Smart Swarm: Using Animal Behaviour to Organise Our World [Hardcover]

This is a book about social behaviour - looking at the research into the behaviour of ants, honeybees, termites and starlings and showing how this can be used to improve systems, and to understand some human behaviour.

I really enjoyed reading this. It was fascinating to read about how the insects and birds coordinated their behaviour, and how this knowledge can help both business, and understanding how humans behave. While we may often act as individuals, our behaviour in a crowd can be remarkably similar to that of starlings, for example. I also found myself drawing my own parallels. Our human tendency is often to go with the "popular" route, and I found myself considering how this could lead to a single error starting a domino effect in others.

I would describe the book as falling into the "popular psychology" category. It's an interesting read, and one which can spark ideas. It's also easy to read, so if, like me, you are the kind of person who loves documentaries, this makes a good book to curl up with on the sofa.

Smart Swarm is, undoubtedly, a fascinating and accessible read. Peter Miller, Senior Editor at National Geographic, evidently has a wonderful grasp of the natural world as well as a genuine skill of summarising and presenting diverse scientific research in a readable format. For this, his book deserves the highest praise; I devoured the pages all too rapidly and will hopefully find time to re-read it before long.

In each chapter, Miller focuses on a member or group from the animal kingdom, presents their behaviours and the current state of research in these areas, and then tries to tie this to human behaviours and potential lessons. I don't know Miller's background beyond being an editor at Nat Geo, but I would hazard a guess that he's spent a good proportion of his time studying the natural world. His descriptions of ants, bees, termites etc. carry such enthusiasm and wonder that I found myself with a broad grin across my face for much of the time I was reading this.

However, the subject matter is far from new. I am a systems engineer and the concept of `emergence' of properties goes back centuries. It became a buzz-word in the mid nineties and I have read numerous articles and books touching on the subject since. The outstanding "Frontiers of Complexity: The Search For Order in a Chaotic World" by Coveney and Highfield does a much better job than Smart Swarms of illustrating how multiple interactions following simple rules can result to spectacular properties at system and collective level, albeit in a somewhat more academic/essayist style.

In fact, occasional statements in Smart Swarms made me wonder if Miller actually appreciated the hard science of what he was trying to illustrate. For example, in the sub-chapter `What are they learning in those schools', Miller talks about research on real and virtual fish, quoting Couzin's discussion of his simulated fish swimming in circles: `there was absolutely nothing in equations of motion for this model that said go around in circles'. Miller then discusses the work of Ioannou on actual fish behaving in the same manner and writes `one reason might be strategic'. This statement seems to miss the point completely - if the emergent property of the primitive individual behaviours is swimming in a torus... this doesn't need any other explanation, strategic or otherwise.

I suspect that Miller's perspective is coloured by his background in the natural world and the powerful theory of Darwinian evolution which, in part, seeks to explain why one property or behaviour led to survival. I see the same information and conclude that a survival-behaviour can lead to other `quirky' emergent properties. In the end it's just an interpretation. But despite loving this book for its treatment of the fascinating creatures on this planet, I was less impressed by Miller's writing on the applications of this in computer modelling and human interactions.

This was a great book. It's basically a comparison between the way that humans and animals work in groups. He shows how various groups of animals, like bees, ants and fish, solve complex problems with solutions that use ingenious teamwork. He distills the principles of how the animals work together and shows how they are being used to solve problems that humans face, like how to route electricity around a country in the most efficient way, or how to solve the postman problem.

The postman problem is when you try to work out the quickest route between all the different houses on a postman's trip. This is easy when you have a small amount of houses, as you can just write an equation that quickly calculates the answer. But when the number of houses becomes very large, the possibilities to choose the right answer from are so great that the equation takes ages to calculate. When there are a large number of houses, it's actually quicker to find the answer through trial and error. Ants solve this problem when trying to find things by leaving a pheromone trail, and as more and more ants start following the ants which make good choices, other ants follow them, until you get a system that exaggerates good answers and minimizes bad ones.

There are other examples of different sorts of business and engineering problems, and the clever ways that the other animals perform similar tasks that use clever voting systems, and methods of measuring and communicating the opinions of ever member of the group. There are a number of good business stories that show how some of the animals' secrets have been put to good use in companies, and how they've transformed the way they do things, and it also talks about all sorts of groups of clever people who are copying the strategies that the animals have evolved over millions of years of evolution.

I got into this one so quickly. It's a really interesting insight into teamwork, and really easy to read - definitely one to recommend.