A Generic Model for Swarm Intelligence and Its Validations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a contradiction-centric model for swarm intelligence that explains emergence through internal contradictions within individuals and their interactions, demonstrating broad applicability and simplicity.

Contribution

It presents a new generic, contradiction-based model for swarm intelligence that effectively describes various emergence phenomena without complex computations.

Findings

Model successfully describes different swarm behaviors

Validated across five swarm intelligence systems

Proves the model's broad applicability and effectiveness

Abstract

The modeling of emergent swarm intelligence constitutes a major challenge and it has been tackled in a number of different ways. However, existing approaches fail to capture the nature of swarm intelligence and they are either too abstract for practical application or not generic enough to describe the various types of emergence phenomena. In this paper, a contradiction-centric model for swarm intelligence is proposed, in which individu-als determine their behaviors based on their internal contradictions whilst they associate and interact to update their contradictions. The model hypothesizes that 1) the emergence of swarm intelligence is rooted in the de-velopment of individuals' internal contradictions and the interactions taking place between individuals and the environment, and 2) swarm intelligence is essentially a combinative reflection of the configurations of individuals' internal contradictions and the distributions of these contradictions across individuals. The model is formally described and five swarm intelligence systems are studied to illustrate its broad applicability. The studies confirm the generic character of the model and its effectiveness for describing the emergence of various kinds of swarm intelligence; and they also demonstrate that the model is straightforward to apply, without the need for complicated computations.