UPenn researchers have collected examples of swarms or group behaviors found in nature.  More than half of the papers describing the collective behavior of swarms exhibited coordination.  The cool thing was that they found that coordination behavior is present from killer whales to cancer cell populations!  It definitely seems that the ideas of coordination and cooperation are the keys to characterizing swarms.

So far, I have been assuming that swarms relied on cooperation and that was why I thought that the Shapley value would be very useful in characterizing them.  However, it can only describe half the cases.  Because in nature, coordination without cooperation happens.  Some good examples I found in the powerpoint here are:

”A group of people are sitting in a park. As a result of a sudden downpour, all of them run to a tree in the middle of the park because it is the only source of shelter.”

or

“Individual drivers in traffic following traffic rules”

The difference between having cooperation and not is responsibility.  They give the counter example of a convoy of drivers.  They are cooperating.

So, I believe that there are at least three types of swarms.

joint coordination cooperation

Only coordination

Only cooperation

The good news is that joint intentions are useful in describing coordination.  So, I need to read up on that.

 

This paper seems very interesting because it takes a wholly physics approach to describing the swarm phenomena.  Also this paper is interesting because it determines the most influential k nodes in a social graph using the shapley value.