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Swarm Theory Makes National Geographic
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.
Aunt Hillary 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...")
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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.)
In this case we just need to be careful not to suppose that if intelligence might perhaps be well-described in terms of swarm-theory of neurons then intelligence is not "real".
(Incidently, there is a difference that might be relevant here between describing something and explaining it.)
My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.
Or communism...
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
The correct term is Dynamical Systems, 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.)
No, it isn't. In real communism there's not even more a need for a state, a government or a leader. In theory at least.
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 information, and without any kind of central authority. Each person follows simple rules based on his own local information and the result is an allocation similar to what perfect information of all participants would have suggested. Decision-making is purely distributed in a free market, and information travels by means of "price signals" to coordinate the activities of far-flung individuals who have never heard of each other. You can see this principle at work with regard to the extremely complicated interactions in the global economy. An example is the "ripple effect" of prices where you place a demand for something, which in turns affects the demand for what's necessary to manufacture that thing, which in turn affects the demand for something else, etc, until some shop in Taiwan manufacturing a part for a sub-sub-contractor in something seemingly unrelated shifts his production away from transistors because for some reason (in fact for millions of different reasons) the demand for that kind of transistor has gone down. The shop owner in Taiwan made the correct allocative decision that optimally satisfies the needs of an unbelievably complex interaction, but he didn't know why or how. All he must do is pay attention to local price changes--the price of this component has gone down, so produce less of it. The result of all this, even though it's difficult to believe at first, is that free prices produce the optimal allocation even though each individual participant was acting on limited information and was using only simple rules.
Von Hayek also made the additional claim that the price system itself was never devised by anyone, but was the product of an evolutionary development which nobody understood when it was occurring. Hayek speculated that the price system would never have been consciously devised, but resulted from people following "what worked" based on their own local information. People who followed the price system bred more quickly (in the malthusian sense--fewer of them died) and spread civilization. Of course on this point Hayek acknowledged that he was being very speculative.
The spontaneous order of the market was the basis for Hayek's claim that communism would quickly collapse--not because of a lack of incentives, but because of the need for conscious control. Conscious control was not a benefit (as claimed) but was actually a fatal flaw, because even the supremely intelligent leaders could never achieve the kind of coordination and distributed information that a market could easily achieve. As a result, Hayek believed that claims of capitalism being "anarchic" and "disorderly" were actually compliments to it, because only distributed, spontaneous order could ever hope to contend with the complexity of a modern economy.
Hayek immediately pointed out that the same principle was applicable to biology. He was then informed that a similar change was already underway in that field. He was told that ants and bees used something similar, etc.
Another example of "swarm theory" in economics is the efficient market hypothesis, which relates to stock markets, and which is mentioned frequently in the book about "the wisdom of crowds."
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, just citeseer for "swarm intelligence".
theefer