Eric Bonabeau

Founder and Chairman, Icosystem Corporation

Ants and wasps that haunted him as a child should be the last thing on his mind to study as an adult, but a chance lodging snafu with a French ecologist would change his thoughts on insects forever.

Eric Bonabeau is an expert in the burgeoning area of swarm intelligence—a field of research that taps into the collective and self-organizing behavior of social insects and animals to figure out complex business problems.

According to Bonabeau, self-organization is key to understanding swarm intelligence. "With self-organization," says Bonabeau, "the behavior of the group is often unpredictable, emerging from the collective interactions of all of the individuals. The simple rules by which individuals interact can generate complex group behavior. Indeed, the emergence of such collective behavior out of simple rules is one the great lessons of swarm intelligence."

How did a man with a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics come to know so much about the behavior of ant colonies? After receiving his degree, Bonabeau joined France Telecom to work on finding ways to improve the telco’s emerging (and highly complicated) routing network.

A trip to Santa Fe, N.M., changed the course of his thinking and the course of his career. Through a hotel error, Bonabeau found himself sharing a room with another Frenchman, Guy Theraulaz, an ecologist studying the behavior of social insects. Theraulaz had been studying the division of labor and nest construction in social wasps. "From building and defending a nest, to foraging for food, to taking care of the brood, to allocating labor and even forming bridges, I learned that collectively, social insects are a powerhouse of efficiency and optimization," explained Bonabeau.

"It was the most unlikely encounter, but it changed my life," Bonabeau says. "Listening to this story was an epiphany, not only because I finally understood how ants were able to so efficiently raid my sandwich during picnics, but also because I saw a powerful computing metaphor. Indeed, by discovering the shortest path to a food source, the ants collectively solve an optimization problem using emergent computation."

Needless to say, when Bonabeau returned to France Telecom with his swarm intelligence theories, they thought it was more than a bit strange. "Managers would rather live with a problem they cannot solve than accept a solution they don’t understand," he says. Ultimately, his theories forced his departure from the multibillion-dollar company. (You can only face an uphill battle for so long.)

Still, Bonabeau felt there was more than just a metaphorical connection between ants and telco routers so he joined the Santa Fe Institute to study social insects. After three years, the engineer in Bonabeau crept back in, and again he wanted to apply his entomological learning to complex business problems.

He got that chance as Chief Executive Officer of Eurobios, a consulting company in Paris. Companies as diverse as Unilever and Southwest Airlines began using swarm intelligence applications for everything from factory scheduling and cargo routing.

In 2000, armed with $2 million in seed financing, Bonabeau launched his own company, Cambridge, Mass.-based Icosystem Corp. "In the United States in general, there is this pioneer and poker-playing atmosphere," he says. The firm is focused on three key areas: distributed problem solving (a.k.a swarm intelligence), human behavior modeling and innovation.

Recently, Icosystem launched the Hunch Engine, a search engine designed for those users searching for something "when they are not really sure what they’re looking for." For example, chemists at drug discovery companies use it to search for new molecules, while moms-to-be might use it to help them search for baby names.

"The Hunch Engine outsources your left brain to your computer and lets you use your right side for creativity," he says. Already, he and his team have come up with 25-plus applications for the Hunch Engine. "It collectively creates innovations and spins them out," Bonabeau says of the business. "It’s a mini ant colony, except it doesn’t steal your lunch."