Modeling Distributed Search via Social Insects

Complex group behavior arises in social insects colonies as the integration of the actions of simple and redundant individual insects Adler and Gordon, 1992, Oster and Wilson, 1978]. Furthermore, the colony can act as an information center to expedite foraging Brown, 1989]. We apply these lessons from natural systems to model collective action and memory in a computational agent society. Collective action can expedite search in combinatorial optimization problems Dorigo et al., 1996]. Collective memory can improve learning in multi-agent systems Garland and Alterman, 1996]. Our collective adaptation integrates the simplicity of collective action with the pattern detection of collective memory to sig-niicantly improve both the gathering and processing of knowledge. As a test of the role of the society as an information center, we examine the ability of the society to distribute task allocation without any omnipotent centralized control.