
chapter
seven
The Particle Swarm
This chapter introduces the particle swarm
in its binary and real-numbered forms. The
book so far has been preparing a context, de-
scribing related paradigms in computer sci-
ence and social science, discussing culture
and norms and language and other scien-
tific and philosophical developments that, if
we have been successful, will make the parti-
cle swarm seem like an obvious thing to
propose.
The Adaptive Culture Model in the previ-
ous chapter hints at what can happen as a re-
sult of the simplest imaginable interactions
of the simplest imaginable agents—if these
can even be called “agents.” Given a large
space of possibilities, ...