Swarm intelligence. From natural to artificial systems. (English) Zbl 1003.68123

Bonabeau, Eric; Dorigo, Marco; Theraulaz, Guy

Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xii, 307 p. (1999).

Publisher’s description: Social insects such as ants, bus termites and warps, can be viewed as powerful problem-solving systems with sophisticated collective intelligence. Composed of simple interacting agents, this intelligence lies in the networks of interactions among individuals and between individuals and the environment. Social insects are also a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence. The problems they solve – for instance, finding food, dividing labor among nestmates, building nests, and responding to external challenges – have important counterparts in engineering and computer science.
This book provides a detailed look at models of social insect behaviour and how these can be applied in the design of complex systems. It draws upon a complementary blend of biology and computer science, including artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, information display, and computer graphics. The book should appeal to a broadly interdisciplinary audience of modellers, engineers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists, as well as some biologists and ecologists.

MSC:

68T01	General topics in artificial intelligence
68T05	Learning and adaptive systems in artificial intelligence
92D50	Animal behavior
68T40	Artificial intelligence for robotics
92D40	Ecology
92C20	Neural biology
93A30	Mathematical modelling of systems (MSC2010)
93C85	Automated systems (robots, etc.) in control theory

Keywords:

self-organization; artificial problem-solving systems; decentralized problem-solving; decentralized control; collective patterns; individual algorithm; ant-based routing; telecommunication networks; collective intelligence; models of social insect behaviour; computer graphics; robotics