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."

Comments

Proverbs 6:6

[cybermace5]

"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. ;-)

Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

This certainly isn't the first attempt to apply these ideas to practical problems. Ian Clarke often describes swarm intelligence as one of the inspirations behind the Freenet design, for example in this article he says:

"My motivation from the technical side was, firstly, really, I was fascinated by the idea of complex systems, which are formed from simple individual entities all cooperating. An example would be an ant's nest, whereby all of these ants are following relatively simple rules, yet they all work together to make this effectively a kind of meta-organism, which is the ant's nest, which can feed itself and reproduce and defend itself. So I was fascinated by that idea, and I was very interested in trying to apply that to a computer system. And by combining [this idea with my idealogical motivations], I essentially came up with Freenet."

A business application

[TopShelf]

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.

class

[DonkeyJimmy]

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.

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control

[DrinkDr.Pepper]

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

Are we a swarm of cells?

[lawpoop]

I've always thought that the idea of multi-celluar organisms to be a misnomer - we are actually more of a tightly integrated colony of cells.

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).

Re:Dirk Gently Navigation

[SN74S181]

That technique works pretty well for eBay browsing. There are tools out there now that give you a GUI interface to enter eBay IDs. It presents a list of all items that person has bid on that are current. It has a 'favorites' feature so you can have 'favorite' people you track.

It finds the 'good' stuff, i.e. the things that anybody would actually bid on. By cultivating collections of people who buy the kinds of things I am interested in, I seldom anymore actually browse 'raw' ebay for items to buy.

Interestingly, when you pull up a query for an eBay account held by someone in Germany, eBay returns a message that they aren't allowed to gather and give out that information for German citizens.