Swarm Intelligence: The Benefits of Swarms

It is a well-known fact that an individual ant is not very bright and almost blind, but ants in a colony, operating as a team, do remarkable things like effective foraging, optimal brood sorting, or impressive cemetery formation. Many other biological species, such as insects, fish, birds, can present similar intelligent collective behavior although they are composed of simple individuals. At the basis of the increased “intelligence” is the shared “information” discovered individually and communicated to the swarm by different mechanisms of social interaction. In this way, intelligent solutions to problems naturally emerge from the self-organization and communication of these simple individuals. It is really amazing that the seamless coordination of all individual activities does not seem to require ANY SUPERVISOR!1