Swarming: Sting Like a Bee.

The study of social insect behavior led to ideas for networks and organizations in the 1990s. Little did Eric Bonabeau, a telecommunications scientist, know when he decided to visit the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a think tank focused in part on complexity theory, that a biologist's research on the behavior of social insects would suggest ways to improve the performance of networks, organizations and even fleets of unmanned air vehicles. The behavior of social insects like ants consists of individuals doing different tasks based on a set of low-level rules. With regard to computer networks, Bonabeau theorized that if artificial swarms of virtual agents such as a piece of software code in a packet could move through a network and leave "messages" at a switching station node on what was happening down the line, the coded message would reveal the packet's experience in the system. The U.S. special operations forces are already well versed on the use of swarming tactics and are well networked as seen in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Compared with half a million soldiers in the first gulf war in 1991, the U.S. put a few hundred special forces troops on the ground in Afghanistan and let them direct B-52 air strikes that took a matter of minutes from call to completion compared with the many hours it usually took to identify a target in Desert Storm and direct an aircraft in to attack.