geographic

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

It seems to me that this whole field (what do I call it - complex systems? derived behaviour? emergent systems? swarm theory?) lacks a consistent language. It is a hugely important scientific field, but everyone calling it different names means it appears smaller than it really is!

Swarm Theory and Economics

My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

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.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

you're mixing up communism and socialism. Communism, in the Marxist sense, has never been reached. The planned economy is a stage in Marxes theories on the way to communism, which is a utopia where everyone works for themselves, taking only what they need, giving what they can or think the group needs. Communes often come close to communism (and the words being almost the same is no coincidence).

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

By that definition, there is no real difference between an ideal free market economy and communism. Except that in an ideal free market economy people have access to luxuries and in an ideal communist economy no one has any luxuries, since by definition a luxury is something you don't need. In an ideal free market economy, everyone's needs are met by the efficiencies of the economy. Of course, since this is not an ideal world, neither of these will ever happen. The question is which theory does a better job of meeting people's needs in the real world.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

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.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

The idea that there is a net benefit for a group from the collective selfish actions of individual actors is closer to what this article is describing as swarm theory.

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.

Re:Swarm Theory and Free Market Economics.

Actualy they are very much more like a free market.

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.

Re:Nomenclature

Agreed. And TFA itself is a little confused itself about the differences between the "Hive Mind" and swarming/schooling/flocking/herding behavior; which are really two completely different things.

Re:Nomenclature

The correct term is Dynamical Systems [wikipedia.org], and its common, consistent language is the branch of mathematics dealing with dynamical systems (complete with its own vocabulary -- strange attractors, manifolds, emergence, chaos, etc.)

Re:Nomenclature

When did dynamical become a cromulent word, and who decided that systems was too good a noun to be modified by an adjective like everyone else?

Insect swarms are smarter than insects

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

That human consciousness is a swarm of neuronal interactions.

 

Re:

And the rest of the body is a swarm of cooperating cells.

Alternatively

From TFA "Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are."

But apparently...

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - Kay

Re:Alternatively

Why break away? Being dumb is fun, that's why beer was invented.

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.

"Practical Applications" of Swarm Theory

They cite a practical application of Swarm Theory as optimizing the business operation of a gas producer. They say this technique was inspired by how ants learn to forage for food, but this technique is a standard (and pretty obvious) solution to numerical optimization. So while the idea is interesting and can definitely be applied to networks of robots, it is a retroactive explanation of something that has already been developed (for marketing purposes, I'm sure).

Unmentioned in the article

It's not mentioned, but it seems an obvious sort of question to ask given the content they've got: is there anything to "real" (by which I mean, individual) intelligence other than swarm behavior at the neuron level? In fact, is the entire biology of any given animal (ourselves, obviously, included) anything more than swarm behavior at the cellular level? Or, if we accept the idea that cells are just a reproductive mechanism for DNA, is it just swarm behavior at the molecular level?

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:Unmentioned in the article

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).

Re:Unmentioned in the article

Yeah, I don't really see this as "swarm intelligence" so much as a system with self optimizing behavior.

I think the reason people are talking about this is that it goes against the sort of inborn intuition about where intelligence lies in living organism.

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.

Re:

There is an interesting question of reductionism here. There a good form of reductionism, were a complex idea is described in terms of an aggregation of simpler parts. But there is also a bad form of reductionism in which the complex idea is claimed to be

Sentient Groups & Algorithm Difficulties

A Fire Upon The Deep [wikipedia.org] novelizes the potential of sentient consisting of several physically individual members who do not have sentience as individuals, although this runs tangential to the plot.

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.

Antsdot

Ant colonies sound a lot like slashdot it seems...

Article Missed a Major Point

It said that "Swarm Theory" was being applied to business operations. I call bullshit. A computer model was run at night that provides the orders to all the drivers each morning. This flies in the face of the premise of swarm theory. If each driver were given a simple set of rules to follow for driving then it would be a direct application of swarm theory to operations. However, it's not swarm theory applied to operations, because each driver gets an order from corporate each morning. No local decision are made. It's just another algorithmic approach to combinatorial optimization with centralized management, which till I see a Big O notation, and some papers, I withhold comment on the computer model.

Re:

Would your body classify as a swarm of atoms?

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 togeth