Lessons from the Ant Colony: Overcoming the Biases of Web 2.0

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Written by Guest Author (???) / April 15, 2009 2:00 AM 

Operating as a collective, an ant colony can achieve remarkable things, complete tasks, and solve problems that would be unimaginable for a single ant. Colonies are responsible for building elaborate nests, waging battles, and creating efficient highway systems to food sources. The collective intelligence of an ant colony can serve as inspiration to help us solve complex human problems. Businesses in particular are finding innovative ways to apply these lessons from nature, from routing trucks to managing plane congestion on the tarmac... to making Internet search more accurate.

The theory of swarm intelligence (or collective intelligence) relates to how the simple actions of individuals can come together to produce the sophisticated behavior of the collective. Deborah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University who has spent decades studying harvester ants in the Arizona desert, summed up the concept this way: "Ants aren't smart. Ant colonies are."

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