In a blog at dummyspots.com a trader compared the swarm intelligence of e.g. ants to the behaviour of a swarm of traders.
Well, are traders “swarming” ?

Swarming, no, and intelligence ? Certainly not. Is the fact that stock prices move, in seemingly no logical direction, but in reaction to lots of peoples behaviour any sign of intelligence. I suppose no ! What is the benefit for the swarm ? There is benefit for some traders but there is an equal amount of loss for the others. Consequently the sum of the benefits is zero, nada, nil, noppes, nul de botten, rien du tout. With such intelligence no ant swarm would survive till the next day !
Moreover, traders are not swarming. They just act independently with no mutual interaction whatsoever. Well there is a sort of interaction, as they respond to the result of their trading behaviour on the stock price. And there is even another sort of interaction, namely the blog and spam messages about stocks that are going to boom and which you should certainly buy (not saying they bought them already and if you follow their advice they will be the first to sell and leave you with the losses). But that is not the behaviour of a swarm, but of a unconnected collection of selfish individual hunters who know there is a lot of competition.

Interesting post from Ryan Hollingsworth as guest blogger for LeRon Shults about swarm intelligence.
At the end he poses the above question : can people develop a swarm intelligence ? My answer is simple : NO !
In nature you have species who developed almost no intelligence whatsoever, like plants, amoebae, worms, muscles etc.
Other species developed a swarm intelligence, like ants, bees and termites.
And at last there are a whole lot of species with a non-neglectable intelligence like all mammals of which we think of ourselves as being the summit.
In order for humans to develop a swarm intelligence we should first lose our personal intelligence !
Remember, as I said in a previous post a swarm intelligence is far more intelligent than its constituents !
So, even if we developed a “human swarm intelligence” we would be too stupid to understand it, probably we would’t even notice it. Hence : who says it is’nt already there ?

According to the cynefin framework of Dave Snowden there exist 4 quadrants in in decision making : The known (=simple), the knowable(=complicated), the chaos(can’t do anything with it) and the emergent (complex).

Management loves the known and knowable, because it is there where they can “manage”, or in other words : say what and how others have to do their work.

However, with interprise 2.0, we are somewhat entering the emergent quadrant, where blogs, social networking, wiki’s etc. are a fertile soil for emergent patterns : alternative ways of doing things, of coworking, of forming project groups, of looking for help, of forming opinions, of directing towards decisions …

This means : managers will no longer have to decide what and how but they rather will have to create a good enterprise 2.0 environment to optimise this pattern emerging and to provide with the necessary means to capture the new patters and transform them somehow into the knowable/known direction.

Are they ready for such a paradigm shift ? Or do we have to wait until they all are retired and replaced by youngsters who have grown up in web 2.0 ?

Lately I have seen some erroneous explanations about swarm intelligence as for example here. The fact that people connect more on the internet and find easily all sorts of information, and hence become more “intelligent” (do they ?) is NO Swarm intelligence !

As I told in my previous post you can speak of swarm intelligence when a large number of relatively dumb items together form another type of composed item, the swarm, that is orders of magnitude more intelligent then the constituent parts. This is not the case in human beings connected through the internet !

Anyone familiar with advanced data mining techniques knows that the best models are obtained with techiques relying on splitting up the rules into many tiny pieces and afterwards look for the ‘emerging’ general rule by sort of averaging up all the little bits.

Examples of this superority are the contests won by Salford products, and currently the best results in the netflix contest. Another example can be found
here .

Among these ’swarm-like’ data mining technique : artificial neural nets, bagging, boosting, random forests, treenets, ant clustering (which is still experimental).

The pattern is still the same and somewhere the definition of swarm intelligence : the intelligence of the swarm is allways much higher than the intelligence of the items in the swarm.

The drawbacks of these complex techniques/models are firstly that they very much like a black box : it works, but you do not kwow why or how and secondly they consume a lot of computer resources.

A termite colony is intelligent enough to build a termite heap with a sophisticated airconditioning system. How is this possible ? No individual termite has not even a fraction of the intelligence necessary to accomplish this task.

This differs completely from for example the building of human towns. A lot of humans are sufficiently intelligent to build houses, bridges, streets.

Two persons know more than one person, but after a meeting or discussion both know the solution. There is but a small gap between te combined intelligence of the team and the individual intelligences of the team members.

In swarm intelligence the gap between the intelligence of the swarm and the constituting individuals is huge. Swarm intelligence is built out of dumb individuals responding to simple stimuli (e.g. pheromone levels).

Similarly, human intelligence is built from dumb brain cells responding to simple electrical stimuli. As such, the human brain is simply a swarm of brain cells, governed by very simple rules. The complexity stems from the connections between the different items of the swarm.

And this is apparently the only way intelligence can evolve from nothing to where we stand now.

Sometimes people think of web 2.0 as the breeding ground of a new intelligence. But still in web 2.0 the base deciders are humans who put and read the context.

For Artifical General Intelligence to emerge in the WWW we need to have dumb individuals but communicating and responding to stimuli, independently of human interaction : agents.

We can begin to talk about swarm intelligence when, as a response to a search term, thousends of agents begin to crawl the web, pass on info to eachother, filter the info and at the end provide us with an up-to-date sort of wickipedia-like summary of the requested topic, full of hyperlinks to the corresponding subtopics and details. And of course our previous requests are taken into account in the filtering and summarising process.

Since the wikipedia-like summary is only the output of the task, the info that was gathered is really stored in the agents swarm-intelligence under the form of simple rules and connections.

Which is the basic architecture of e.g. Novamente, a AGI-system under construction, but with all the possibilities to eventually become a real general intelligence, provided that it is allowed to grow big enough !

More and more blogs are about blogs or about bloggers. They are meta-blogs. And since this particular topic has this meta-blogging as subject, my blog is becoming a meta-meta-blog. I suppose this is the curse of the growing complexity of our society : emerging patterns. Patterns that grow on the underlying patterns. If something happens enough, people will write about it. If enoug people write about it, people will start to write about people who write about it etc …
A bit link the “GOD-” thing (and other alike concepts) that Douglas Hofstadter writes about : “God Over Djinn” in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The like, I suppose we will see alter ego’s in secondlife of ego’s in secondlife which at their turn are alter ego’s of people in the ‘normal life’.
Or why should we not create a facebook identity of our alter ego in secondlife?

Simply put, Mixotricha paradoxa is a complex thing, living in the intestines of termites It consists of one central cell, at the surface of which are other eleongated cells (of another species ?) who serve as flagellae that move Mixotricha around. The energy for each flagella comes from another cell (ot another species ?) underneath the flagella. In the interior of Mixotricha are yet other symbiotic cells (of another species ?) that perform other services for Mixotricha. (look here for a more scientific description).
And if you know that the colony of termites where Mixotricha lives in symbiosis posesses itself a sort of distributed intelligence, capable of building termite heaps with nearly constant temperature in the inside, thanks to a sophisticated air-conditioning system in their basement and that this intelligence is the result of thousends of non-intelligent agents (termites) communicating with feromones you can easily see the parallel between this and our ever complexer world.
Some people are already working on General Artificial Intelligence systems or think that our www will become itself a superintellingence. Check for example KurzweilAI.net