In this blog Iain Couzin from Princeton University brings the science of group wisdom even further – where a group solves a problem that none of its members are even aware of.
We have all heard of the story of Sir Francis Galton, who in 1907, asked villagers to guess the weight of a bull. Of course nobody got it right but the collective average was spot on.
Couzin looks at the strange world of a small minnow-like fish called a golden shiner. These fish seem to have a collective intelligence in their swimming patterns.
We see shades of Galton here as applied to fish migrations. The school of fish track shades of light in the water but each individual makes an imperfect decision about where to go. When the school pools their estimates, they cancel out each other’s mistakes, and mutually arrive at the best possible vector.
Now that is collective intelligence!
