Austin,
the capital city of Texas, is much touted as the “the live music capital of the
world”. But what really amazed me on a summer trip there is harmony of a
different kind. Imagine 1.5 million bats emerging from under a bridge at dusk within a half
an hour window, on their way for dinner with 30,000 pounds of insects on the
menu - a spectacle that attracts 100,000 every year. When Austin’s Congress
Avenue Bridge was renovated in 1980, nobody suspected that the crevices in the
structure would be ideal large-scale accommodation for a colony of pregnant Mexican
Free-tailed Bats on a collective maternity stopover, giving birth before
heading back together to colder Mexico.
Just like birds, bees, fishes and ants, bats have
developed sophisticated social networks and communication systems that can put
Facebook to shame, at least in terms of purposeful networking. What enables such shared spirit, common
purpose and distributed problem-solving capabilities? Birds and bees probably
know little about combinatorial optimization, but the effectiveness of their self-organization
intrigues many. Such aggregate behavior of large populations, without any
centralized control, is studied in a field known as “swarm intelligence”, where
apparently very simple rules of action lead to emerging coherent functional
patterns and global intelligence. For instance, ants, upon finding food leave a
trail of a chemical (called pheromone) that others can follow. So a random food
hunt is turned into a complex organization for targeted prospecting, where
promising pathways are reinforced and lesser ones die out (when the pheromone gradually
evaporates). The end result is amazingly effective and intelligent, and
scientists are replicating such models to solve all kinds of problems – like reducing
airline delays by improving taxiway traffic at busy airports, where a “colony”
of pilots follow simple rules to efficiently produce globally effective queuing
solutions. Bird flocking, foraging by honey bees, land animal herding, fish
schooling, nest building by termites or wasps, and even bacterial growth are
examples of swarm intelligence in nature.
Principles of swarm theory are being increasingly applied to various engineering, design and business problems. The team strategy of ants to detect food (and threats as well) is being used to protect computer networks from malicious programs that can delete data or steal passwords. Thousands of “digital ants” are made to wander through the cyber-world looking for threats, and leaving digital trails. This approach leads to an army of ants that converge to the spot you never suspected, just like in remote areas of your kitchen with food leftovers.
Swarm intelligence models learnt from our six-legged or flying
bio-mates are also being used for routing information in telecommunication
networks, ticketing and checking-in at airports, simulating crowd behavior, coordinating
complex interactions among many robots in minesweeping or search and rescue
missions. Computer graphic designers are crafting amazing displays based on the
shapes generated by self-organized flocks of starlings or schools of fish.
Scientists are also investigating swarm intelligence tactics to control a group
of robots to explore remote Mars terrains. In medical nanotechnology, it now
seems plausible that a collection of very small nano-robots can cooperate like
animals do, to locate and destroy cancer tumors in the body.
Individual insects or animals react to their local environment,
without any grasp of the global problem. Nonetheless they effectively influence
each other to produce intelligent overall behavior. The
sum is indeed greater than the parts. In human market economies, simple rules
of self-centered actions of individuals help propel a complex, intelligent and collectively
beneficial system, with the blessing of a wise invisible hand. A key insight is that the absence of a centralized
control means no centralized point of failure, and therefore a higher chance of
success. Given the failures and dissatisfaction with so many of the centralized
governance in human societies, maybe a swarm model is what we need – arguably the
design that nature intended. Anyway, it
is increasingly evident that the birds and the bees, long invoked to show
children the ways of the world, have wisdom in store for adults too.
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