Since the other topic "Cloud Foresight" has seen the best of its days, here is another topic.

have you ever looked and wondered at a school of fish or a flock of birds? what about car traffic and human interaction?
well, as to everything, there is a science behind this as well (nothing new).

There has been lots of research and math put into this, and for a very clear reason. It is a growing area and will be one of the founding logic in future independent automation.

the following elaborates of the topic itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

Here is a fun simple implementation:
http://www.kmelrobotics.com/index.php?n=Main.Applications
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=216_1358452306

some of the math done on this:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10898-007-9149-x
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-30552-1_1#page-1
http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/courses/569/Essays_Fall2012/Files/Hu.pdf
some other research:
http://www.google.fi/books?hl=en&lr=&id=vOx-QV3sRQsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=artificial+swarm+intelligence+robot+birds&ots=-P315b5kor&sig=x6V8rTPlZroDWSySLIYjICmJjco&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=artificial%20swarm%20intelligence%20robot%20birds&f=false
http://www.google.fi/books?hl=en&lr=&id=teHhVHk3a54C&oi=fnd&pg=PA432&dq=artificial+swarm+intelligence+robot+birds&ots=h-pf0xPw5k&sig=X6uuFjVaca6Hj8fUHzxcx3aWomk&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2013/528069/
http://www.economist.com/node/16789226

some implementations:
http://people.idsia.ch/~frederick/sij-submitted.pdf

my question to you is, do you see any of such in day to day life?
can you see any of such applied in the future? if so share your entrepreneur vision.
what do you think is required to develop algorithms, applications and solutions based on SI?

lets see if this thread will draw more activity..
BL
23 days later
My research in the university uses swarm intelligence(ant colony optimization) to try to solve certain problems(finding shortest path or finding the best parameters for something...). But your interest here is not in the concept of swarm intelligence itself, you just like robotics and found these robots cool(and so did I) . But swarm intelligence itself is just one boring field out of thousands.

here is a simplified explanation:
Swarm intelligence is about creating one simple entity(lets say one bird) programming and teaching this bird some basic stuff like how to fly, to turn back when it sees an obstacle in front of it etc... and giving that bird a task to do(like find food) and then duplicating that bird into thousands of birds and setting them loose together. Given what that bird knows about avoiding obstacles and the basics, they should now all be able to operate without hitting one another and should be able to fly the trajectory they were programmed to do in an orderly fashion...

One of the earliest "cool" applications for swarm intelligence was in "The Lion King" The stampede scene when Mufasa dies, the stampede was generated by a swarm intelligence algorithm.
What you stated is true and i was thinking beyond the boundaries of the current definition. Currrnt definition serves given field areas as you described in the cgi industry. There is ongoing military and search and rescue resesrch going on on how to implement swarm intelligence at reduce investment and operstional costs. I forsee this to be a huge leap area in implemented technology.

Thanks for replying and please do share more of your experience and perspective.
a good thing to remember in general, things do not need to be complex to be a key factor in reinventing things or resolving issues.