By: Gabrielle Branche
Synopsis:
This week’s readings serve to introduce us to swarm intelligence by commenting on swarm activity in nature. The first article ‘When Ants Get Together to Make a Decision’ discusses ants and how they choose new locations to move the colony. The second article, an extract form the book Swarm Intelligence provides the introduction for swarm intelligence and how it can be used in the field of architecture.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
Definitions:
I didn’t fully understand the concept of multi-agent models
Wikipedia definition: A multi-agent system (MAS or “self-organized system”) is a computerized system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can solve problems that are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or a monolithic system to solve. Intelligence may include methodic, functional, procedural approaches, algorithmic search or reinforcement learning.
Thoughts:
I found it interesting how the articles discuss how species such as birds and ants distribute a task among colony members. That way each individual organism has only simple decisions to make. This point was brought up in both articles and seemed to be the key to understanding swarm intelligence.
As with humans, these organisms can succumb to cognitive overload. However these animals have solved this issue by leaning more to collectivism. Just as there is no lead ant, there is no lead bird. They all depend on one another and are in-tune with only a few other individuals but when looked at holistically they all become interconnected allowing for collective behavior.