CONCLUSION AND CURRENT RESEARCH

Bluetronix, an R&D company in Cleveland, Ohio, is using ant behaviour as a way to remodel military wireless communications. Bluetronix is working on mobile routers (tiny computer chips holding mathematical algorithms) using Swarm Intelligence for military ad-hoc communications networks. These networks cover everything from tanks and missiles and everything in-between. Bluetronix's vision is to connect these multiple "nodes" so information can be efficiently processed and prioritised, even those these networks contain hundreds upon thousands of nodes.

In the U.S., Southwest Airlines has tested an ant-based model to improve service at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. With about 200 aircraft a day taking off and landing on two runways and using gates at three concourses, the company wanted to make sure that each plane got in and out as quickly as possible, even if it arrived early or late. The planes are like ants searching for the best gate. But rather than leaving virtual pheromones along the way, each aircraft remembers the faster gates and forgets the slower ones. After many simulations, using real data to vary arrival and departure times, each plane learned how to avoid an intolerable wait on the tarmac. Southwest was so pleased with the outcome, it may use a similar model to study the ticket counter area.

Marco Dorigo's group in Brussels is leading a European effort to create a "swarmanoid," a group of cooperating robots with complementary abilities: "foot-bots" to transport things on the ground, "hand-bots" to climb walls and manipulate objects, and "eye-bots" to fly around, providing information to the other units. The military is eager to acquire similar capabilities.

The biggest changes may be on the Internet. Consider the way Google uses group smarts to find what you're looking for. When you type in a search query, Google surveys billions.
of Web pages on its index servers to identify the most relevant ones. It then ranks them by the number of pages that link to them, counting links as votes (the most popular sites get weighted votes, since they're more likely to be reliable). The pages that receive the most votes are listed first in the search results. In this way, Google says, it "uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Wikipedia, a free collaborative encyclopedia, has also proved to be a big success, with millions of articles in more than 200 languages about everything under the sun, each of which can be contributed by anyone or edited by anyone. It's now possible for huge numbers of people to think together in ways we never imagined a few decades ago.