The Hunch Engine

Today, we welcome the participants in Group VI of the IT Leaders Program who are starting their first workshop.  Welcome to the Tuesday Readings, gleanings from my readings that I hope you might find interesting, provocative, and otherwise useful.

Today’s reading is a review of Eric Bonabeau’s “Hunch Engine” which appeared in a recent Technology Review.  In the piece, which can be found at, http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17397&ch=infotech.

Wade Roush notes that Bonabeau, a theoretical physicist, has studied “swarm intelligence,” the intelligence that emerges from systems such as ant colonies whose individual parts are not themselves intelligent.  The Hunch Engine is software that uses such algorithms to “breed” solutions to science, engineering, business, or design problems, “solutions that no human mind could have predicted.”

I think that you will find it to be an interesting read……………….jim