Small victories can be achieved alone, but not great victories. A swarm is an apparently disorganized collection of moving individuals that tend to cluster together, while each individual seems to be moving in a random direction. It involves a process of mutual interaction, self-organization and interaction with the environment to solve complex problems through the collective behavior. This article discusses how individual efforts can be coordinated to achieve a common goal using Swarm Intelligence (SI).

Wisdom of crowds is the interdisciplinary field of energy that comes into reality, when people interact from the position beyond ego. Human beings have advanced capabilities in interpreting visual data, path planning and reasoning as compared to machines or insects. Swarm behavior defines where the behavior of a large group of individuals is determined purely by their local interaction. The individual may be stupid, inexpensive and dispensable, but with the proper local interactions as a whole, may exhibit amazingly, complex and intelligent behavior. Swarm Intelligence (SI) demands a number of characteristics, like flexibility, robustness, decentralization, self-organization and simplicity to achieve impressive results through collaboration of individuals.

SI is inspired by a group of social creatures like colonies of ants, swarm of bees, school of fishes and flocks of geese to understand the practical application of existing biological knowledge, in order to formulate new ideas to solve real-world problems. Social intelligence is derived from collective adaptation. The ants can solve complex problems by finding food, building or extending a nest, efficiently dividing labor among individuals, responding to external challenges and spreading alarm. The role of SI is to seek a diversity of options, encourage free competition, and use an effective mechanism to narrow the choice (Example: Investors behavior in the stock market, betters behavior at a horse race). SI architecture is built based on self-organization and stigmergy. Self-organizing systems can be characterized by four properties. 1. `Positive feedback' amplifies a certain behavior (e.g., Bees may induce other bees to follow them to good food sources). 2. `Negative feedback' on the other hand, limits a behavior (e.g., If a food source is too crowded). 3. `The amplification of fluctuations' enables discovery of a new collective behavior resulting from random walks or errors of individuals. 4. `Multiple interactions' between individuals, direct or indirect, can be mediated by sound, smell or vision (e.g., word-of-mouth recommendations of a new restaurant or good doctors). Swarms can communicate indirectly by changing the environment called stigmergy. The ants can communicate with each other by the smell of their body. The ants find the shortest path with a very simple behavior, by laying and following a track of pheromones.

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