> The search for artificial intelligence modelled on human brains has been a dismal failure.<p>No, it hasn't. There have been huge strides made in artificial neural networks in the last decade. One example is the HyperNEAT algorithm [1], which uses an indirect encoding enabling it to evolve networks with millions of connections. There's an entire conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), which is considered one of the most prestigious publication venues in AI.<p>This article is complete garbage. Ant colony optimization has been around for decades. It's great for routing and similar tasks where you need to find the best path and be able to handle breakdowns in that path. However, there is no basis for making the leap that human brains function like ant colonies.<p>[1] Stanley et. al. A Hypercube-Based Encoding for Evolving Large-Scale Neural Networks. In: Artificial Life journal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. <a href="http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/publications/2009/stanley.alife09.html" rel="nofollow">http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/publications/2009/stanley.alife09.ht...</a>
"The purposeful collective activity of ants and other social insects does, indeed, look intelligent on the surface. An illusion, presumably. "<p>No more an illusion than the individual intelligence/consciousness we humans experience.
>In particular, Dr Dorigo was interested to learn that ants are good at choosing the shortest possible route between a food source and their nest. This is reminiscent of a classic computational conundrum, the travelling-salesman problem.<p>Ugh.
Very interesting article. The Hard AI problem is one of the new frontiers of science.<p>If you're interested in this topic, I highly suggest you check out the Radiolab episode on emergence.<p>The episode doesn't focus on AI, per se, but it does talk a lot about how many individual things (ants, fireflies, bees) are not intelligent on their own, but do appear intelligent as a collective whole.<p>Here's the link: <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/02/18" rel="nofollow">http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2005/02/18</a>
A really good book on this subject is Swarm Intelligence by Russell Eberhart<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Morgan-Kaufmann-Evolutionary-Computation/dp/1558605959/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282352355&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Morgan-Kaufmann-Evolution...</a><p>(I'm not affiliated with the book in any way :)
Good companion resource to the article: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization</a>