A review by davidr
The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done by Peter Miller

4.0

This is a fun, entertaining book about how animals and people act in crowds. Peter Miller shows clearly how ants, bees, termites, locusts, birds and fish usually act much smarter in a crowd than any individual. They do this instinctively, without the need to be taught how to behave. In some situations, people also are smarter in a group than any individual. But not always; there are times when a group of people will be dumber than the dumbest individual. Several anecdotal examples are given in the book. This is definitely a "feel-good" book, though occasionally it veers off-topic.

To me, the most interesting topic was the use of models of ant behavior, in the development of mathematical algorithms. For example, the well-known traveling-salesman algorithm is intractable for a large number of cities. But models of ant behavior, depositing pheromones along a trail, helps to yield an approximate solution.