Thursday, January 14, 2010

Swarm Intelligence

Group Thinker: Researcher Gets $2.9 Million to Further Develop Swarm Intelligence
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=swarm-intelligence-research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
Swarm intelligence (SI) describes the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.[1] 
SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. 
The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while 'swarm intelligence' refers to the more general set of algorithms. 'Swarm prediction' has been used in the context of forecasting problems.

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