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"I thought this was a nice exotic thing that would never work, but would let me present things in nice conferences in Hawaii, but... it worked!" said Bonabeau, as he presented the ideas to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara last week.

It certainly does work. By studying the way individually stupid creatures - social insects like ants and bees - can collectively solve massively complex problems, Bonabeau and others are building techniques that are proving to be massively useful in the human-sized world. When a swarm of bugs following simple rules act together, a form of intelligence emerges.