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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The computer age's centralized mindset has successfully produced machines that have changed our lives. A central unit processes and dispatches information, while a memory stores it. Simple and powerful. But today's computer isn't the only possible tool for computing. Machines can process information in other ways. One way is "swarm intelligence." Forget centralization and control. Forget programming. Forget the concept of a big, omniscient computer. Think of a hive, or an anthill. Social insect colonies aren't centrally controlled; they're composed of thousands or even millions of insects with limited cognitive repertoires. Individually, one insect can't do much, but collectively, social insects can achieve great things-build a nest, forage for food, take care of the brood, allocate labor, and so on. The collective intelligence of social insects, swarm intelligence, offers a powerful new model for computing. At a time when the world grows so complex that no single human being can understand it, when information, and not the lack of it, threatens our lives, when users can no longer master bloated software, swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing computing systems. In swarms, autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centralization. Applications to manufacturing scheduling, supply chain optimization, routing and others will be presented.
Eric Bonabeau is the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation, a Cambridge, MA-based "idea incubator" that uses complexity science to invent new technologies. Prior to his current position, Dr. Bonabeau was the CEO of Eurobios, a joint venture with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young applying the science of complex adaptive systems to business issues. He has been a research engineer with France Telecom R&D, an R&D engineer with Cadence Design Systems, and the Interval Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of more than one hundred science articles and three books (Intelligence Collective, Hermhs, 1994; Swarm Intelligence in Natural and Artificial Systems, Oxford University Press, 1999; and Self-Organization in Biological Systems, Princeton University Press, 2001). Dr. Bonabeau is also co-editor-in-chief of Advances in Complex Systems and a member of the editorial and scientific committees of more than twenty-five international journals and conferences. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, France, holds a telecommunications engineering degree from Telecom Paris, a post-graduate degree in applied mathematics and a PhD in theoretical physics both from Paris X University.
