swarm intelligence favors NOVELTY

Bees fascinate me. I’d like to have my own bee farm, but alas condo living doesn’t allow for it.

Here’s a fascinating video about the bee waggle dance, in which forager bees tell their buddies back at the hive about EXACTLY where to find some great nectar.

I got the above from a very interesting article about Complexity and Swarm Intelligence, in which the author uses bee and ant behaviors to illustrate his thoughts. Bee behavior demonstrates systems, network theory, the power of working with a quorum, the significance of novelty within swarm intelligence, self-organization, and the process of group-decision making where there’s no leader to snuff out dissent.The article illustrates “how something approaching intelligence arises in a complex system comprising of non-intelligent individuals” and “how honeybees in a beehive, and ants in an ant colony, operate as a single, intelligent, super-organism.”

The 2 points in the article I found most fascinating are:

#13: The evolutionary (internal rules)
part of the behaviour of the bees can also be explained in terms of
emergent behaviour. The networked swarm is adaptable and resilient,
and it nurtures small failures so that large failures do not happen
frequently. This helps not only survival and propagation, but also
favours NOVELTY. The large number of combinations and permutations
possible among the interacting agents has the potential for new
possibilities. And if heritability is brought in, individual
behaviour and experimentation leads to PERPETUAL NOVELTY, the
hallmark of evolution.

#14: The beehive can teach us a thing
or two about decision making by groups of individuals, particularly
the compromise between good decisions and swift decisions. Swift
decisions may be necessary at times, even at the risk of some
mistakes.??

And then:

How to understand human intelligence as a kind of swarm intelligence. Human intelligence emerges from the interactions among neurons, in spite of the fact that any particular neuron is as dumb as can be.

Huh!