I heard this amazing story on NPR yesterday, Understanding Swarm Theory with Sudoku (listen).

John Carroll University professors Daniel Palmer and Marc Kirschenbaum assembled 81 people who tried to solve a sudoku puzzle on a nine by nine grid marked off on the grounds of the university. Each person represented an integer between one and nine, wearing a color coded tee shirt bearing the corresponding number. They were asked to mill about and interact with one another to try to find a configuration that represented a sudoku solution, i.e., each grid square with one person and all nine colors represented in each row, column and 3×3 sub-grid.

After seven minutes of milling, jostling and negotiating, the human swarm was close to a solution, but frustrated. Several of the intelligent digits, worked out a solution to the puzzle, took control and orchestrated the group into a valid solution. Palmer and Kirschenbaum plan on analyzing the video of the exercise to see if they can discover algorithms or heuristics that can he used to help swarms of mobile robots coordinate their activities.

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