Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Swarm Theory


How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? For example, whereas one ant is incapable of complex thought, a colony of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) can solve some fairly elaborate problems.

I ran across an article on nationalgeographic.com talking about the swarm theory and how it can provide insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots. Though I'm not entirely interested in truck routing or military robots, it did raise some interesting questions that made me stop and...think.

If you are in a mood to reflect, take a moment and...click here