Of Robots and Ants - A Brief Interdisciplinary History of Swarm Intelligence

From its inception, the field of swarm intelligence has drawn its research questions and tools from a diversity of disciplines. For instance, chemistry and physics provided biology with theoretical and analytical frameworks to study the emergence of complex collective behaviors in living systems. In turn, biology provided inspiration to engineering for algorithms to solve optimization problems and for controllers to guide swarms of collaborating robots. Finally, technological development in engineering created new tools to track and measure collective behaviors in large groups, both in the lab and in the wild. During this lecture, I will attempt to retrace the history of the field of swarm intelligence. I will first cover its early developments that often happened in parallel in the different disciplines mentioned above. I will then explain how these initial efforts coalesced in the 1990s into a research field with a coherent set of questions, goals, and methods across multiple disciplines. Finally, I will discuss the past, present and possible future applications of research in swarm intelligence, in particular in engineering and the social sciences. By taking this historical approach, I aim to offer a brief but integrative introduction to the breadth and diversity of the research and development in swarm intelligence and provide the students with an understanding of the progress of the field and the challenges that remain ahead.