Another good piece by Ben Hammersley in the Guardian yesterday. Swarm intelligence refers to the collective intelligence of a group of, say, ants as opposed to the individual lack of intelligence in one ant, an idea that's being used more and more in developing web and other technology. It's one of those ideas that's really obvious after someone's pointed it out to you and has a lot in common with connectionism

One thing that interests me about this kind of thing is the gap that still remains between the activity of the ants/neurons/whatever at brain level and whatever's going on at mind level. Us linguistics folk tend to operate at mind level while assuming that one day we'll explain how it all relates to brain level. But so far, we don't really know exactly how to connect the two.

B-)