[Swarm-Modelling] Crichton's "Prey"

[Steve Railsback]

Someone just gave me Michael Crichton's 2002 book "Prey". (I would bet a 
lot of money that he wanted to name it "Swarm" but his lawyers told him 
not to...too bad, could have been a nice fund-raiser for us.)

Am I nuts, or is a central assumption of the book nonsense? He has a 
swarm of independent, persistent, artificial organisms; and the swarm 
could learn very rapidly. Our brains can learn rapidly, but the 
connections are all hardwired; a population of simple organisms can 
"learn" but only  via evolution, which requires birth and death and 
selection... Is there any way a collection of independent agents, 
interacting locally with a changing set of neighbors, can "learn" 
without evolution?

Steve

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