Serendipity: The Buzz About Swarm Theory
Small life forms teach big lessons in using collective intelligence to guide sustainable systems.
You’ve probably never spotted an ant lieutenant — the ant in charge of assigning duties and confirming that each task is completed. Ant colonies are leaderless, yet they typically make the right decisions. Biologists studying group behavior in animals have been startled to learn how much is applicable to humans. Their results can help us design sustainable systems, from running smooth meetings to unkinking Highway 101.
“One key to an ant colony,” Miller writes, “is that no one’s in charge. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.”
I like the idea of learning from nature, not only because it seems natural. In this new field, advances are evident in a plethora of technologies and fields. Insects, for example, can teach us about choices and traffic.
Biologists studied colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera) to learn how they choose a new home. They set out a half-dozen bee boxes, each with a known design flaw, plus one they believed met all of the requirements of a perfect bee hollow. Bees immediately scattered to explore the region and soon returned to the swarm, extolling the virtues of their discovery in song and dance. Well, maybe just dance. Then more scouts buzzed away to check out the data, presumably flying to the location most appealing based on the competing dances. The box designed to meet all of the bee requirements emerged as the wings-down winner.
Swarm behavior is characterized by decentralized control, response to local cues and simple rules of thumb. But can humans operate in a system without hierarchy?
“We’re not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can’t control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere,” said Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist at the University of Cambridge. “But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that’s very exciting.”
Southwest Airlines tested an ant-based model to improve tarmac traffic flow in Phoenix. It was faced with a basic operations research problem: 200 takeoffs and landings per day, two runways, three concourses and a goal of minimizing process time. Scientists designed an algorithm mimicking ants’ decision-making. The algorithm was simple: When deciding which gate to use, avoid the slow gates and return to the fast ones. The Santa Barbara Airport most likely could benefit from such a simulation.
Far from being ruled by chaos, these studies point to a collective intelligence driven by the individual responsibility exercised by its members. Some of these issues may emerge from an upcoming open class at Westmont called ”Flying Intelligence” being co-taught by Iba and his colleague, Marilyn McIntyre. The weeklong class, open to the public, includes a consideration of how people “read” the behaviors of life forms and art forms, and what that reading entails.
Students may just learn to look up to ants.
Karen Telleen-Lawton’s column is a mélange of observations supporting sustainability. Graze her writing and excerpts from Canyon Voices: the Nature of Rattlesnake Canyon at www.CanyonVoices.com.
» wrote on 05/29/08 @ 07:24 PM
Of course we collectively create institutions to pass and enforce laws for the regulation of individual behavior, and at the same time on the individual level make many of our day to day choices based on fairly simple “algorithmic” type decision making models. But the disconcerting subtext here is that society will be more “sustainable” if everyone collectively decides on and adopts and abides by the same decision-making criteria. The insect behavior examined is a social model of efficient conformity. “Give me efficiency or give me death!” just doesn’t have much of a ring to it. It is no model for innovation and provides essentially no incentive for individual achievement.
» wrote on 05/29/08 @ 07:58 AM
In an effort to clarify elements of this article that may rub some folks the wrong way, I hope it is apparent that we regularly “give up...free choice to follow a set of subjugating rules” whenever we drive a car (think “stoplights"), shop at the grocery store (think “lines at checkout"), or any number of other daily activities that are subject to rules that allow for an orderly functioning of society. Without these rules, anarchy would ensue. If I felt like driving through a red light in an exercise of my “free choice,” sooner or later, the results would be deadly. Or, alternatively, another system of rules would emerge, which is the exact point of Swarm Theory. I would recommend Johnson’s book, “Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software” or Barabasi’s book, “Linked: The new science of networks” if anyone is interested in learning more about the fascinating area of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).
» wrote on 05/28/08 @ 07:23 PM
A solution where individuals give up free thought and free choice to follow a set of subjugating rules is no solution at all, at least for a society whose members have less than six legs.