A murmuration of starlings can hold thousands of birds and still turn as one. Researchers found that each bird watches only its seven nearest neighbours. There is no leader.
No manager in the middle
Early versions of Swarm had a coordinator agent. It became the bottleneck in every large run. Today, each agent shares state with a handful of agents working on nearby files, and order emerges from that.
What changed
Runs with over 1,000 agents finish 3.4 times faster.
A stuck agent slows down seven others, not the whole run.
Adding agents makes runs faster instead of noisier.
