Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems / Edition 1

by Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo, Guy Theraulaz

Overview

Social insects—ants, bees, termites, and wasps—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. A fascinating subject, social insects are also a powerful metaphor for artificial intelligence, and the problems they solve—finding food, dividing labor among nestmates, building nests, responding to external challenges—have important counterparts in engineering and computer science.

This book provides a detailed look at models of social insect behavior and how to apply these models in the design of complex systems. The book shows how these models replace an emphasis on control, preprogramming, and centralization with designs featuring autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning. These designs are proving immensely flexible and robust, able to adapt quickly to changing environments and to continue functioning even when individual elements fail. In particular, these designs are an exciting approach to the tremendous growth of complexity in software and information. Swarm Intelligence draws on up-to-date research from biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, operations research, and computer graphics, and each chapter is organized around a particular biological example, which is then used to develop an algorithm, a multiagent system, or a group of robots. The book will be an invaluable resource for a broad range of disciplines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195131598
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/23/1999
Series:	Santa Fe Institute Studies on the Sciences of Complexity
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.28(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Santa Fe Institute

Research Associate with the Belgian Fonds National pour la Recherche Scientifique

French Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

Table of Contents

Preface1. Introduction2. Ant Foraging Behavior, Combinatorial Optimization, and Routing in Communications Network3. Division of Labor and Task Allocation4. Cemetery Organization, Brood Sorting, Data Analysis, and Graph Partitioning5. Self-Organization and Templates: Application to Data Analysis and Graph Partitioning6. Nest Building and Self-Assembling7. Cooperative Transport by Insects and Robots8. EpilogueBibliographyIndex