"when software systems become so intractable that they can no longer be controlled, swarm intelligence offers an alternative way of designing an ‘intelligent’ systems, in which autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning replace control, preprogramming, and centralization."
Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Jing Wang and Gerardo Beni in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.
"Swarm intelligence illustrates the complex and holistic way in which the world operates. Order is created from chaos; patterns are revealed; and systems are free to work out their errors and problems at their own level. What natural systems can teach humanity is truly amazing."
"Dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smart results."
"These nature-inspired algorithms gradually became more and more attractive and popular among the evolutionary computation research community, and together they were named swarm intelligence, which became the little brother of the major four evolutionary computation algorithms."