Back to the swarm
Posted May 7th
Having considered the opportunity to expand on my Pirate Jacket idea from the sound module, I have deemed it not suitable and decided to pursue a slightly different take on my original idea of swarming using mobile phones. I present..
Swarm Sandbox
Having spent many months researching Swarm Intelligence, I have come up with a number of findings and conclusions that have contributed to my dissertation on the subject (download here). It is these findings and knowledge that I would like to explore further in this project.
Keywords
Emergent Behavior, De-centralized Organization, Swarm Intelligence, Mobile Experiences, Social Behavior, Swarm Art
Background
The key principle of any Swarm Intelligence based system is that a number of independent “agents” follow simple rules that dictate their actions. The interactions between these agents and their environment may individually be un-intelligent, however when a swarm of many “agents” follow these given rules the behavior that emerges from this is very interesting to study, and can provide a number of elegant solutions to current problems in computer science and other areas.
Bonabeau, Dorigo and Theraulazn (1999) describe Swarm Intelligence as “any attempt to design algorithms or distributed problem-solving devices inspired by the collective behavior of social insect colonies and other animal societies”. Meaning that everything we artificially create that is inspired by natural swarms is Swarm Intelligence. (Reynhart, 2009)
I have identified that a significant part of these systems that has vastly unknown levels of impact on the emergent properties of the entire swarm is the local ruleset that each “agent” follows. For example small changes in the local ruleset of each “agent” can greatly differ the emergent behaviour of the swarm. Many of these complex processes at work in a swarm system are still not fully understood, and my intention is to produce a platform that enables anyone to explore these processes without any specific hardware or training. In fact it is the goal of this project to situate this experiment of local processes within a swarm to an everyday social environment. The underlying technology that enables me to create this platform is bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, which I will cover in more technical detail at a later date.
