Swarm Theory

A fascinating article on the power and efficency of decentralized intelligence with some practical applications for business, organizations, engineering, and political movements:

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.

Simply fascinating!

Some questions this raises -- what other applications are there for these insights? Swarm theory seems to give a powerful explanation for why freedom is so good at generating positive economic results. What else can this describe? Does it help explain the rise of Protestantism though decentralization of religious authority? What application does it have for analyzing the court system of the US? There seems to be a strong parallel between judicial decisions among the various levels of courts in the US and the decision making of bees:

In one test they put out five nest boxes, four that weren't quite big enough and one that was just about perfect. Scout bees soon appeared at all five. When they returned to the swarm, each performed a waggle dance urging other scouts to go have a look. (These dances include a code giving directions to a box's location.) The strength of each dance reflected the scout's enthusiasm for the site. After a while, dozens of scouts were dancing their little feet off, some for one site, some for another, and a small cloud of bees was buzzing around each box.

The decisive moment didn't take place in the main cluster of bees, but out at the boxes, where scouts were building up. As soon as the number of scouts visible near the entrance to a box reached about 15—a threshold confirmed by other experiments—the bees at that box sensed that a quorum had been reached, and they returned to the swarm with the news.

"It was a race," Seeley says. "Which site was going to build up 15 bees first?"

Scouts from the chosen box then spread through the swarm, signaling that it was time to move. Once all the bees had warmed up, they lifted off for their new home, which, to no one's surprise, turned out to be the best of the five boxes.

The bees' rules for decision-making—seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices—so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.

Just as the decisions of bees coordinate around efficient outcomes, so too do the numerous decisions made by various court systems around the country tend towards economically efficient outcomes. This evolutionary, emergent nature is one of the beauties of a common law system and is very analogous to swarm behavior in nature.

Read the whole article! There are many ideas that could emerge from this.

See my previous post, Consider the Ant!, as well as my other posts on agent-based modeling for more on this.

(HT Russ Roberts)