Swarm Behavior - National Geographic Magazine - The Diigo Meta page

• 19 May 08
  

  bees nature

• 21 Aug 07
  

  ratbeard

  emergence nature science

  • As soon as the number of scouts visible near the entrance to a box reached about 15—a threshold confirmed by other experiments—the bees at that box sensed that a quorum had been reached, and they returned to the swarm with the news.
  • If one member of the group were to break down, others could take its place. And, most important, control of the group could be decentralized, not dependent on a leader.
• 06 Jul 07
  

  Alex Ko
  • The bees' rules for decision-making—seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices—so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.
  • if their members are diverse, independent minded, and use a mechanism such as voting, auctioning, or averaging to reach a collective decision.
  • Everything is very distributed: They don't all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they're all anonymous.

  1 more annotation...

• 03 Jul 07
  

  Dan McCrea

  bees cybernetics nature psychology scinece self-organized

  • The bees' rules for decision-making—seek a diversity of options, encourage a free competition among ideas, and use an effective mechanism to narrow choices—so impressed Seeley that he now uses them at Cornell as chairman of his department.
    
    "I've applied what I've learned from the bees to run faculty meetings," he says. To avoid going into a meeting with his mind made up, hearing only what he wants to hear, and pressuring people to conform, Seeley asks his group to identify all the possibilities, kick their ideas around for a while, then vote by secret ballot. "It's exactly what the swarm bees do, which gives a group time to let the best ideas emerge and win. People are usually quite amenable to that."
  • In fact, almost any group that follows the bees' rules will make itself smarter, says James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. "The analogy is really quite powerful. The bees are predicting which nest site will be best, and humans can do the same thing, even in the face of exceptionally complex decisions."

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