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.

Comments

Nomenclature

[pubjames]

It seems to me that this whole field (what do I call it - complex systems? derived behaviour? emergent systems? swarm theory?) lacks a consistent language. It is a hugely important scientific field, but everyone calling it different names means it appears smaller than it really is!

Swarm Theory and Economics

[Attila Dimedici]

My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

[Attila Dimedici]

By that definition, there is no real difference between an ideal free market economy and communism. Except that in an ideal free market economy people have access to luxuries and in an ideal communist economy no one has any luxuries, since by definition a luxury is something you don't need. In an ideal free market economy, everyone's needs are met by the efficiencies of the economy. Of course, since this is not an ideal world, neither of these will ever happen. The question is which theory does a better job of meeting people's needs in the real world.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

[Elemenope]

No, in Communism there is access to luxuries, only they must be produced by the labor of the individual consuming them or appropriated by equal (i.e. no surplus value subtracted) labor from someone who can. Besides, it is narrow to assume that the economic definition of 'luxury' is equivalent to the practical definition of the same. Many here I'm sure can attest that access to sci-fi books and video games, while not strictly necessary for survival, are beneficial to their continued functioning as healthy individuals, and as such aren't really 'unnecessary'. There is such a thing as prioritized consumption.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

[tom_evil]

More like anarchism. Capitalism has corporate bosses, communism has party bosses.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all--at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

Re:Swarm Theory and Economics

[Liberaltarian]

The principles, if one must cast a political/economic philosophy over them, would most closely resemble anarchism. Representative democracy and the modern business both have leaders and led, the rule-makers and the rule-followers: a disturbing amount of our economy and polity is top-down (also never meaningfully accountable) and couldn't be further from swarm theory. If we want to see a more rhizomic society, we'll have to think a lot further outside the box, that's for sure.

The closest the article's author comes to political applications is the Seattle '99 protests. However such tactics and structural sentiments abound in anti-neoliberal movements, from the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil to the Zapatistas in southern Mexico.

I have a sneaking suspicion

[Colin Smith]

That human consciousness is a swarm of neuronal interactions.

Re:I have a sneaking suspicion

[WormholeFiend]

And the rest of the body is a swarm of cooperating cells.

Re:I have a sneaking suspicion

[beyondkaoru]

and a computer is a swarm of cooperating transistors.

Article Missed a Major Point

[CyberGarp]

It said that "Swarm Theory" was being applied to business operations. I call bullshit. A computer model was run at night that provides the orders to all the drivers each morning. This flies in the face of the premise of swarm theory. If each driver were given a simple set of rules to follow for driving then it would be a direct application of swarm theory to operations. However, it's not swarm theory applied to operations, because each driver gets an order from corporate each morning. No local decision are made. It's just another algorithmic approach to combinatorial optimization with centralized management, which till I see a Big O notation, and some papers, I withhold comment on the computer model.

Re:Alternatively

[MarcoG42]

So, now you have a group of people with high IQ's trying to convince one another that *their* idea on the best way rid the valley of Count Bludsuckingfiend, which leads to much chart-drawing and counter-pointing. All the while the good Count is systematically draining their daughters' circulatory systems.

Now, you've got the low IQ guys, whose first thought may be "Der...maybe we should just kill him." The other two guys, not having any better idea, happily go along with the first.

Re:Unmentioned in the article

[jc42]

This sort of reminds me of the the Chinese Room Argument. The gist is that a person is isolated in a room with a complex instruction manual, and that person receives cards with Chinese characters. Using the instruction manual, the person translates the characters into English. The argument is that the person in the room doesn't really understand Chinese. He's executing instructions that lead to a Chinese translation.

And just about anyone who knows more than one language understands the fallacy behind this scenario. For a lot of fun examples of the results, visit engrish.com and wander around a bit. You'll quickly find a lot of example of the results of word-by-word translation. In the case of east Asian writing, translating individual characters without understanding that there are multi-character words can lead to especially humorous results. But even some of the "correct" translations are hilarious. And sometimes, of course, you just can't tell what was meant unless you can read the original.

The reason that computerized translation has been "5 years away" for so many decades is that the job requires intelligence and understanding. Doing it mechanically as a text-substitution process simply doesn't work very well. But it's a good source of humor.

(Reports are that the Chinese government is preparing for their upcoming Olympics by replacing a lot of multilingual signs with better translations. This has led to complaints that they are taking a lot of the fun out of trying to find your way around in Beijing. ;-)

Re:Swarm Theory and Free Market Economics.

[xappax]

Actualy they are very much more like a free market.

Communism is a tightly hierarchical system in which all decisions are made at the top and everyone has to do what they are told by the chain of command.

I don't want to seem snotty or disrespectful, but please read what someone's written before disagreeing with them. You're right. As I wrote above, authoritarian systems - including communism - are not swarms, and in fact are usually set up to deliberately suppress swarm behavior (which undermine centralized power). So swarms are not a good example of communism.

I think, however, you've fallen into the classic trap of thinking that there are only two economic models: communism and free market capitalism. It reminds me of when I was a young kid and thought that if you weren't Christian, it meant you were Jewish :)

There are a ton of socio-economic models which critique and are sometimes opposed to free market capitalism - and only one of them is communism. The rest are things like participatory economics, anarchism, gift economies...I would say that swarms are more closely related to some of these models.

Human beings in a free market make decisions based on the information we get from our interactions with others in society

That's true, but irrelevant. All life forms make decisions based on the information they receive, that has nothing to do with swarms. The interesting thing about swarms is that when you get a bunch of actors together, and each one of them follows a pattern of behavior that has no benefit to the individual, you get an overall emergent result which benefits the whole group. Individual humans in a free market environment base their decisions on what will help their personal interests to the exclusion of anyone else's - that's the hallmark of the system.

Swarms are like a proof-of-concept that when people are able to stop being myopically selfish and participate in a collective "organ" that's larger than them, rewards return to them which couldn't have been anticipated with a free market perspective. In one way, this is a kind of creepy realization, since it suggests that the most efficient mode of socio-economic organization would be some kind of Borg-like hive-mind. Obviously, I don't think that'd be a good thing, but I do think there's room for individuals participating in collective swarms when it comes to important matters (like food,clothes,shelter), and going their own ways when it's not.