] For instance, a colony of ants can collectively find out
] where the nearest and richest food source is located,
] without any individual ant knowing it. In experiments, a
] food source is separated from the nest by a bridge with
] two branches, one of which is longer. The shorter branch
] is most likely to be selected by the colony. This is
] because the ants lay and follow chemical trails:
] individual ants lay a chemical substance, a pheromone,
] which attracts other ants. The first ants returning to
] the nest from the food source are those that take the
] shorter path twice (from the nest to the source and
] back). Nest mates are recruited toward the shorter
] branch, which is the first to be marked with pheromone.

Its common for different people to come to the same rough conclusions at the same time. This is largely due to shared circumstance and information sources. What is truly amazing to me, is at this point in time, we can see each other coming to these conclusions better then ever before, and feed off each other's ideas as we go along in a very effective mannor. This, if in no other way, is how Information Technology is really changing things.

] My experience trying to "sell" the concepts of swarm
] intelligence to the commercial world is that managers
] would rather live with a problem they can't solve than
] with a solution they don't fully understand or control.
] So the mindset is a big barrier to adoption.

A lot of whats going on these days in computing is related to these ideas. Of course, the difference between Ant and People is that an Ant will tell the colony if it finds food, whereas People will secure the "food" and charge access. The difference is that Ants don't compete with eachother for resources. They don't have to. Their resources are infinite. This, of course, is the reason these questions are so interesting in terms of information. Information isn't scarce.

] Eric Bonabeau, Ph.D, a keynote speaker at the upcoming
] Emerging Technology conference, is a leader in the field
] of swarm intelligence and has focused on applying these
] concepts to real world problems such as factory
] scheduling and telecommunications routing.

Perhaps there is a potential convergence between swarm intelligence and genetic programming. What if one could evolve the components of the swarm to improve the overall capabilities of the whole?