www7.nationalgeographic.com — A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.
Jul 2, 2007 View in Crawl 4
heysuburbiaJul 3, 2007
<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_%28novel%29">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_%28novel%29</a>Prey deals with the threat of intelligent nano-robots escaping from human control and becoming autonomous, self-replicating and dangerous. It loosely deals with the grey goo concept that has been widely explored in science fiction
thirdeyeopenJul 3, 2007
Or, if you want fiction, try Stephen Baxter's 'Destinys Children' series. About humans evolving over thousands of generations into a hive.
samkellettJul 3, 2007
Psychohistory anyone?"You can't predict what one person will do, but you can predict what millions will do"
slaveboy2203Jul 4, 2007
@jhaksThe point I got from the article is that complicated problems can be solved by relatively simple interactions between individuals that form a group. How the system arose is really irrelevant, what's relevant is that it works, works well, and is yet another case where we can learn from how things in nature work.It's easy to say that this system somehow evolved, but it doesn't make it true. Or even relevant to what we can learn from it.
okalexJul 4, 2007
Sort of. I believe Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" talks about it some, though not in detail and not explicitly related to computer science. It's been a while since I've read it, but I'm pretty sure that's where I remember reading about this sort of thing. Even though it only briefly covers the topic, you should read this book. It's one of my favorite books ever and covers ideas related to artificial intelligence in such a creative and interesting way that it really inspires you to think about how we are what we are. I haven't read his new one, "I am a Strange Loop" yet, but I think I'll get it soon. Anyone read it?
kingponeJul 12, 2007
In fashion indeed, proven by the last presidential election