Quotes and Ideas from The Smart Swarm

I picked up a few new books from the MIT Press bookstore and will be sharing my thoughts and impressions of them as I finish them.

First in the queue this weekend was The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done.

Thanks to the subtitle, you’ve got a good grasp of the book’s premise. The author, Peter Miller, is senior editor of National Geographic, and wrote the book very much like a solid long read from the publication. The only thing missing was the vivid photography.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and how Peter weaved together various research findings from the study of ants, bees, starlings, and fish. As I read the book, it triggered insights into the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street movements, while also making me realize what’s been driving behaviors I’ve seen come from people using online and mobile technologies. Anyone wanting to improve what they’re doing to mobilize people will benefit from these insights, too.

Here is a collection of notes I took while reading this 269-page book:

Pg. 10
Self-organization: biology term for phenomena with no master plan and is the first principle of the Smart Swarm.

Notable characteristics: decentralized control, distributed problem solving, and multiple interactions between individuals.

“No one ant understands its own decisions,” Gordon say, ” But each ant’s decision is linked to another ant’s decision and the whole colony changes.”

Pg. 24
Greedy function: decision-making rule that produces best results in shortest time period.

Pheromone function: decision-making rule that follows the strongest collective signal.

Pg. 29
Emergence is the process of forming a master strategy as a result of individual moves. It’s a phenomena of much coming from little. The strategy emerges from interactions with others.

Pg. 31
Tension between minimizing uncertainty and experimenting to keep up with change. The amazing thing to me is how, every way you look at it, the ant’s system is so messy, and yet somehow it works.

Pg. 39
Diversity of Knowledge is the second principle of a Smart Swarm. This includes a broad sampling of options and friendly competition of ideas. Vigor of the bees dancing (length and repetition of the dance) demonstrated their belief in propose location of the new hive.

Pg. 41
Decay rate – the rate of loss for support and abandonment of the idea.

Quorom for the new hive location was just 15 bees out of the 150 that scouted and danced. 97% of the bees slept and rested while the scouts sorted out the decision.

Pg. 43
Smart Swarms seek diversity of knowledge, engage in friendly competition of ideas, and use effective mechanisms to make choices.

Pg. 120-121
Indirect Collaboration is the third principle of the Smart Swarm.

Stigmergy – the stimulation workers feel by the performance they have achieved.

Pg. 133
Stigmergy – communicating and collaborating indirectly by modifying the environment

Pg. 138
Stigmergy – contributions from one individual changes the project by stimulating contributions by others.

Pg. 162
Adaptive mimicking is the fourth principle of Smart Swarms. This includes coordination, communication, and copying.

Summary of the Main Idea
Four Principles of the Smart Swarm:

1. Self-organizations
2. Diversity of Knowledge
3. Indirect Collaboration
4. Adaptive mimicking

Have you read the book? What thoughts and ideas did you gather from it?