Swarm

The undulating mass of insects is both beautiful and terrifying. You try not to stand too close, hoping to see clearly what their little world is like, while avoiding any direct contact for fear of exciting the anger of the buzzing tribe. Somehow, the bees greatest gift to mankind other than pollination, honey, is the furthest thing from your mind, as your appetite descends and your heart rate soars. Swarm behaviour, or swarming, is a collective behaviour exhibited by animals of similar size which aggregate together, perhaps milling about the same spot or perhaps moving en masse or migrating in some direction. As a term, swarming is applied particularly to insects, but can also be applied to any other animal that exhibits swarm behaviour. The term flocking is usually used to refer specifically to swarm behaviour in birds, herding to refer to swarm behaviour in quadrupeds, shoaling or schooling to refer to swarm behaviour in fish. Phytoplankton also gather in huge swarms called blooms, although these organisms are algae and are not self propelled the way animals are. By extension, the term swarm is applied also to inanimate entities which exhibit parallel behaviours, as in a robot swarm, an earthquake swarm, or a swarm of stars. Swarm intelligence systems are typically made up of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of intelligent global behaviour, unknown to the individual agents.