Group decision making in honey bee swarms (2006)

Wow. This is quite significant for problems in comp sci we have around group decision making. They have a representative democracy with high degrees of disputation (argument) occurring at different levels. Seems this is highly optimal, having evolved over millenia. Bees are cool.

Strong parallels with ant-foraging behaviour, which should surprise no one. My PhD thesis was basically on these similarities, how a swarm can detect quorum and the functionally identical computational algorithm Stochastic Diffusion Search.

Don't be scared off by the name, you can implement it in about the time it takes to explain the name. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18668000

I misread it as "Google investing in honey bee swarms" and I thought "nice, finally big tech does something for mother nature other than rape and plunder it". Yes I need glasses.