
Army ants’ ‘living’ bridges suggest collective intelligence - ca98am79
http://www.kurzweilai.net/army-ants-living-bridges-suggest-collective-intelligence?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=45825ca8c5-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-45825ca8c5-281895037
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cortesi
The world of social insects is filled with ideas for tackling resource
tradeoffs of this sort. These are usually not signs of "collective
intelligence", as much as they are a manifestation of good algorithm design,
honed by aeons of evolution. In fact, we've successfully pinched and applied
quite a few social insect resource tradeoff algorithms in computer science.

It's a marvel that we can actually understand these biological algorithms well
enough to code them up. I wrote about an example of this in a blog post about
EO Wilson's "Superorganisms" a while ago
([http://corte.si/posts/books/superorganism/index.html](http://corte.si/posts/books/superorganism/index.html)).
Bee hives need to find the right balance between foragers out in the field,
and nectar producers staying home to work in the hive. They have an elegant
way of doing this, that works even when each bee can only rely on local
knowledge - that is, each bee makes a decision about what it can see around
itself, without any global integrative intelligence required. The algorithm
goes like this (see the blog post for more detail):

1 - Not enough nectar collectors in the field? If yes, and you also have
immediate knowledge of a producing flower patch, perform the waggle dance.

2 - Is the flower patch rich or the weather fine or the day early or does the
colony need substantially more food? Perform the dance with appropriately
greater vivacity and persistence.

3 - Not enough active foragers to send into the field? Perform the shaking
maneuver.

4 - Not enough nectar processors in the hive to handle the nectar inflow?
Perform the tremble dance.

A variant of this algorithm, directly inspired by bees, has been used to
balance resource allocation in server farms:

[http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~ctovey/publications/papers/bee....](http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~ctovey/publications/papers/bee.oct19.2004.masi2.pdf)

~~~
robotresearcher
> not signs of "collective intelligence", as much as they are a manifestation
> of good algorithm design, honed by aeons of evolution.

What is intelligence, if not that?

~~~
cortesi
Intelligence is the wrong word in this case. These are complicated emergent
behaviours that arise from extremely simple rules applied locally and
iteratively by each individual. There's no planning, forethought, or central
driving will at play here.

If this is intelligence, then so is bone growth, which follows a similarly
simple algorithm, is also honed by evolution, and is also inspiring real-world
applications, e.g.:

[http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArti...](http://www.engineering.com/DesignSoftware/DesignSoftwareArticles/ArticleID/10279/Conceptual-
Design-Inspired-by-Bone-Growth.aspx)

[https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671102/a-3-d-printed-house-
tha...](https://www.fastcodesign.com/1671102/a-3-d-printed-house-that-grows-
like-human-bone)

~~~
papaf
_There 's no planning, forethought, or central driving will at play here._

Do there have to be these things to show intelligence? Simple markets without
central planning absolutely destroy central planning in terms of efficiency:

[http://www.realussr.com/ussr/queues/](http://www.realussr.com/ussr/queues/)

Maybe the intelligent, planning, ants were overtaken by the unintelligent ants
:-)

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rdlecler1
An organism is already an example of collective intelligence. Gene Regulatory
Networks (GRNs) have the same mathematical description as a Artificial Neural
Network (ANN). Each cell carries the same network topology and each network is
linked to neighboring cells by cell-cell communication mechanism. The result
is a large meta-network that controls growth and development and physiology.
Some of these cells are neurons which are connected together in a new way and
form a higher order network. In turn, so-called supra organisms are just
neural networks which are connected to other neural networks through sensory
signaling mechanisms. It's neural networks all the way down.

------
api
I heard ants explained this way once: the little bug is not an ant. The colony
is one ant.

~~~
egypturnash
I like to abuse plurals to say this:

The little bug is one ant. The colony is not "some ants" or "a bunch of ants";
it is _an ants_.

Similarly, you have one bee, and then you have a bees. (Though there are also
species of solitary bees that don't form hives, so if you have a bunch of them
in the same area then you do indeed have some bees there rather than a bees.)

