Swarm Intelligence: Part I

NYTimes had a great article today about swarm behavior, how complex behavior and decision-making can arise through interactions between simple individual actors. The article doesn't go into a lot of detail, but it's a good introduction to the topic.

By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.

Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.