SwarmTheory

Swarm Theory

"In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few
examples where you have a central agent," says Vijay Kumar, a professor of
mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. "Everything is
very distributed: They don't all talk to each other. They act on local
information. And they're all anonymous. I don't care who moves the chair,
as long as somebody moves the chair. To go from one robot to multiple robots,
you need all three of those ideas."

[...]

IN NATURE, OF COURSE, animals travel in even larger numbers. That's because,
as members of a big group, whether it's a flock, school, or herd, individuals
increase their chances of detecting predators, finding food, locating a mate,
or following a migration route. For these animals, coordinating their movements
with one another can be a matter of life or death.

[...]

"It's difficult to describe in words, but when the herd was on the move it
looked very much like a cloud shadow passing over the landscape, or a mass
of dominoes toppling over at the same time and changing direction," Karsten
says. "It was as though every animal knew what its neighbor was going to do,
and the neighbor beside that and beside that. There was no anticipation or
reaction. No cause and effect. It just was."

[...]

For each caribou, the stakes couldn't have been higher, yet the herd's evasive
maneuvers displayed not panic but precision. (Imagine the chaos if a hungry wolf
were released into a crowd of people.) Every caribou knew when it was time to run
and in which direction to go, even if it didn't know exactly why. No leader was
responsible for coordinating the rest of the herd. Instead each animal was following
simple rules evolved over thousands of years of wolf attacks.

That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about
ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized
control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to
cope with complexity.

[...]

Social and political groups have already adopted crude swarm tactics. During mass
protests eight years ago in Seattle, anti-globalization activists used mobile
communications devices to spread news quickly about police movements, turning an
otherwise unruly crowd into a "smart mob" that was able to disperse and re-form
like a school of fish.

The biggest changes may be on the Internet. Consider the way Google uses group smarts
to find what you're looking for. When you type in a search query, Google surveys
billions of Web pages on its index servers to identify the most relevant ones. It
then ranks them by the number of pages that link to them, counting links as votes
(the most popular sites get weighted votes, since they're more likely to be reliable).
The pages that receive the most votes are listed first in the search results. In this
way, Google says, it "uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a
page's importance."

Wikipedia, a free collaborative encyclopedia, has also proved to be a big success,
with millions of articles in more than 200 languages about everything under the sun,
each of which can be contributed by anyone or edited by anyone. "It's now possible
for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few
decades ago," says Thomas Malone of MIT's new Center for Collective Intelligence.
"No single person knows everything that's needed to deal with problems we face as
a society, such as health care or climate change, but collectively we know far more
than we've been able to tap so far."

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