Written by Simon Garnier on March 2, 2008 – 8:23 pm
Scientific American has just published a special edition about robotics. It gathers many interesting articles about most of the current hot topics in robotics. Among them is a new version of “Swarm Smarts“, an article written by Eric Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz in 2000 for the same journal, where the approach of swarm intelligence is [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on February 13, 2008 – 3:56 pm
I recently read the following post by Zyxo on Mixotricha blog about complexity which illustrates one fundamental flaw in many studies of swarm intelligence: the assumption that the subunits in a swarm-intelligent system are necessarily dumb.
Interesting post from Ryan Hollingsworth as guest blogger for LeRon Shults about swarm intelligence. At the end he poses the [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on February 8, 2008 – 3:11 pm
I recently read a paper by Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman called “Novelty and collective attention“. This paper speak about how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. In particular, they analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of the interactive website digg.com. This website allows its users [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on February 6, 2008 – 12:02 pm
We as human beings are essentially visual animals. Representations are therefore of major importance for our understanding of the world around. This is especially true when we are dealing with complex systems where a large number of agents are continually interacting together. Visualization tools are required to help us give a sense to the apparent [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on January 4, 2008 – 11:41 pm
Hereafter is a link toward the video of Guy Theraulaz’s talk at the 2007 European Conference on Complex Systems. This talk is directly related to the article “The biological principles of swarm intelligence” we wrote together for the first issue of the Swarm Intelligence journal.
The Biological Principles of Swarm Intelligence
ECCS07 talk - Guy Theraulaz
For [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on December 5, 2007 – 6:01 pm
I recently decided to start an online bibliography database about collective behaviours. I am nearly certain that such an online database does not exist but should be useful to many people. The goal of this database is to make an inventory of all kind of publications related to collective behaviours in general, in both natural [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on October 27, 2007 – 3:05 pm
I recently found this website about collective behaviours in animal societies: www.collective-behavior.com. This website is designed around the book ‘Collective Animal Behaviour’ by Professor David Sumpter. The book will be finished during 2008 and published by Princeton University Press. This website provides draft versions of some of the chapters which will appear in the book, [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on August 20, 2007 – 7:24 pm
A special issue of Swarm Intelligence will be soon dedicated to Swarm Robotics. The editors are Erol Sahin and Alan Winfield, and the submission deadline is December 1, 2007. All the necessary information can be found at http://swarm-robotics.org/swrm/ .
Written by Simon Garnier on August 20, 2007 – 1:55 pm
Do you need a funny break between two boring talks at the last conference about swarm intelligence? Try "The Boids!", by Campbell & Merrill. To my knowledge, it is the first swarm intelligent comic strip ever written.
The Boids is the story of Flock Unit 2A-6, known to his pals as “Boid.” Boid is a [...]
Written by Simon Garnier on August 20, 2007 – 1:26 pm
My internet peregrinations drive me to this surprising page on Apple website. Apple is associated with the Evolutionary & Swarm Design Group at the University of Calgary (director Christian Jacob) to "apply the latest developments in swarm theory and evolutionary computation to a broad array of real-world phenomena". Perhaps should I ask Apple for a [...]