Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán

Swarm intelligence

Publications

Evolutionary theory has application reaching far and beyond the life sciences. Aldo Poiani from Monash University had the wonderful idea of making a book to discuss current and future applications of evolution to a wide range of fields of science and technology. And so, Pragmatic Evolution: Applications of Evolutionary Theory was born, with chapters from Douglas Futuyma, Michael Ruse, Randolph Nesse, and many more.

Along with Suzanne Sadedin, I was kindly invited to write a chapter for this book, now published by Cambridge University Press:

Harnessing the swarm: technological applications of collective intelligence

Abstract

One of the most influential concepts in artificial intelligence is the notion of the swarm. That is, intelligent adaptive behaviour can arise in large groups of interacting agents, even when the individual agents have limited local information and use simple rules. Self-organisation provides a basic structure in such agent societies, while natural selection can drive the evolution of increasingly efficient and coordinated interactions through improved communication, information processing, and agent specialisation. Such collective intelligences have evolved in diverse biological contexts, ranging from foraging and home-building colonies of ants, termites and bees, to the coordinated movements of vertebrate flocks and schools, to the exquisitely tuned dynamical responses of immune and neural systems. Here, we discuss how these biological models contribute to emerging technologies in fields such as optimisation, robotics, image processing, self-repairing systems and automatic structure design.

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