Is there any advantage to using a centralized hivemind?

Question

Basically, there are 2 types of hiveminds: the common centralized and the uncommon distributed.

Centralized means that all units are extensions of the master entity (the badguy alien/robot stereotypes).

Distributed means all units are extensions of the entire collective (closest example I can think of is: ants, bees, schools of fish).

Since time and again, the centralized type's master entity has shown to be the weakest link (B1 Battle Droids, Battle LA aliens, Ender's game aliens, Independence Day aliens, Skynet etc), why would it be used instead of a distributed hivemind type?

Seems like there is no purpose of having them with a centralized hivemind, except to give the human goodguys an easy way to win

Edit: No one answer is the best; many of them bring up good points.

After going through the answers, the advantages of a centralized hivemind are (summarized):

• greater/easier scalability

• capability for strategic planning/goals

• less resources and less processing power required per unit

• lower latency, higher speed communication

• higher reliability and security (but a double edged sword as the master entity(s) is now a critical vulnerability)

Answer 1

The swarm can think ahead.

In a decentralised hive every action is local.

1. Foraging group picks up the scent of an enemy hive. They put down danger pheremones.

2. Patrolling soldiers pick up danger pheremones. They identify the rival hive and put down muster pheremones.

3. More patrolling soldiers gradually cluster around the muster point.

4. When the soldiers reach a critical mass their passive attack pheremones (which are always active) cause the platoon to follow the trail of enemy pheremones.

5. The soldiers follow the trail for 400 metres and find nothing at the end. Huh?

6. While the soldiers are occupied, the enemy hive (which has a centralised intelligence) attacks.

The centralised intelligence of the enemy hive allowed it to make this trick. It would be much harder to do this only acting locally.

Edit: The main weakness of the centralised mind is, if the queen dies, the whole swarm is left mindless.

HOWEVER: There is no reason you have to choose one or the other. Imagine an ant-like hive mind that can function on it's own, but also has a conscious leader who can (a) issue broad commands and (b) assume direct control of individuals or groups of drones.

You get efficient small-scale behaviour but also the potential for long term strategies. Also if the queen is killed the hive has enough instinctual intelligence left over to create a new one. So yes, the hive is rendered stupid for a while, but it's not an automatic win for the enemy team.

Answer 2

The client-server model has better scalability than peer-to-peer.

Simply put, as you scale a peer-to-peer model, the number of connections that must be maintained scales according to a Big O of N^2, since each node needs to be able to connect to every other node. By contrast, with a client-server architecture, the number of connections scales according to a Big O of N, since each client node connects to a central server node.

While this may not matter much for small-scale networks, once the number of a nods begins to increase, this becomes more and more noticeable - once you've got a million nodes, adding one more node requires another million connections for peer-to-peer, while it only requires one additional connection for client-server. This would result in the peer-to-peer network using considerably more bandwidth than the client-server model.

Answer 3

Latency (and reliability)

Depending on the mode of communication your swarm uses, the physical act of communication may be the major bottleneck. It's all well and good if the individual drones in your swarm have enormous combined processing power and storage capacity, but if every operation requires time-consuming and potentially unreliable communication at every step, it may quickly become untenable to do things that way.

In a centralized model, every percept the system receives and every action the system chooses to take only requires a single transmission (or perhaps a couple if they're short range, to forward it to the central unit). In a fully distributed model, every 'thought' the swarm collectively has could require dozens or hundreds of redundant transmissions just to locate the relevant bits of memory.

Security

You cannot secure every drone in your swarm. Some of them will be captured by the enemy. If they remain capable of contributing to the swarm's collective thinking process, this may present your enemy with an avenue of attack by which they could influence the decisions the swarm makes. Strictly keeping all thinking in a central control unit (whose physical security can be guaranteed and which can show all the steps in its thought process upon request) could help mitigate this risk.

Answer 4

In the long term, a distributed network (either distributed hive or autonomous actors) will always outperform a centralized hierarchical organization. This was first described by F.A Hayek as "The Local Knowledge Problem".

Basically, it recognizes that information is widely distributed across large systems. Local actors can see and act upon the local bits of information immediately, while centralized networks need the information to be gathered, processed, sent up the chain to be analyzed, orders made and passed back down to be executed. This sets up a delay, and orders can be received after the local conditions have changed, meaning they are no longer valid for the situation.

This is the "best case" scenario, and even suggesting computers can be used ignores the extra resources needed for sensors and bandwidth, while still not overcoming the latency issues. Add mistaken information, faulty analysis, or malicious corruption of information along the way to derive local advantages, and the conditions exist for a positive feedback loop of errors to accumulate.

Looking at some of the more spectacular failures of central command economies, such as the 1930 era "New Deal" extending the Great Depression by as much as seven years, the collapse of the Soviet Union or Venezuela today, or even comparing the sluggish socialistic economies of Europe to the United States (most European national economies have lower GDP/capita than all but two American State economies), it is difficult to argue with Hayeks observations.

If the loops are small, or there is an emergency situation, a command economy or other centralized system does have short term advantages, being able to mobilize resources faster than networks or meshes, but the possibility exists that this situation results in mal investments, which accumulate and eventually cause frictions or failures (such as economic busts, or ecosystems being overrun by invasive species or algae blooms).

Depending on the environment, meshes are more flexible and adaptive, while hierarchies are better with emergencies and extreme environments. A centralized hivemind can mobilize more quickly to react to emergencies, while a mesh might have the emergency situation "flow through" it, and rebuild the broken links in the wake of the situation. As several comments in this thread have noted, "real life" insect colonies actually use a mixture of techniques (like ecosystems and economies) to provide the flexibility to deal with both changing local situations and emergencies.

Edit to add: In modern military organizations, "mission command" has been adopted which makes use of the Local Knowledge Problem model. Senior commanders provide the overall mission guidance and resource allocation, but subordinate commanders are expected to respond to the local situation in the most appropriate manner consistent with the overall desired end state. In other words, everyone from a platoon commander on up is expected to understand the local environment and react to the available information there to achieve immediate advantage without waiting for higher command.

Answer 5

The army dying when the leader dies isn't a flaw, it's a feature.

There are ways to have a hive mind without the threat of collapse. You could have multiple backup redundant hive minds, and have one of those set up again whenever the humans killed one. But that comes with a serious flaw.

Your subordinates now have an incentive to kill you to take the swarm.

Your main enemy is your subordinates, not outsiders.

You would have either a distributed hive mind or backup hive minds if you wanted combat efficiency. It makes sense to be prepared. But, if your main priority is yourself, successors are simply a weakness. They mean that by killing you, someone else can gain power. That means you personally lose control.

An outsider who wants a more pliable swarm can kill you and ascend a pliable subordinate. Either way, you lose.

It decreases the swarm's vulnerability to hacking.

If every subordinate has some degree of potential to run the swarm, then a hostile entity can upload code or commands to enough of them and take over the entire swarm. A centralized entity can have powerful anti hacking and anti psychic protections that lowers the risk of a takeover. That's much cheaper than giving every entity strong protections. The centralized entity can also shut off rogue swarm members who are compromised.

The borg have this. There are multiple efforts to use borg drones to upload borg destroying viruses. The queen reduces this risk, by being able to shut down cubes.

It allows more suicidal tactics

A swarm where every creature has a voice will not normally sacrifice more than 50% of the swarm- each individual has an incentive to survive, and so even if they agree, they can at most form a group to sacrifice 50%. A centralized hive mind has no such constraints, and can sacrifice all but one of it's swarm. This allows them to fight harder, and take valuable resources a more distributed swarm could not.

Answer 6

Compare democracy with a "martial law" government.

In a true democracy, every action should be voted by the individual members which may lack the information to make the correct choice. Even if the choice is ultimately correct, this whole process takes a very long time.

In a centralized, non-democratic government, every decision can be made very quickly, and information channels are designed to feed the decision makers. The obvious downside is that those decision makers are small in number, and eliminating them would be a potential lethal blow to the organization.

Similarly, in a hive mind every individual element lacks the whole set of information, and either has to make blind decisions, or delegate those decisions to someone else (central command?).

Answer 7

Avoiding Value Drift.

A distributed intelligance works by emergant thoughts held by the interactions of the agents. If you seperate two groups of the agents entirely then you end up with two hive minds. They are exposed to different stimulus, so think more and more different thoughts.

This still happens even if not totally seperate. Once you spread out enough, and become large enough you get latency. Information can not travel faster thn the speed of light, and even once you occupy just a single solar system that starts to really add up. Even if you do have faster than light information transfer (which is useful to make a centralized hive-mind possible too), the possibility of being cut-off remains.

The left-hand does not know what the right is doing. Worse, some other hands (finger) might be too small (and thus dumb) to realize that they are at risk of value drift.

You can eventually become your own enemy.

A centeralized highmind does not run this risk. It has its own latency problems and may not (without FTL communication) even function over large areas. But it does not run the risk of becoming its own enemy. If communication with agents is lost or becomes unfeasible, they stop being intelligently driven. They don't form local clusters with their own emgerent values and goals.

This is a theme of the last stage of the game "Universal Paper Clips". Your greated foe is (former) parts of yourself, who've values have drifted out of alignment with your own.

Answer 8

Centralized is easy.

That's probably all it comes down to. A fully distributed network is far more complex to design and develop and often infinitely more complex to understand than a centralized one.

For a centralized hive mind, all you need to understand is how the central brain works, and you can predict what it'll do. If it doesn't do that, you know where the problem is coming from and where to look for a fix.

If you need to make some design changes, you only have one place to manage them. All the drones in the network are stupid; they just do what they're told. If the central brain can be taught to deal with the problem, the drones can probably stay as they are. If they need to be changed, they can be tested in isolation in a test chamber.

If you build a new type of drone, you just need to update the central network to be able to command the new drone type and to let it interact with the others, if necessary. The new drone, again, can be built and tested in an isolation chamber; as long as it does the right thing when instructed and feeds the right info back into the central hive, it's going to work perfectly well with everything else.

When you're dealing with a distributed network, nothing is easy. All your drones are self-operating, so it's hard to test them in isolation. Even if you build a full environment for one of them to play around in, all you'll know is that the drone does a certain thing when alone. You have no idea how the drone will act when it encounters a fellow drone, because not only will your drone behave differently now, but the other drone you introduce it to will also behave differently. And each type of drone will probably have a different type of reaction. And having more than one drone at once will also change what is happening. Even different if it's a different combination of drones. It's hard to predict what the various drones will do.

Whenever you want to change a distributed network, you need to not only think about the main network and how to modify it, but you need to think about how all the different drones are going to respond to new instructions.

If you build a new type of drone, not only does the main network need to deal with that, but all the other drones need to learn to interact with it in a useful way. And probably those drones are pretty limited in terms of thinking power, so good luck with that.

Using primarily centralized intelligence, we can drop human beings on the moon with all the computing power of a modern calculator. Using distributed intelligence, we can only now barely produce something capable of navigating a quiet road and we're still terrified of letting it do that around actual people.

Sure, having a fully functional distributed system that perfectly functions will beat a centralized system with absolute ease. But there's a good reason humanity invented the stone hammer tens of thousands of years ago, but the self-swinging-hammer still isn't a thing.

Answer 9

The efficiency of a centralized system depends a lot on the speed with which information is transmitted and the processing potential of the central node, as well as the ability of the system to reshape itself in the event that the central node is removed. Generally this last achievement can be achieved through backups, in robots this could mean each robot has the potential to be a central node in the system, with biological organisms you'd likely see multiple competing hive's or otherwise have backup rulers that lie dormant till needed. You probably wouldn't want all of your eggs in one basket, but let's assume that's the only option for a centralized system, why might you choose that over a distributed system anyways?

In some circumstances centralized systems can be much more resource efficient and can be far superior in terms of decision making. With a decentralized system each node is only aware of it's surroundings and the signals of others, in a perfect centralized system the central node can be aware of all of it's drones surrounding's and can formulate complex strategies for the hive as a whole and execute them with perfect precision. A distributed network is a cheap knockoff of actual omnipresence and relies on signals propagating through a network of multiple intelligence's, but with enough processing power a centralized network can be the real thing. Essentially a single god like entity in total control, similar to plugging our nervous system into a nations infrastructure. However, if information moves through the network too slowly or the central node can't process all the information efficiently, the system loses it's edge.

Beyond that regard, it's also potentially a waste of resources to have every drone capable of thinking, it's especially wasteful if each drone is highly intelligent. If you assume that each drone is intelligent and communicates with every other drone the processing required will increase exponentially with each new drone, whereas a central system only has to send the information once for each drone, then send a response. A caste system addresses this somewhat as a hybrid system, but is still not as ideal as having a mind capable of correlating all the information of the hive at a quick pace. If it's instead a simpler form of communication that creates emergent intelligence, that could be more resource efficient, but is not as likely to manifest in the same level of intelligence, nor be as adaptable as a conscious entity.

Given very fast information processing, a centralized network can get away with using less resources per drone and less processing per drone by potentially an exponential amount, by keeping the communication at a linear rate per drone. This allows for further expansion of the hive. So if a hive is primarily concerned with growth, centralization probably allows for the greatest growth per unit of resources until the distance become too great for rapid communication. So the answer is that it's only the best option when you have the necessary processing capabilities and a means to send information almost as fast as the nervous system because omnipresence and super intelligence is a very powerful combination that might outweigh the risks.

Answer 10

Obviously a lot depends on the exact architecture you have in mind. In real life, insect swarms are largely decentralised and have a lot of 'clever' adaptive behaviors which work in distributed fashion.

However, there may be biological reasons to have a centralised approach. While some ant colonies may have hundreds of breeding queens (and some do not), many honey bees have a single queen per hive. The reason for this is supposedly that it speeds evolution. In this situation, if the whole hive is dependent on pheromones or other signals from the queen, you have a single point of failure.

As with the queen been, it may be a matter of resources. Distributed brains may be limited. If you only have one super-duper-battle-computer, you may want to put that at the centre of the network so that the whole swarm has access to its computing power. This might be seen as a centralized approach.

However, in real life single-queen honey bee hives are very successful, and can replace the queen rapidly when lost. The trope of 'kill the central master and win the war' appeals to human storytellers but it's very much a B-movie approach.