Facebook, Social Network?

싸이, 블로그, 카페 등을 보다 요즘 Facebook에 목적(?)이 있어 자주 들르다가 우연히 다음 그림을 보았다.

다분히 Facebook에 어울리는 그림인듯.

Bucket Brigade

From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_brigade

A Bucket brigade is a method for transporting items where items are passed from one stationary person to the next. More specifically, it refers to a method of firefighting before the advent of hand pumped fire engines, whereby firefighters would pass buckets to each other to extinguish a blaze. A famous example of this is the Union Fire Company.

The method is applicable only if the number of participants is sufficient compared to the distance to cross. This principle inspired various technical items, e.g. the bucket-brigade device.

The term "bucket brigade" is also used for a certain method of organizing manual order picking in distribution centers. Here customer orders to be processed are passed from one order picker to the next. When the last picker in line has finished picking an order he walks back and takes over the work of the next-to-last picker, who in his turn also walks back and so on, until the first man in line is reached, who then commences picking an entirely a new order.

Similar applications of the idea of bucket brigades also exist for production lines.

From "Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think About Business", Harvard Business Review May 2001

Like runners transferring a baton in a relay race, the ants pass food down a chain. But the ants are not stationay, and their transfer points are not fixed: an ant carries the food down the chain until it reaches the next ant, and after transferring the food, it turns back until it meets the previous ant in the chain to receive its next load. The only fixed location in this operation are the start (the food source) and the end (the nest).

The Genius of Swarms

From the national Geographic Magazine (July 2007), http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text

- A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarmmade up of a population intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots

- That's how swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant tells any other ant what to do. Some ant species may go about this with more sophistication than others. (Temnothorax albipennis, for example, can rate the quality of a potential nest site using multiple criteria.) But the bottom line, says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Oxford and Princeton Universities, is that no leadership is required. "Even complex behavior may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions," he says.

- In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent," says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. "Everything is very distributed: They don't all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they're all anonymous. I don't care who moves the chair, as long as somebody moves the chair. To go from one robot to multiple robots, you need all three of those ideas.

- That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or caribou, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

- We don't even know yet what else we can do with this," says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We're not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can't control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that's very exciting.

- Such thoughts underline an important truth about collective intelligence: Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. For those of us who sometimes wonder if it's really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don't see how.

- A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert. "None of us knows what society as a whole needs, but we look around and say, oh, they need someone to volunteer at school, or mow the church lawn, or help in a political campaign.

Swarm Intelligence

From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

Swarm intelligence (SI) is a type of artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. The expression was introduced byGerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

SI systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Natural examples of SI include ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding,bacterial growth, and fish schooling.

The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while 'swarm intelligence' refers to the more general set of algorithms. 'Swarm prediction' has been used in the context of forecasting problems.