Swarm Intelligence

A Swarm can be defined as an aggregation of persons or animals, especially when in turmoil or moving in mass.
The nature of swarms that is relevant to Distributed Systems is the collective behavior that emerges out of the aggregation of local behaviors.

Links

A great collection of resources from Payman Arabshahi
Swarm Intelligence book by James Kennedy, Russell C. Eberhart, with Yuhui Shi
A Swarm Optimization bibliography by Yuhui Shi
Swarm software in Objective-C developped by the Swarm Development Group at Santa Fe
Eric Bonabeau presentation at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
Wired article:Living Machines
Center for study of complex systems at University of Michigan
Amorphous Computing Group at MIT

Links to Swarm-related Projects

Nasa Nanotechnology Project
Mute P2P File-sharing using Ant algorithms
Swarm-Bots

Conferences and Symposiums

IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium; April 24-26, 2003
ANTS 2004
Parallel Problem Solving from Nature VIII Swarm Intelligence and Patterns (SIP'04); August 26-28, 2004, Budapest, Hungary

People in Ant Algorithms and Swarm Intelligence

Eric Bonabeau
Guy Theraulaz
Marco Dorigo

People in Particle Swarm and PSO

James Kennedy
Russel Eberhart
Yuhui Shi
Jesper Hoffmeyer
More people

Books

Prey Michael Crichton
James Kennedy, Russ Eberhart, with Yuhui Shi, Swarm Intelligence
Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo, Guy Theraulaz, Swarm Intelligence, from natural to artifical systems
The Ants, by Bert Holldobler
Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized, by Deborah M. Gordon