Of Robots and Ants - A Brief
Interdisciplinary History of Swarm Intelligence
From
its inception, the field of swarm intelligence has drawn its research questions
and tools from a diversity of disciplines. For instance, chemistry and physics
provided biology with theoretical and analytical frameworks to study the
emergence of complex collective behaviors in living systems. In turn, biology
provided inspiration to engineering for algorithms to solve optimization
problems and for controllers to guide swarms of collaborating robots. Finally,
technological development in engineering created new tools to track and measure
collective behaviors in large groups, both in the lab and in the wild. During this
lecture, I will attempt to retrace the history of the field of swarm
intelligence. I will first cover its early developments that often happened in
parallel in the different disciplines mentioned above. I will then explain how
these initial efforts coalesced in the 1990s into a research field with a
coherent set of questions, goals, and methods across multiple disciplines.
Finally, I will discuss the past, present and possible future applications of
research in swarm intelligence, in particular in engineering and the social
sciences. By taking this historical approach, I aim to offer a brief but
integrative introduction to the breadth and diversity of the research and
development in swarm intelligence and provide the students with an
understanding of the progress of the field and the challenges that remain
ahead.