The universal instinct to swarm
Stumble It!By studying swarming behaviour in ants, locusts and crickets there is much we can learn about robot communications, how cancer tumours spread and even how our neurons swarm to produce thoughts.
A school of bigeye trevally in Malaysia. Picture Source: Peter Scoones/Getty Images
The New York Times has just run a major article in its Science section “From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm” which reports on the work of Dr Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford, on Swarm Intelligence.
The 3-page article, which includes some excellent graphics and diagrams, can be read in full here:
Swarm Intelligence is certainly becoming popular – this NYT piece follows on the heels of an major 22-page article in National Geographic In July 2007 - National Geographic features Swarm Intelligence.
Thanks again to Brian Cleland at InterTradeIreland for foraging out this one.
Tags: ants, robots, swarm, swarm intelligence
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Animal Instincts in the office
Just because we might have selfish genes it does not mean we have to behave selfishly; nature knows when to be nice as well as nasty and nepotism occurs in the biological world too with equal destructiveness as our world. This is according to Richard Conniff author of The Ape in the Corner Office and reviewed in the UK Guardian Newspaper (27 May).
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