collective-intelligence

Social-network researcher Damon Centola challenges conventional assumptions about groupthink in an extended feature accompanying his new book, Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence.

An interdisciplinary symposium in Berlin will examine whether intelligence across radically different biological and artificial systems shares common organisational principles.

Bacterial collectives combine signalling, division of labour, environmental memory and local decision rules to achieve capabilities unavailable to individual cells.

Fire ants demonstrate several distinct ways that useful group-level behaviour can emerge from decentralised interactions. Research presented by collective-behaviour specialist Takao Sasaki includes workers dynamically self-assembling into pontoon bridges across water, rafts collectively selecting a swimming direction toward visual landmarks, and colonies depositing particles to construct paths across difficult substrates.

Simple information constraints can push biological collectives into self-reinforcing consensus that becomes detached from the outside world. Cornell researchers modelled agents such as animals in groups and cells in tissues, relaxing two unrealistic assumptions: that individuals know the evidence behind neighbours’ decisions and can attend to every neighbour simultaneously.

Just two of Sydney’s sulphur-crested cockatoos spread the word to all its mates (and theirs). An innovation discovered or introduced at a few nodes can diffuse through overlapping local relationships until it becomes population-level culture.

To operate autonomously, minimal robot swarms must make timely and reliable collective decisions despite noisy individual sensing and severe constraints on communication, computation, and memory.

Longhorn crazy ants cooperatively transporting awkward loads through mazes reveal a striking scaling effect: larger teams solve geometrically difficult problems much more effectively than smaller ones, even when the physical burden per ant is held constant.

A game theory model examines how collective intelligence can arise when each individual observes only one part of a complex environment.

Groups of American cockroaches can continue occupying a shelter after environmental cues change, even though isolated individuals quickly move elsewhere.

Greater Japanese horseshoe bats gradually converge on a shared echolocation frequency after unfamiliar individuals join a colony. Instead of separating their signals into individual channels, lower-frequency bats shift upward until colony members preserve a common clutter-free band in which echoes from fluttering prey remain detectable.

A honeybee-inspired study compares centrally directed organisations with decentralized groups whose members allocate work through local communication and differing behavioural thresholds.