

Swarm intelligence - RiderOfGiraffes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

======
x0ner
[http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Swarm-Understanding-Colonies-
Com...](http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Swarm-Understanding-Colonies-
Communicating/dp/1583333908)

Great book on animal/insect swarms and how we can learn from them.

~~~
mindcrime
There's also this[1] which is a great introduction to Swarm Intelligence and
it's relationship to Evolutionary Computing, Genetic Programming, Genetic
Algorithms, etc.

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Morgan-Kaufmann-
Evolution...](http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Morgan-Kaufmann-Evolutionary-
Computation/dp/1558605959/ref=pd_sim_b_2)

And anybody who's really into this stuff should probably poke around at:

<http://www.swarm.org/index.php/Main_Page>

and

<http://santafe.edu/>

as well.

------
speek
Computational Intelligence (Swarm Intelligence, genetic algorithms, wavelets,
emergence, etc) seems to be making a resurgence. This is good, there could be
a lot more research happening in these topics :-)

------
burgerbrain
That article has been there for years. Is there any particular reason why you
think its worth posting on HN now? There are thousands of really cool
wikipedia articles but HN will be a mess if people just start randomly linking
to them.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Yes. Recently there have been articles about "genetic" evolution of cars,
"genetic" evolution of robots, optimisation with intelligent water, and more.
People seem interested in the subject, so I thought I'd put in a link to an
article summarising some of the more interesting techniques, especially since
it, in turn, has links to other items on optimization.

In addition, I'm still making observations about what people on HN now want to
see. Although this item may yet be flagged to death, it's also getting a lot
of up-votes, showing that there's a segment of the current population that
finds this sort of thing useful or interesting. I find it rather depressing
that stuff I've written and recently submitted [1] has sunk entirely without
trace, and yet a hackneyed link like this is doing so well. Clearly I don't
know what HN wants. I continue to make observations to try to make more useful
contributions.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123469>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126890>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2127187>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130519>

~~~
burgerbrain
My theory is upvotes are all about the title. People vote things up on the
mainpage without looking at the actual article, or the comment section. "Swarm
Intelligence" gets voted up because hey, who doesn't like swarm intelligence?
If you had called it "Swarm Intelligence Wikipedia Article" I'm willing to
wager it would have received less upvotes.

EDIT: This is probably a theory that is somewhat open to testing. Hmm...

~~~
dhimes
I upvote first on comments. I often don't even read the linked articles, but I
never upvote without either reading comments (or submitting one, if I'm the
first) or reading the article.

------
mark_l_watson
One of my publishers Morgan Kaufmann sent me a free copy of "Swarm
Intelligence" (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Evolutionary Computation) about
ten years ago. A bit interesting but I didn't see any applicability to any
work I do for my customers so I didn't really get into it.

