Swarm Intelligence

chapter

six

Thinking Is Social

The linkage between social science simula-

tions and computer programs for engineer-

ing and other applications is not always obvi-

ous. Neural networks, simulated annealing,

cultural algorithms, ant colony optimization,

and evolutionary algorithms are several in-

stances where psychological, physical, and

biological theories have influenced the de-

velopment of computational methods for

problem solving.

This chapter takes a simulation from the

social sciences and shows how it can be

modified slightly to perform combinatorial

optimization. The adaptive culture model is

extremely straightforward and easy to un-

derstand; further,