Swarm intelligence

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Swarm intelligence (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised, systems. The expression "swarm intelligence" was introduced by Beni & Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems (see also cellular automata, evolutionary computation).

SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents interacting locally with one another and with their environment. Although there is normally no centralised control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local interactions between such agents often lead to the emergence of global behaviour. Examples of systems like this can be found in nature, including ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacteria molding and fish schooling.

Two of the most successful swarm intelligence techniques currently in existence are Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). ACO is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm that can be used to find approximate solutions to difficult combinatorial optimization problems. In ACO artificial ants build solutions by moving on the problem graph and they, mimicking real ants, deposit artificial pheromone on the graph in such a way that future artificial ants can build better solutions. ACO has been successfully applied to an impressive number of optimization problems. PSO is a global minimisation technique for dealing with problems in which a best solution can be represented as a point or surface in an n-dimensional space. Hypotheses are plotted in this space and seeded with an initial velocity, as well as a communication channel between the particles. Particles then move through the solution space, and are evaluated according to some fitness criterion after each timestep. Over time, particles are accelerated towards those particles within their communication grouping which have better fitness values. The main advantage of such an approach over other global minimisation strategies such as simulated annealing is that the large number of members that make up the particle swarm make the technique impressively resilient to the problem of local minima.

Swarm robotics is the application of swarm intelligence principles to large numbers of cheap robots. A particularly interesting application of swarm robotics principles can be found in the SWARM-BOTS project.

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Applications of swarm technology

Swarm Intelligence-based techniques can be used in a number of applications. The U.S. military is investigating swarm techniques for controlling unmanned vehicles. NASA is investigating the use of swarm technology for planetary mapping. A 1992 paper by M. Anthony Lewis and George A. Bekey discusses the possibility of using swarm intelligence to control nanobots within the body for the purpose of killing cancer tumors. Swarm technology is particularly attractive because it is cheap, robust, and simple.

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References in popular culture

Swarm Intelligence-related concepts and references can be found throughout popular culture:

  • Prey, by Michael Crichton deals with the danger of intelligent nano-robots escaping from human control and becoming dangerous.
  • Wyrm, a novel by Mark Fabi deals with a virus developing emergent intelligence on the internet
  • Jason X, a movie in the Friday the 13th series, had a swarm of nanobots repair Jason's damaged body.
  • Hacker and the ants, a book by Rudy Rucker on AI ants within a virtual environment
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Researchers

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See also

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References

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External links

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Swarm simulation links

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