Collective intelligence

Collective intelligence, also called group or swarm intelligence is an emergent phenomenon. Communication and specific actions of individuals can intelligent behavior of the relevant " superorganism ", that is, the social community, cause. To explain this phenomenon exist systems theory, sociological and philosophical, as well as pseudo-scientific approaches.

An early formulation of the concept of collective intelligence can be found in Aristotle's Summierungstheorie.

Systems theory

Francis Heylighen, cybernetician at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, looking at the Internet and its users as a superorganism: "A society can be viewed as a multicellular organism, with individuals in the role of the cells. The network of communication channels that connect the individuals playing the role of the nervous system for this superorganism ". The swarm is not replaced, the network here, but is only the base. This view is consistent with the observation of the Internet as information infrastructure. The meaning of the term, however, is shifting away from artificial intelligence towards a kind of aggregation of human intelligence.

Sociological Description

A certain sociological interpretation meant by collective intelligence collective, consensus-based decision-making. Collective intelligence is an old phenomenon, the advances in information and communication technologies pointing new and strengthened. The internet simplified as never before to coordinate decentralized scattered knowledge of the people and exploit their collective intelligence.

In this sense, Howard Rheingold formulated in his 2002 book " Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution": "The killer apps ' of tomorrow 's mobile infocom industry will not be hardware devices or software programs but social practices. " ( The killer applications of mobile IT industry of tomorrow will not be hardware or software, but social actions. )

The guiding principle of swarm intelligence is assumed the potential to transform society and markets. Serve as examples of this smart mobs such as the Critical Mass movement.

Scientific Description

A classic example is the ant colony. An individual ant has a very limited, but also very functional behavior and response repertoire. In the self-organizing interaction, however, result in behavior patterns, processes and results that can be called "intelligent" from a human perspective. Certain aspects of "intelligence" (better "functionality" ) of such an ant colony - for example, processes in search of food - can be captured in rules and simulated with computer programs.

The individuals state-forming insects act with limited independence, but are highly targeted in the performance of their duties. The totality of such insect societies is extremely powerful, which returns lead researcher on a highly developed form of self-organization. Data communication between ants use pheromones for example, the bee waggle dance. Without any form of centralized oversight the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

In a way, also a brain is the interaction of a super-organism of man for himself " dumb " individuals, namely the neurons. A neuron is almost nothing more accurate than an integrator with reaction threshold, a sigmoid response curve. Only the complex and specific rules governed the interaction of billions of neurons results in what we mean by intelligence.

Description in the computer science

Swarm intelligence (English swarm intelligence ), the research field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is based on agent technology is also called Distributed Artificial Intelligence ( DAI ). The area of ​​work tries to model complex networked software agent systems according to the model state-forming insects such as ants, bees and termites, and partly also flocks of birds. Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang had coined the term swarm intelligence in 1989 in the context of robotics research.

The VKI research assumes that cooperation artificial agents can simulate higher cognitive functions; Marvin Minsky describes this as The Society of Mind. An application example of this so-called ant algorithms presented Sunil Nakrani from Oxford University and Craig Tovey from the Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004, at a conference on mathematical models of social insects; they modeled the calculation of the optimal load distribution for a cluster of web servers on the behavior of bees collecting nectar.

For the communication between software agents that Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language ( KQML ) is often used.

1986 Craig Reynolds formed with the computer program Boids simulation of swarming from.

In addition to the research field of swarm intelligence VKI is also a blurred fashion buzzword as early as about 2000, the peer-to -peer ( P2P). While the latter took to replace the paradigm of client -server architecture through decentralized P2P architectures, swarm intelligence is now to replace hardware-based networks.

Researchers at Princeton University concerned under the direction of Roger Nelson since 1988 with the phenomenon of collective perception of people and have to stationed stations around the world. "Global Consciousness Project " collects the empirical data and compares it with the message able to detect whether an event even before the message has been distributed, causes neuronal reactions. To this end, significant, delivered albeit minimal empirical evidence.

Application Examples

In the economic

The collective intelligence can be used to support business decisions, for example in the form of crowdsourcing or Social Forecasting as a web2.0 tool. Management can then exploit by the crowdsourcing projections, analyzes and other information provided by the employee.

For example, the collective intelligence is being actively used in prediction markets to obtain sales forecasts and to estimate the potential of new product ideas. Company implentieren this process on the intranet, thus saving costs and thus increase the security as well as when it is used externally.

In the didactics

Groups of learners are redesigned so that the resources of the individual learner be further explored, as it is the case with the traditional frontal teaching. The brain is used as a model and the learners are defined as neurons. Based on intensive interactions of learners emerge collective thoughts. This principle is used in the method of teaching learning by teaching ( according to Martin) systematically.

The Internet

The use of brain structure as a model for organizations has a long tradition. With advent of the Internet were drawn analogies between the Internet and the brain from the beginning, with the interactions between users of the interactions between neurons or neuronal ensembles can be compared. After initial skepticism, the number grows to publications that consider the Internet as a metaphorical world brain. Even if the comparison has numerous weaknesses, then shows the very fruitful metaphor as a heuristic instrument.

Joint review of facts

Collective intelligence as a topic in the popular literature

• Stephen Baxter, The Order
• Michael Crichton, prey
• Andreas Eschbach, Black out, hide out, Time out (Out trilogy)
• Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud
• Stanisław Lem, The Invincible
• Frank Schätzing, The Swarm
• Daniel Suarez ( writer ), Kill Decision
• Star Trek ( the Borg )