Swarm Intelligence

Introduction

The problem with the story about the blind men and the elephant is that

it assumes they were also deaf. The famous tale, set in verse in the 19th

century by John Godfrey Saxe (1869/1936), describes the experiences of

six blind men who, converging upon an elephant, each come to believe

that the entire elephant resembles the particular part he has encountered

by chance:

The First approached the Elephant,

And happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side,

At once began to bawl:

“God bless me! but the Elephant

Is very like a wall!”

The second blind man, feeling a tusk, cries that the elephant is like a

spear, and so on. Of course the moral ...