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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.
They cite a practical application of Swarm Theory as optimizing the business operation of a gas producer. They say this technique was inspired by how ants learn to forage for food, but this technique is a standard (and pretty obvious) solution to numerical optimization. So while the idea is interesting and can definitely be applied to networks of robots, it is a retroactive explanation of something that has already been developed (for marketing purposes, I'm sure).
chillax137
It's not mentioned, but it seems an obvious sort of question to ask given the content they've got: is there anything to "real" (by which I mean, individual) intelligence other than swarm behavior at the neuron level? In fact, is the entire biology of any given animal (ourselves, obviously, included) anything more than swarm behavior at the cellular level? Or, if we accept the idea that cells are just a reproductive mechanism for DNA, is it just swarm behavior at the molecular level?
Which would have a fascination all its own, since I don't think anyone's ever argued that DNA has anything we'd call intelligence. If all of life arises out of swarm behavior at the molecular level, we've managed to take intelligence completely out of the equation.
Which, in turn, just makes this another facet of the belief that the entire universe is an emergent phenomenon of a vast set of simple items following simple rules.
The truly intriguing observation (from my point of view, anyway), though, is that this emergent phenomenon contains examples of exactly the same mechanism at so many levels of complexity. It wouldn't necessarily have to be true that simple interactions at the fundamental particle level would give rise to higher-order behaviors that can be macroscopically described as simple interactions at that higher level. It's the fractal nature of the mechanism that is most intriguing, I think.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Agreed. And TFA itself is a little confused itself about the differences between the "Hive Mind" and swarming/schooling/flocking/herding behavior; which are really two completely different things.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
A Fire Upon The Deep novelizes the potential of sentient consisting of several physically individual members who do not have sentience as individuals, although this runs tangential to the plot.
Everyone with some algorithm design experience knows that you can get complex behaviors (often known as bugs) with a set of simple rules. Unfortunately, the wide range of problems to which we apply computers, generally by business demands, require rigorous certainty. We want to know exactly how many beans were shipped, not an estimate. Individual instances of an algorithm cooperating via simple rules inherently introduces uncertainty or reflects a very inefficient approach to solving a certain problem. This goes against the grain of classical training and thinking about computing.
Collective intelligence may also depend on all individuals having some level of variation, yet cooperating through simple rules. In this case, the emphasis goes to the protocol and not the algorithm. I believe that further research will find that some level of individual variation will become recognized as an essential element of perceived group intelligence, important to breaking recursive feedback loops and deadlocks. Unfortunately, attempts to emulate this in computing will run into the issue that group perceived intelligence may not be determined so much by design, but by fitness for a particular, narrow purpose, with truly remarkable group intelligence requiring many iterations exposed to actual operating conditions or good simulations thereof.
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you're mixing up communism and socialism. Communism, in the Marxist sense, has never been reached. The planned economy is a stage in Marxes theories on the way to communism, which is a utopia where everyone works for themselves, taking only what they need, giving what they can or think the group needs. Communes often come close to communism (and the words being almost the same is no coincidence).
The idea that there is a net benefit for a group from the collective selfish actions of individual actors is closer to what this article is describing as swarm theory.
Actually, the article doesn't say anything about the collective selfish actions of anybody. In fact, in almost all the examples given, the actors are behaving unselfishly. The ants don't know exactly why they should go out and follow a given trail, the bees don't really understand why they should choose one nest over another - even a protester wasn't aware of how their movement to a particular street would help overwhelm police.
There is no apparent benefit to any of the individuals in doing any of that. In fact, I daresay that a "free market" ant wouldn't follow any trails, wouldn't bother to smell any pheromones, it would just chill in the nest and eat what the other ants brought, expending the minimum effort for the maximum gain. And free market ants certainly wouldn't automatically tell everyone else where the food-jackpot was that one of them had personally worked to find.
So I agree that swarms are unlike authoritarian communism. They're unlike authoritarian anything, simply because swarms are anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchial - any structure involving a boss or a "chain of command" cannot function as a swarm. However, they're definitely not behaving the way a free market does, either. The key thing to understand is that the actors in a swarm are voluntarily doing non-selfish things because those things, when done by a lot of actors all together, will result in a net benefit for all the actors.
So, swarms definitely have a sort of collectivist, socialist tinge to them, because they require all the actors to base their actions on what will benefit and sustain the group - not them personally. However, because of the lack of authority, swarms are sort of a more pure form of socialism that is inherently resistant to the corruption and oppression by things like governments or leaders.
I think swarms are one of the most important trends in society, because they're the one thing that terrifies all people in power - capitalist CEOs and communist dictators alike.