Session 1F: All the Swarms In the World

Swarms have been studied for a good long time, with the first studies emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While these and subsequent studies examined the power of artificial swarms and developed ideas about what swarms were beyond simple groups of autonomous agents, no study has yet demonstrated the power of an engineering paradigm that can build swarms a priori. Such a paradigm can define the actions of artificial agents carrying out a collective task, yes. Additionally, such a paradigm can lead to the development of a multitude of outcomes including energy systems that draw from the environment, non-command economic systems that don’t have inflation, artificial systems with the ability to innovate, and societies whose social ills are engineered out of them. We will discuss how swarm engineering brings us to these outcomes through a walk through these very outcomes