Distributed Artificial Intelligence: A primer on Multi-Agent Systems, Agent-Based Modeling, and Swarm Intelligence

Almost two years ago, I paused thinking about the future of AI and drew down some "predictions" about where I thought the field was going. One of those forecasts concerned reaching a general intelligence in several years, not through a super powerful 100-layers deep learning algorithm, but rather through something called collective intelligence. However, except for very obvious applications (e.g., drones), I have not read or seen any big development in the field and I thus thought to dig a bit into that to check what is currently going on. As part of the AI Knowledge Map then, I will have a look here not only at Swarm Intelligence (SI) but more generally at Distributed AI, which also includes Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Let's start from the broader classification.