Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Robotics Science

Swarm Theory Makes National Geographic 213

Posted by kdawson 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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Swarm Theory Makes National Geographic More

Swarm Theory Makes National Geographic

Comments Filter:

  • Nomenclature (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @08:57AM (#19753011)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Attila Dimedici ( 1036002 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:06AM (#19753083)
      My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by igny ( 716218 )
        My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.

        Or communism...

        • Re:Swarm Theory and Economics (Score:5, Insightful)

          by tom_evil ( 1121495 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @11:39AM (#19754679)

          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.

          • Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

            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: (Score:2)

        by ettlz ( 639203 )

        My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.
        I'm not too familiar, but there may be some universalities associated with them. Often seemingly different systems like these (e.g., in condensed matter systems and QFTs) composed of a large number of simple but linked elements exhibit similar behaviours (such as around phase transitions).
      • um...free market economics don't rely on unbending regulation at every turn, like the ants in TFA...I'd say this makes a case that 'things sort themselves out if left to do as they please', or self-regulation, are what you see when you aren't looking closely enough, and that in fact regulation helps large systems operate optimally.
        • What unbending regulation? The ants in the article respond to stimuli according to their own individual "programming". What external regulation is mentioned in the article? In free market economics, people respond to external stimuli according to their own individual "programming". Now, do I think there are reasons to impose some external regulations? Yes. But there is something to be learned about human economies from the efficiency of an ant economy.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by svunt ( 916464 )
            fair enough, perhaps my wording sucked. The individual "programming" of the ants is identical for each type (sentry, forager, etc) - which is certainly not the case for humans in a free market.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cartman ( 18204 )

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

        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

        • Now that you refer to him, I seem to remember coming across something about Von Hayek on this topic. It has been a long time and I never found time to read any of his writings.
      • That's what I've been saying over at the xkcd forum. [xkcd.com]

    • Re:Nomenclature (Score:5, Interesting)

      by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:29AM (#19753253)
      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.
    • I call it ``bottom-up AI'' (as opposed to the ``top-down AI'' everyone is familiar with).

    • Re:Nomenclature (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gunark ( 227527 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @10:17AM (#19753707)
      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.)
      • According to the article you link to:

          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)

        by AndersOSU ( 873247 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @10:58AM (#19754203)
        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?
    • The field of complex agent behavior has had a well established and consistent terminology since it emerged as a branch of economic game theory in the 1960s. The primary problem is that most people on SlashDot don't check the math section for books, only the computer science section, and the mathematicians beat us to the punch by so many years that we had little afterwards to say.

      John Nash is a good place to start reading, if you're interested.

  • Insect swarms are smarter than insects (Score:5, Informative)

    by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:04AM (#19753063) Journal

    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)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:09AM (#19753113)
    That human consciousness is a swarm of neuronal interactions.

     
  • See how many "I for one welcome our hivemind overlords" type posts we get with this story.

  • Alternatively (Score:5, Funny)

    by z0idberg ( 888892 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:19AM (#19753193)
    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

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

      Which adequately describes the /. effect.

  • "Practical Applications" of Swarm Theory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by chillax137 ( 612431 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:26AM (#19753221) Homepage
    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).
  • To find out how, Seeley's team applied paint dots and tiny plastic tags to identify all 4,000 bees in each of several small swarms that they ferried to Appledore Island, home of the Shoals Marine Laboratory. There, in a series of experiments, they released each swarm

    So that is what killed all the bees!

  • Unmentioned in the article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Control Group ( 105494 ) * on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:27AM (#19753231) Homepage
    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: (Score:2)

      by lawpoop ( 604919 )

      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.
      Stephen Wolfram, is that you?
      • Just because he's a bit of a kook doesn't mean that everything he says is wrong.

        (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)

          by lawpoop ( 604919 )

          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.

          • Well, I am the grandparent, so odds are good I'm talking about Wolfram. ;)

            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)

              by lawpoop ( 604919 )
              You're you're own parent? Woah... ;)

              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)

      by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @10:01AM (#19753551) Journal

      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: (Score:3)

        by Vireo ( 190514 )

        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.
        This is clearly the antropic principle at work.
      • Of course, it may be the case that "intelligence" is the result of an optimization

        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)

        by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @10:59AM (#19754213) Homepage Journal

        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.
        • 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.

          It shouldn't be too difficult to understand why, either. Humans have a large brain with lots of neurons that interact electrically and ch

      • "So, yes, this is nifty stuff, but I don't see it as "intelligence" so much as an optimization problem."

        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

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jc42 ( 318812 )
          This sort of reminds me of the the Chinese Room Argument. 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 Chinese translation.

          And just about anyone who knows more than one language understands the fallacy behind this s

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by iangoldby ( 552781 )
      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 'nothing but' the aggregation of simpler parts.

      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
      • Absolutely. I didn't mean to be diminutive of what intelligence clearly is - "nothing but" was (in retrospect, obviously) a bad choice of words. I couldn't agree more that intelligence, whatever its provenance, is real; in much the same fashion, regardless of whether we can identify what gives rise to swarm behavior, the fact remains that the swarm acts more intelligently than the sum of its parts.

        I also apologize for falling prey to recognizing no difference between description and explanation - especially

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Hal_Porter ( 817932 )
      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.

      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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rhakka ( 224319 )
      I have wondered that for a very long time, and for me the idea of (and I am NO expert of course!) quantum mechanics still leaves the door open for intelligence of some kind... non-determinism is what is needed, otherwise we're all just very complex automatons.

      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.
      • But randomness (á la quantum theory) doesn't actually get us closer to the classical concept of free will than pure determinism. In the latter case, you've got your behavior determined by particle interactions and precision mathematics.

        In the former, you've got your behavior determined by particle interactions and dice rolls.

        Neither is "free will."

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rhakka ( 224319 )
          But what IS randomness?

          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 ;)
          • Well, if randomness is not random, we're rapidly coming into an area where all we're discussing is definitions of terms, rather than any reality.

            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

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by rhakka ( 224319 )
              I guess I should have said, what if it only appears random, not called the notion of randomness into question. Lots of things seem random to us and now, these days, we know they are not truly random, they are just complex... so complex, they might as well be random to Joe Blow on the street. I don't see any reason why the apparently random actions of the quantum world necessarily have to BE random, instead of just misunderstood.

              Testable? Perhaps not. Knowable? Perhaps not. But never more than perhaps

  • Sentient Groups & Algorithm Difficulties (Score:4, Interesting)

    by aldheorte ( 162967 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:37AM (#19753313)
    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.
    • I doubt the necessity for individual variance. It may be a factor to consider as one of the rules of setup (each unit can vary X amount from the norm in dimension Y), but I don't think you need it. For example, the ant colony behavior (as described in TFA) doesn't require individual variance. Variance comes from the environment with which the ants interact.

      Alternatively, you can replace individual variance with pure randomness - that is, individuals may react to the same stimulus differently, but only accor
      • In the article, the ant colonies have specialists. Scouts look for food sources, foragers wait for signals of food sources. Assuming that both start the day in the nest, environment cannot account fully for the variance resulting in this division of behavior.

        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
    • "Everyone with some algorithm design experience knows that you can get complex behaviors (often known as bugs) with a set of simple rules." I'm convinced that JavaScript is the essence of this assertion.
      • That's because, in addition to poorly defined algorithmic flexibility, JavaScript has a high level of environmental variance.

  • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by SatanicPuppy ( 611928 ) *
      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 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)

    by mhannibal ( 1121487 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @09:47AM (#19753399)
    Ant colonies sound a lot like slashdot it seems...

  • What a great way to stop an ant population! (Score:3)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Thursday July 05, 2007 @11:22AM (#19754461) Homepage
    Perhaps some genius chemist will come up with a way to infect or affect an ant's sense of smell/touch/taste in such a way that foragers never go out and thereby starve the colony? It wouldn't be poison in the direct sense and would hopefully be safe for plants, animals and children. It would be like boric acid but better.
  • equals God.

  • Article Missed a Major Point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CyberGarp ( 242942 ) <`gro.ttebraG' `ta' `nwahS'> on Thursday July 05, 2007 @12:42PM (#19755551) Homepage
    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.
    • The swarm intelligence algorithm is ran offline to determine a solution to the global problem. Indeed, ants "run" the "algorithm" inline as they don't leave the nest with a full plan of action, but the method used is still swarm intelligence, as opposed to, say, standard heuristic-based TSP solvers. The reason why it's not ran inline is that the cost of doing so is larger than the benefit, since the conditions are not very dynamic.

      By the way there are many papers on the topic, although it's quite recent, ju
  • In Hollywood movies such as "I, Robot" and "Independence Day" a non-swarm organisational structure is assumed and actions by the hero, such as destroying the central processing core or blowing up the mothership, generally puts an immediate and dramatic end to the world's invasive trouble. What would happen in a movie where the invasive enemy had a swarm organisation? I'm not a movie buff at all, so can anyone point out any examples of this? Perhaps Hitchcock's "The Birds" (which I haven't seen) or some k
  • Individuals are dumb (i.e. in the ants examples), but as a whole seems to be a pattern, some (lets pick correctly the words) "intelligent design" in how the group behaves. But there are not design there, not intelligent choices made by individuals or the group as a whole, just simple (mechanic?) interactions in the group much like sand making dunes. Seeing the the swarm as something intelligent because the dumb interactions seems to have a pattern tells more about the observer than about the swarm.
  • Swarms are smart? Hah! While they may have emergent behaviors, they are no smarter than their members. I'm wracking my brain trying to think of an example, but there are none. Fish swarm? Dumb. Ant trail? Dumb. Flock of geese? Dumb. Swarm of bees? Dumb. In fact, single bees appear to be much more intelligent than bee swarms.
  • I thought that's how /. worked???

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Close