I bought this several years back (2001, I think), but just picked it up again for a read. It describes the concept of emergence, that is, when given an aggregate, the capabilities (far) surpass the sum of the capabilities of its individual parts. For example, consider ant colonies, in which individual ants are making decisions in isolation based on an extremely limited capacity for analysis and thought. When viewed in the aggregate (colony), however, each ant appears to be contributing to an extremely coordinated, thoughtful, and strategic mass. The author here attempts to be clever on too many ocassions, and the applications to technology are a bit stretched (IMHO). However, it lead me to look deeper into the behavior of ant colonies, and as such was a good “gateway“ read.

Read this now. This book focuses on algorithmic techniques for approximation of NP-hard/complete problems, in particular Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). Out of disorder, chaos, and localized decision making, the simulation of ant behavior to attack classic NP-hard algorithms causes fascinating new approaches to problem solving and new approximate solutions to emerge. This is one of the best reads in a while.