A Generic Model for Swarm Intelligence and Its Validations
  The modeling of emergent swarm intelligence constitutes a major challenge and
it has been tacked in a number of different ways. However, existing approaches
fail to capture the nature of swarm intelligence and they are either too
abstract for practical application or not generic enough to describe the
various types of emergence phenomena. In this paper, a contradiction-centric
model for swarm intelligence is proposed, in which individuals determine their
behaviors based on their internal contradictions whilst they associate and
interact to update their contradictions. The model hypothesizes that 1) the
emergence of swarm intelligence is rooted in the development of individuals'
internal contradictions and the interactions taking place between individuals
and the environment, and 2) swarm intelligence is essentially a combinative
reflection of the configurations of individuals' internal contradictions and
the distributions of these contradictions across individuals. The model is
formally described and five swarm intelligence systems are studied to
illustrate its broad applicability. The studies confirm the generic character
of the model and its effectiveness for describing the emergence of various
kinds of swarm intelligence; and they also demonstrate that the model is
straightforward to apply, without the need for complicated computations.
