Thus it is important to understand the corresponding mechanisms in naturally co-ordinated systems like social insects. Sociality is not the key concept in the book, but the interaction of local rules resulting in self-organised behaviour or emergent patterns. Finally, one can state that the book Swarm Intelligence is an impressive, integrated collection of examples for simple models of self-organisation and emergent behaviour found in social insects. It even can serve as an introduction to agent-based insect models as used in theoretical biology. Every illustrative model is presented in so much detail that one might directly be able to reproduce their simulation results.
Every algorithm is given in pseudo-code.
It is very fascinating to see how the shift is made to artificial swarms for problem solving. The book is full of new ideas, new concepts produced by a research direction that is at a rather early stage. The book sums up a new, fascinating way of developing algorithms, multi-agent systems and robot swarms based on examples of maybe the most successful social systems found on earth. That makes it well worth reading.