Understanding the mind by studying ant colonies

I'm still wondering what happened to the whole 'social' movement for web apps in the early 2000's.

Facebook and Twitter came along and suddenly people were only interested in whoring themselves (and buying iPhone apps) instead of inventing apps (and using them) to change the world with 'social' or truly democratic means.

Moral: People tend to only care about themselves ("look at all my followers!") Big, hard global/social problems can wait for 'the next generation'.

Swarm intelligence is a fascinating concept that has interesting possibilities in the computing world. Whether it be finding near optimal solutions to NP-Complete problems through the use of algorithms like Ant Colony Optimization or applications in robotics, such SI approaches to common problems will gain an increasingly amount of importance down the line.

As I'm entering my last year as an undergraduate in Computer Science, I'm thinking that my senior project may deal with utilizing swarm robots in some sort of pathfinding problem. Now, if only I could afford enough arduinos...

Similarly interesting research modeling bee colony nest choice through individual agents: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/bees_nesting_an.ht...

The paper is rather straight-forward for anyone here, so I'd recommend just reading it directly.

How does it work again (I remember reading up on ant behaviour)? An ant comes straight back on the same path, when it finds food. Since ants leave pheromone markers, this path is now stronger, so other ants know and will in turn follow. A simple algorithm leading to a higher aggregated outcome.

Emergence is my favorite science. It's infinitely applicable.

Also, this article is another reason why I love this magazine.

Very interesting study. It could also lead to interesting insights when it comes to swarm (or the more proper term, crowd) psychology in general. Or maybe we'll finally find the mechanism(s) by which we form/join mobs. This seems like something worthwhile.