National Geographic feature: welcome boost to “swarm intelligence”
I was gratified to see Peter Miller’s feature on “swarm intelligence” in the current National Geographic, because it’s mass media coverage such as this (or books such as Wisdom of Crowds) that moves the theory from the realm of entomology to a practical means to encourage — and benefit — from collaboration in human society.
Among the key points he made that relate directly to my networked homeland security theory:
- it’s the collective action that’s important, not individuals’ abilities
as Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon says, “Ants aren’t smart. Ant colonies are” — exhibiting collective behavior that’s far more complex and sophisticated than the sum of their very simple parts.
- no one’s in charge
“That’s how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do … the bottom line, says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Oxford and Princeton Universities, is that no leadership is required. ‘Even complex behavior may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions,’ he says. “ - we — you and I — gotta step up
“Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.”
The article cites a wide variety of companies, from Southwest Airlines to Air Liquide that have streamlined their operations and reduced operating costs through algorithms that mimic ants’ foraging, (this kind of work, BTW, is a specialty of my collaborator Eric Bonabeau’s company, Icosystem. The article quotes Eric about swarm intelligence’s potential applicability to a wide range of human issues — and how little we’ve tapped the potential: “‘We don’t even know yet what else we can do with this. [warm intelligence]. … We’re not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can’t control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that’s very exciting.’” — you got it, Eric!) as well as the Army’s Centibot robotics program.
Miller concludes, “ If you’re looking for a role model in a world of complexity, you could do worse than to imitate a bee.” I’ve always been an ant man myself, but you get the point, don’t you?
Technorati tags:
homeland security War on Terror antiterrorism smart mobs swarm intelligence emergent behavior networked homeland security collaboration Icosystem Eric Bonabeau
