Swarm Intelligence

behaviors are exactly what they have been programmed to be, and the

cause of the surprise is anthrocentrism, not emergence. Further, individ-

uals in a swarm are usually relatively homogeneous, while “society of

mind” or subsumption modules are assigned to specialized tasks. One

ant is the same as the next; one bee does pretty much the same thing as

the next bee. Grasping is very different from looking, which is different

from rolling.

Rodney Brooks has expressed the opinion that robots will continue to

get smaller and smaller; indeed the simplicity of the subsumption archi-

tecture enables such a miniaturization. For instance, he says, imagine a

colony ...