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

Insect swarms are smarter than insects

[idontgno]

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...")

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

[xappax]

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.

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:Nomenclature

[Gunark]

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.)

Re:Nomenclature

[AndersOSU]

When did dynamical become a cromulent word, and who decided that systems was too good a noun to be modified by an adjective like everyone else?