Slashdot Mirror
Swarm Intelligence
elamdaly writes "Eric Bonabeau, Ph.D, a keynote speaker at the upcoming Emerging Technology conference, is a leader in the field of swarm intelligence and has focused on applying these concepts to real world problems such as factory scheduling and telecommunications routing. The concept itself is borrowed from nature; in this interview, that's where the conversation begins, with ants and other social insects. Dr. Bonabeau takes us from his childhood nightmares of carnivorous wasps to applying the theories of swarm intelligence to solving real problems in the business world."
We posted first!
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
But, there certainly isn't any here!
We've found it works best when we all rush the intern at the same time. Down 'e goes! Ha! Whose nephew are you NOW?
I recommend this book on Swarm Intelligence. It was written by experts in several different fields and is quite good.
From Amazon
An article for businessmen?
/. paid to plug this webzine?
How much was
This has no merit and nothing to say?
Once again, WTF?
all sugar-processing plants saw a huge increase in network traffic
Fleur de Sel
It's already being used in financial models. Explains everything from the dot-bomb crash to "tomorrow will, 2 out of 3 times, be like today"
Guess he won't be giving the RIAA a call anytime soon, eh?
The following posts clearly demonstrate the swarm's LACK of intelligence.
I wouldn't bet my business on the swarm.
Can't be far off.
Reading the article, I was just thinking how deadly a worm that was based on how a colony of wasps or ants would behave. Considering wasps and ant's don't have extremely complex brains, all someone with malicious intent would do is to give it a basic behavior and how to interact with other worms it might encounter and how to share information with one another. I have a feeling I'm completely out of date here, I'm not too up to date with the worms of today and even yesterday, and perhaps something like this has been set loose and/or killed.
There is no doubt that swarming technologies have been AWESOME for p2p applications.... downloading a file from more than one source speeds up napstering (like the verbing there?).
Shouldn't Michael Crichton have given this address? His novel, Prey, did a better job explaining this.
ProfQuotes
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise."
;-)
Considering how that's been around for thousands of years, interesting that no one's really done much about it until now. Maybe no one thinks they're a sluggard.
...
by Tony White can be found here.
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDus t/ u st/
http://www-bsac.eecs.berkeley.edu/~warneke/SmartD
Or, for a lighter read, try Prey by Michael Crichton. Excellent novel, though not quite as good as some of his previous work (Timeline, anyone?).
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
I'm sorry, there are too many flaws in this system for it to be practical. DOS attacks could be carried out in numerous ways. One way to grind all traffic to a halt would be to throw in a stray peanut butter sandwich packet.
I can see it now: a potential attacker who only needs a can of insect repellent..
Ladies, form queue here -->
Could someone point me to a good auto-scheduling application, that would make schedule according to dependencies and rules (mostly the fact that someone can't be at two places at the same time) for lets say, a school ? I can't believe it hasn't been done yet...
It works for Slashdot. Watch me get modded down!
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Hey Boss, we're not gonna make the deadline.
...I guess it would be a good motivational tool...
Boss: How about if I give you five thousand deadlines!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
If this guy were a trekkie, he'd know the endpoint of his research leads to the Borg...
Reminds me of this post Once again Rudy Rucker proves prophetic. The protagonist of the story is a programmer named Jerzy Rugby who uses artifical life (ants!) to build and optimize robot source code.
Just like the ant analogy mentioned in the article, the ants were used for their collective ability to help build the smartest AI source. Again I recommend the read.
For example, unleashing your army of carnivorous wasps to eat key performers at the competition.
Manager 1: "Where's Engineer Bob? He's supposed to finish project X-12 this week."
Manager 2: "He got eaten by carnivorous wasps."
Manager 1: "Wow. Sucks to have been him. Hey, that leaves us free for golf after lunch."
Manager 2: "Oh, right on, old boy!"
--- Ban humanity.
As described in this post currently buried on page 2 (hint hint moderators)
is this gonna be like the collective mind? but borg has a queen... Im currently reading Prey, by Michael Chricton; this news arrived at a good timing...
... are a swarm of minute particles of fecal matter.
They make any place smell like an MIT lecture hall.
The Swarm Development Group
SFI
Complex Systems
Amazing magic tricks
Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. I read it a few years ago, it is really inspirational.
We'll have cyber-ants eating our web cookies.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
But you failed it.
In other words, imagine if slashdotters actually READ the site before posting!
This does not look much different from genetic algorithms, that have been used for years to solve optimization problems: Intro to GA
Note the words: "computationally expensive".
A.
I got to thinking about this real quick and, as i'm too lazy to read the actual interview and it's probably addressed there, what are the effects of diminishing returns?
The 'mythical man month' basically says that one programmer (or other worker) can produce more in one month than two workers each working half a month... who can do more than three workers all in 1/3 of a month. And further that just throwing more people at a problem doesn't really do much past a certain point. For some problems, it might be the case that one guy working for a month can do more than ten guys working for the same period of time.
How does swarm behavior overcome all of this great stuff?
I presume that it must be an essential part of the deal that the problem must be something very trivial for there to be great effects by swarming.
For a good picture of how this would apply to the business world, check out this article from Business 2.0 about agent-based supply chain solutions. Pretty interesting stuff if you've got a large, sophisticated network to manage.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Now I know where Michael Crichton got the idea for 'Prey'. In that book, Crichton writes about a scientist that applied swarm intelligence in his work. Unfortunately, the bad guys applied his theories to nanites that like to feast on human flesh.
Having written the above, I still can't believe I read the whole book.
Emergence is cool, finding it in a 3000 year old book is priceless.
-Peace
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
hmm, not the most inspired thing I've ever heard but still interesting. quite parallel to the "network mesh" idea that hangs aroung /. for quite some time, a community of individuals with no leaders, no master servers, no big mama.
when we are smart enough to know what we want, we are smart enough to not need leaders to show us what that is.
1) go to google
2) type "google" into the search box
3) press the "i'm feeling lucky" button
4) PROFIT!!!
Links to this Bible famous verse that I had on my personal Web site (in The Reading Room):
1. Ants in Plan.
2. To Be Like The Ant.
3. How Strong Is the Ant: "Ants have many lessons to teach us. The power of unity and cooperation, the importance of the wise use of resources, the value of keeping busy and not wasting time, and the incredible wisdom built into the design of all living things. 'Go to the ant, thou sluggard; condider her ways, and be wise:' (Proverb 6:6)."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
A quote from the story:
DS: That story brings two things to mind. First, why don't we use these ant pheromones to direct ants away from our kitchens instead of poisoning the environment (and our children) with toxic chemicals?
EB: Good question. My guess is that they'll come back.
The fact that this was, I think, an unintentional burn just makes it better.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
There was a programming class at MIT that used the swarm concept on AI for a game. The game was an RTS where each unit had it's own AI and could communicate to other units but not easily (short range, takes time). Each unit generally had a simple program, but your team had a fairly complex overall strategy. My team (Master Control Program) did pretty well in last years contest.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
Looking at the intelligence of some business people !!!
I remember with retrospective anguish my holidays in the south of France, when picnics turned into nightmarish fights against carnivorous wasps...
Ah, yes, those horrible days and nights writing poetry as child in the South of France. Sometimes Reginald wouldn't bring my water chilled, so I had to berate him. In the summer we made meat helmets! ~Peace out, Airrage.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I read this book.
In the end, the people turned out to be covered by the swarms!
Don't trust him!
(pretend there's something witty here)
With the Spider-Wasps? :)
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
I've found the best way to deal with a Zerg swarm is to build lots of proton cannons and make sure you have good air defences before they start sending in those crab guys. I haven't developed a good stratagy for the terrans though, they usually fall to the swarm.
Follow someone who looks like he knows where he's going.. You may not end up where you want to be, but chances are you'll find your way somewhere interesting.
Me and my friend actually did that, arriving in Vancouver at 4:00AM. We followed a few random people to strange places (We stopped following the armed car when we figured that they might be getting a bit nervous). Befere long, we ended up in front of a Dennys. We stopped for breakfast/supper and then called Peter for directions to his place.
Tried it a few times since then -- as long as you've got a little time to spare, you can find some very interesting things about the place you're in.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
The arising of complex behaviour from simple agents is also known as Emergence. It is a subject I have recently begun to study and it deals with the amazing structures, methods of information storage etc which arise in complex networks. Very little of this emerging behaviour can actually be predicted if one is to only examine the behaviour of the individual agents. The reason I bring this up is to plug a book (a popular pastime here apparently!). Its called 'Emergence' by Steven Johnson and it is this book which introduced me to Slashdot. Did you know that slashdot's rating system allows it to act as a forum and knowledge repository on a large scale, without suffering from the needless wastes of spam which ruin other similar forums. Its a difficult topic to explain but the author devotes an entire chapter to Slashdot and how its design encorporates emergant factors to allow its success. Interesting stuff, and a fascinating book too! Will
What is open source after all? Don't think the system would quite work a business model, but for like minded volunteers it's already up & running.
I rarely read nonfiction; I read mostly nonfiction. For those that do like to read nonfiction though I recommend "Prey" by Michael Crichton. The book happened to be laying around at my job and so I read it (I have a lot of reading time where I work). It is very good and is based around swarm intelligence, computing, and many new upcoming technologies with an emphasis on the consequences the technology may bring.
Question everything.
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people on large groups"
YarrRrr
nuff said
It's all part of the field of bio-informatics, biology-inspired metaphors for solving problems with computers. If anyone's interested in Genetic Algorithms, I strongly recommend Melanie Mitchell's book (not a referal link). It covers the area in an interesting way and provides lots of pointers for further reading.
Suck figs.
Rodney Brooks proposed something similar for space exploration in 1989. Did anyone else see the Errol Morris documentary that features him? His paper is here: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System
0xfeedface
and so the borg is born
ad 2003
resistance is futile
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This happens all the time in the business world. Any attempt at a new thought, in particular meetings, will be met with vile and a scorn, right before they they beat you to death with the conference room phone. It is a sort of a mindless action that is drilled into people in corporations in much the same manner as wasps or bees. Attack anything that threatens the stability of the nest!
So I guess this just proves, "The Future is already here!"
childhood nightmares of carnivorous wasps
what? microsoft's marketing dept?
sorry, it had to be done. in all seriousnes, no matter how valid a point he may have, i'm not sure i want to trust someone who develops telecom theory out of a childhood nightmare...maybe i'm just odd...
-frozen
I'm not always the brightest pixel in the stream
People interested in intelligence and life as an emergent and evolving quality would probably also enjoy "Creation: Life and how to make it", "The Tipping Point", and "Figment of Reality". They should all be reasonably easy to find.
I think there is plenty of room for new inventions from those who understand both software technology and the emergence of intelligence from social models.
Read up! Enjoy!
Cheers, Jouni
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
Eric Bonabeau is Chairman and Chief Scientific Officer at Icosystem, a company that uses swarm-based modeling to build models of markets and business problems. They do some cool stuff; I've talked to them about some of their projects.
Check out their case studies (really just simplified examples of what they've done).
/Oh, if only I had done nothing simply out of laziness!
From years of research and observation, my best scientific theory is that the average IQ of a group drops 10 points for each additional person added to the group.
If you've got to plug a related novel, at least plug a better one.
Try The Hacker and the Ants, by Rudy Rucker. Written back in the 80s iirc, and still far more interesting 'cause the author actually has a clue what he's talking about.
" applying the theories of swarm intelligence to solving real problems in the business world."
Is it just me, or did the whole subject get incredibly borint in that last sentence? There was things like "swarm intelligence" and "carnivorous wasps", which sound all cool, but then you start talking about businessa.. zZz..
Include something like "using this for world domination" or "free pr0n", and I would absolutely read the article!
In making a cd, it seems most of the money goes to keep critics quiet or push a character type. It's true that sometime the money simply goes to pay people to scream while jumping up and down (yes, I've met a few) by using slightly more complex versions of Asch's Conformity Study. P2P can put an end to the weasles the wiggled their way into an extortion type business model.
that Slashdot itself is a good example that swarm intelligence doesn't work.
Hopefully this 3000+ year old prior art will prevent somebody from taking out a stupid patent!
I would define a cell as the basic life form, and anything greater than a cell is not a single 'creature'. Humans, like the ant colony, are a giant collaborative effort.
Of course, there's something in our brain that gives us the sense of I, the individual, irreducible person. It's an illusion. But it helps us survive, I guess (By us I mean "we cells," not you).
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
If only there had been a swarm of child-care workers, teachers, politicians, party leaders, judges and news reporters to fix that .... ....oh the humanity
It's already being used in financial models. Explains everything from the dot-bomb crash to "tomorrow will, 2 out of 3 times, be like today"
Not just that:
Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" was exactly swarm intelligence emergent behavior: A large number of humans applying simple rules of self-interest organize large movements of capital goods into the production of more-desirable products by sending each other simple price signals.
Simiar comparisons might be made to the success of voluntary vs. totalitarian governmental systems, the free software movement, the explosion of network applications, and a number of other "less control gives better results" situations.
I think Dr. Bonabeau might find it useful, when trying to sell his ideas to administrators, to bring up these comparisons. Successful administrators and decision-makers already have a solid understanding of these concepts, so speaking in these terms should be immediately accessable.
Imagine going to a non-pointy-haired business exec or a conservative politician: Will he more quickly grasp an argument couched in terms of ants, or in terms of free markets?
Heck: Even central-control systems (such as bureaucracies and military staff command) work by giving only broad directions and letting the subordinates use their own intelligence (and local incentive structures) to work out the details. A fundamental lesson in officer training works as follows:
- Instructor gives the new second louies a platoon, a sergant, and a tent. Tells 'em to try to direct the men to pitch the tent.
- Each second louie tries to micro-manage the tent-pitching, with disastrous results.
- Then the instructor shows 'em how it's done:
"Sergant! (points to spot on ground) I want that tent pitched HERE!"
Then he goes away and lets the sergant handle it.
(Of course the sergant, in turn, passes the order on with only slight elaboration, maybe assigning labor division or providing feedback if somebody's slacking or screwing up. But mostly he lets the men, in turn, apply their own brains and brawn to doing their own pieces of the tent-raising.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
and why declare war with when we can invent a bunch of new permanent laws
and let's hear it for cfr
...in Soviet Russian Beowolf clusters. I'll shut up now.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
4. Ants in space "Yet if not for the Librarian Ants, all of us might still be living on Earth today..."
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Anybody read SLANT, by Greg Bear? Evil computer in it example of swarm AI. Great book involving MGN (Military Grade Nano) and blowing things up.
Swarm intelligence (or any other kind)? Not in the business world.
Email: slashdot3@FreeMars.org (Address will be abandoned when it gets spam.)
The world - the web - it's all Maya - the more one struggles with it, the tighter it grips. Great, isn't it!
... the mythical man moth can handle working in swarms and get more work out.
Dr. Bonabeau takes us from his childhood nightmares of carnivorous wasps to applying the theories of swarm intelligence to solving real problems in the business world."
Reminds me of Freud's practice of diagnosing the entire world as being posessed with the illness of which he suffered.
Perhaps Dr. Bonabeau's phobia will yield better results than the psychological fields have. One can hope.....
There were many examples of swarm intelligence in the book, Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. Since it's been several months since I've picked it up, pardon any inconsistencies.
The "toner wars" were about the release of billions of self-powered nanobots, and the breath-choking dust composed of useless black nanojunk that remained when all those nanoscopic power cells gave out.
Physical security systems were made up of larger microbots that could cooperate to generate an ad-hoc physical barrier to human-scale intruders.
Today's TCP and tomorrow's untrackable but reliable data transactions were explained as a mesh of dumb routers that continued to attempt knowledgeless hand-offs to other routers.
The Drummers were a sex-driven subculture who regularly and ritually exchange body fluids in the primal way, and thus exchange viral portions of larger computations to complete a batch process. One character discovers that mass computing facility and uses it to "crack" and backtrack such an encrypted routeless transaction.
But about ants... the protagonist little girl's AI-driven "book" develops a fable character to illustrate the concept of swarm intelligence to the girl. I liked how the Queen of the Ants explained that ants have two numbers: some and none. Some is anything above around a million, and anything less than that is functionally equivalent to none.
[
This technique sounds suspiciously like genetic algorithms.
Put out a bunch of genes, see which ones survive. The ones that don't die, the ones that do are re-integrated.
Put out a bunch of ants, see which bring back food. The ones that do, copy, the ones that don't forget about.
Or how about neural networks. Put out a bunch of connections. The ones that work, strengthen, the ones that don't weaken.
Is it just me or is it all the same general idea.
Anyone else notice that animals that swarm aren't generally very intelligent, but by dint of numbers they fall over something to eat, kill, etc.?
A man is foolish, but the species is wise.
Isn't this the way open source software is (ideally) built? Thousands of people, each with their own special abilities, each optimizing the solution little by little ? "Pheromones" marking the stable, useful modifications to the original "path" ?
The Dirty Work Group
So is this how the Borg are going to come to be?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Who thinks that Bonabeau has to be an alias?
Even GNU geeks without the socialogical prowess of ESR must have investigated the etymology of the word Bonobo at some point. That an individual (whose name is a homynym of the name of the family of simians thought to be most closely related to humans because of their social habits and also happens to be the name of one of the most recognized GNU projects) is discussing animal-kingdom sociological theory applied to business process and application cycles is uhh... fishy in a very non-darwinian kind of way.
Wait -- his first name is Eric... maybe he is ESR!!!
Nah, I decided to really RTFA. Just coincidence. But it does make you wonder about monkeys and typewriters, although it appears they're more likely to produce "Origin of Species" than "King Lear"
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
At a given level of integration, One can produce smaller simpler chips with higher yields per wafer but at the cost of greater pcb complexity in the final product (more squiggly traces to interconnect more of the simpler chips). This corresponds to swarm intelligence as a result of more numerous but simpler organisms. There is a magic minimum cost that dictates optimum chip size. Currently, the chip designers and builders can only shrink transistors. Once they begin to shrink the other basic 2 units of electromechanical devices (the sensor and the actuator) each chip will indeed have 'swarming ability'. Imagine swarm complexity doubling every year. This is equivalent to speciation on an annual basis. Even the most rapidly growing biological organism evolves at a glacial pace compared to this. Because it is so fast, such a population has therefore probably already evolved somewhere else in the galaxy. And because the basic unit is so small, Interplanetary travel would be cheap and easy. If such a swarm ever brushed by the earth, Would they be interested in us?
Blood Music is another.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
So Stephen Wolfram was right all along!
Where you see swarming ants the anteater sees only conversation.
GEB if you were wondering.
Sure some of the demos are excellent. The problem is these implementations require just as much (at least) work as engineered solutions; it's just a different point of effort! Basically you have to discover how to make the self organising system organise itself to solve your problem, otherwise - it'll just sit and look at you. The trouble with this is that you don't know if it will work, until it works - a big risk for a commercial development project.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
I reckon that human conciousness is similar to a swarm, or the flocking behavior of birds.
An emergent behaviour of seemingly simple interactions within the brain.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Crichton's new book _Prey_ has a lot of swam intelligence stuff in it, and as usual he did a kick-ass job. Excellent read. Available in eBook version as well.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
.. why do the Borg always lose in the end?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
...hear the sound of a new buzzword coming up
i am reminded of the differences between the u.s. & nazi cmd&control mentalities: even an american private would take the initiative to accomplish an objective when cut off from c&c, but the krauts would just sit there waiting 4 orders...
humans need 2 invent god:
"Human beings suffer from a "centralized mindset"; they would like to assign the coordination of activities to a central command."
The Jewish book 'Proverbs' in the Old Testament may not in its current form be thousands of years old, but large chunks taken diretly from an Egyptian proverbs book are thousands of years old.
By the way, as a completed book, Job is considered the oldest book in the Bible.
The oldest story in the Bible may be the Flood narrative which some say goes back to the flooding of the Black Sea around 5600 B.C.
Since you've brought up economic theory, you might also have mentioned that Keynes
Keynes had some significant insights - many of which can be expressed as "if you screw around with the negative feedback loop you can make the output jump wildly". (Unfortunately, only temporarily, while it both makes the system unstable, unresponsive to real signals, and susceptable to long-term saturation in the direction opposite that you tried to drive it.)
The long run iddn't matter to him - he's the one who said "In the long run we're all dead." Perhaps appropriate for someone (like Keynes) who neigher had nor desired children. But leaving the later generations holding the bag is not my preferred economic policy - especially when I, and you, are the later generations. B-)
I prefer the Chicago School. Their models seem to work a lot better than those of the Keynesians. They take into account decision-making with less than perfect information (due to the cost of information, the time cost of processing it, errors, and the cost of correcting errors). This seems especially appropriate for swarm modeling. And their bias is toward spreading the wealth by making so much more of it (through technological improvement and exponential growth) that necessities and the fancy toys get cheap - even if it means more toys in the hands of nerds like us who invent or make them (or Bill, who DOES satisfy a lot of peoples' wants even if non-ideally B-) ) than in the hands of those with the fewest.
[Keynes] showed that the end result of swarm behaviour can be distinctly sub-optimal [...] The general point is that while the swarm will do surprising things given the limitations of their interactions, what they do could often be improved upon.
No argument there. The trick is to set up the rules for interaction so the individual biases of the swarm members (which are mostly hard-wired and not subject to gross adjustment, no matter how hard socialists try) drive the swarm to prosperity.
it's quite possible (indeed normal) for the economy to reach equilibrium without full employment.
"Full employment" is optimal? Without euthenizing the unemployable and untrainable? No, thanks. Body-beautiful utopias are right out for me - especially since I'm no Aryian Superman, while my wife has significant medical problems.
I'll settle for a significant fraction living lives of leisure on previous earnings, temporarily unemployed while switching jobs or hunting (but not starving and homeless meanwhile), charity due to truly incurable issues, or incarcerated for chosing to steal other people's stuff when they could have taken charity.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wrong scale. Not finger, but cell.
Each cell does its own thing.
Watch a film of a white blood cell sometime. They crawl all about the body. Even out of it.
So, you could also describe the swarm-like behavior of a large group of people clicking on the same link at the same time having the complex effect of bringing a webserver to its knees! I wonder if there's a word for that...
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
The direct impact of Swarm Intelligence could be a set of routines in software which correct themselves . There can exist (say) n functions which talk among themselves and, if there exists an error they try to correct themselves. Its like the ants which try to find the shortest path. Also the mindset mentioned by the prof does exist. The only way one can get over it would be by using more proof of concepts.