Surely you use a navigation system. So then you are already relying on the performance of ants and swarm intelligence. Why? Because the current navigation systems are programmed with the so-called ant algorithm and this shows you the “best” way from A to B, just as ants have been doing for over 130 million years so successfully – effectively and efficiently – that by now the biomass of ants on this planet is greater than that of humans. ant algorithm and this shows you the “best” way from A to B, just as ants have been doing for over 130 million years so successfully – effectively and efficiently – that by now the biomass of ants on this planet is greater than that of humans. Incredible, isn’t it?
Swarm intelligence is the key
One could now wrongly deduce that the ant is a particularly intelligent creature. But that’s not the case at all. The single – isolated – ant has only a memory of a maximum of 10 seconds and a behavioral repertoire of about 25 variants. Today, this can actually be simulated almost on an equal footing by means of computers and robots, by the way, not only for the joy of playing but also for the purpose of application in logistics and supply chain. The intelligence of ants is based on a particularly interesting phenomenon. The so-called swarm intelligence. This means that the interaction of many individual ants, in a community with a high division of labor – ant state – leads to these remarkable achievements. Numerous experiments, including the two-bridge experiment, impressively show how this swarm works. Transferred to our entrepreneurial existence, few mechanisms of swarm intelligence – crowd intelligence – can thus be crystallized.
The four mechanisms of swarm intelligence
How can swarm intelligence be generated in ventures and supply chains (supply chains) potentially to the benefit of all stakeholders? Recent research in this area has discovered the following four Mechanisms of Swarm Intelligence and put them in a nutshell:
- Independence of individual employees in their decisions
- Diversity of individual employees in terms of talents, experience, knowledge, skills, etc.
- Decentralized knowledge that can only be accessed by those employees who are active on-site (on-site knowledge)
and finally
- aggregationof all these independent, diverse and decentralized individual performances into a total performance (swarm).
The wisdom of the many
The classic in the field of swarm intelligence is the empirical example by James Surowiecky (The Wisdom of the Many. Why groups are smarter than individuals and how we can use collective knowledge for our economic, social and political actions) with the equally classic example of estimating the weight of a gutted ox. The nearly 1000 participants, who consisted of a wide variety of people – that is, in addition to numerous so-called experts such as cattle breeders, farmers, butchers, also laymen came up with an average estimate that is almost exactly the weight of the ox. The best individual estimate was worse than the average estimate (e.g., arithmetic mean) of all participants. And the surprising thing is that everyone, through their independentand diverseapproach, as well as their particular decentralizedapproach, contributes to a result that is, on average, better than the vast majority of individual estimates.
Information Systems
You can also find more information in the article Ant Algorithm.
Also available in Deutsch (German)
