Smart Swarm

Some quotes from Perter Miller’s Smart Swarm. A very interesting book, and highly recommended:

…a large number of individuals without supervision can accomplish difficult tasks by following simple rules when they meet and interact.- p.262

…groups can reliably make good decisions in a timely fashion as long as they seek a diversity of knowledge and perspectives, encourage a friendly competition of ideas, and narrow their choices through a mechanism like voting. – p. 263

…even small contributions to a shared project can create something useful and impressive when large numbers of individuals build upon one another’s efforts. – p.263

…without direction from a single leader, members of a group can coordinate their behavior with amazing precision simply by paying close attention to their nearest neighbors […] but it can also tempt us to follow the crowd uncritically… – pp.263-4

To vastly oversimplify our dilemma, we’re torn between belonging to a community and maximizing our personal welfare. – p.265

And some outlines from the text:

Swarms in nature have taught us two lessons:

By working together in smart groups, we too can lessen the impact of uncertainty, complexity, and change. – p.267

As members of smart groups, we don’t have to surrender our individuality. In nature, good decision-making comes from competition as much as compromise, from disagreement as much as from consensus. – p.268

Natural mechanisms of interactions between individuals (p.267):

Reliance on local knowledge (maintain diversity of information)
Simple rules of thumb (minimise computational needs)
Repeated interactions between group members (amplify faint but important signals and speed up decision-making)
Use of quorum thresholds (improve accuracy of of decisions)
A healthy dose of randomness in individual behavior (prevent getting stuck in problem-solving ruts).