The Hive Mind is a Single Reinforcement Learning Agent: paper makes swarm imitation exactly equivalent to RL

tctjr · x · 2026-09-30

A blogger highlights the paper "The Hive Mind is a Single Reinforcement Learning Agent" (Soma, Bouteiller, Hamann, Beltrame, arXiv:2410.17517). Instead of hand-waving at "emergence," it writes down the update rule: a population of agents following a simple, local, purely imitative weighted-voter rule is mathematically equivalent to a single abstract RL agent updating its policy — dubbed Maynard-Cross Learning. Keywords span swarm intelligence, RL, evolutionary game theory and biology, motivated by honey bee nest-site selection via waggle dances.

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