The collective intelligence of animal societies

Numerous animal species display collective behaviors that are often spectacular. Starlings, for example, gather in their tens of thousands at dusk to perform astonishing aerial choreographies. On another scale, social insects (ants, termites, certain species of wasps and bees) have developed astonishing abilities to coordinate their activities. For some thirty years, scientists have been seeking to unravel the mysteries of this collective intelligence. It is essentially based on the interactions between individuals that enable these groups of animals to self-organize. Thanks to these studies and the deciphering of these interactions, we now know a little more about the mechanisms that enable animal societies to coordinate their movements, build highly complex nests and collectively solve multiple problems.

Biography

Guy Theraulaz is Director of Research at the CNRS and works at the Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale in Toulouse. He specializes in the collective behavior of animal and human societies. His research lies at the crossroads of ethology and the physics of complex systems. It focuses on the ability of social insects and other animal species living in groups or societies to develop certain forms of collective intelligence. From the time he defended his thesis in 1991 at the University of Aix-Marseille, his work soon led him to interact with researchers from very different disciplines: physics, computer science and robotics. These interactions gave rise to a new field of research , swarm intelligence, one of whose aims is to develop new algorithms directly inspired by nature to solve optimization or computing and control problems in collective robotics. His work has made a major contribution to the development of research into collective intelligence and self-organization processes in animal societies. He is the author of over a hundred scientific articles and five books, including Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Self-Organization in Biological Systems (Princeton University Press, 2001), which are now considered reference manuals.