As a novel evolutionary computation technology

swarm intelligence is now becoming a new research hotspot.It has special relationships with artificial life and evolution strategies.All researches of theories and applications related to swarm intelligence proves that it is a kind of effective method to solve most global optimal problems.It is more important that its potential parallel and distributed features provide technical assurance to process data in large database.A survey of origin and development of swarm intelligence are presented.Furthermore

the basic principles and contemporary research status of two typical algorithms:Particle Swarm Optimization and Ant Colony Optimization

are discussed.