Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

The University of Warwick researchers were particularly interested in how complex systems such as plasma, crowds of people, or flocks of birds suddenly move from a disordered random state to an ordered one. To crack this problem they developed a technique that combines an earlier study of the flocking behavior of large groups of birds and insects with information technology used to correlate information from a range of parallel signals.University of Warwick physicist Robert Wicks hit upon the idea of using an information technology tool called mutual information that can detect patterns and correlations from a very small set of points (typically 10 within a large system). In theory he believed that this method would be much more accurate than the normal statistical analysis of such dynamic systems such as crowds or plasmas and it should be particularly good at picking up the “phase transitions” from disorder to order in such complicated systems.
Science Daily: Swarming Starlings Help Probe Plasma, Crowds and the Stock Market

More information:
Mutual information as a tool for identifying phase transistions in dynamical complex systems
Breakthrough method probes how ordered states arise from random states

See also:
By imitating bees servers can handle being Slashdotted or Digg’d more efficiently
5 new models of flocking behavior discovered