Adaptiveness of self-organised decision making

From animals foraging to consumer market trends, collective decision-making by self-organization is a universal feature in the behaviour of groups. Understanding such processes offers the prospect of robust, reliable engineering systems and simple cases have proved useful in areas such as robotics, optimization, and telecommunications. However, in general the processes are poorly understood. Here we address the crucial question of how group consensus emerges in complex, dynamic environments. The resulting swarm intelligence framework will help to explain group behaviour in many kinds of organisms, and will make it possible to design intelligent, self-organizing systems for a wide range of applications.