This from the New York Times (H/T Shannon Selin) “Our ultimate goal is to have a fundamental understanding of how a complex biological system works,” Dr. Kronauer said. “I use ants as a model to do this.” As he sees it, ants in a colony are like cells in a multicellular organism, or like neurons…
Here is a lovely excerpt from the one and only David Attenborough, the drama heightened by the music. Check out all things swarm related on this excellent website run by Simon Garnier of the Rutgers Swarm lab. antscomputational intelligenceDavid AttenboroughswarmSwarm intelligence
This from Wired. During the 130 million years or so that ants have been around, evolution has tuned ant colony algorithms to deal with the variability and constraints set by specific environments. Ant colonies use dynamic networks of brief interactions to adjust to changing conditions. No individual ant knows what’s going on. Each ant just…
Readers with some familiarity with the eclectic content found on this website will be aware that the humble ant features strongly. Here is an article that offers a brief and accessible discussion of an excellent symposium to be found in Behavioral Ecology that features Mark Moffett’s work. AntAnt colonyBehavioral EcologyLaurent KellerMark W. Moffett
I first came across a reference to Eugène Marais in Andries Engelbrecht’s very excellent Computational Intelligence: An Introduction. See the links below for details about this highly unusual character. The Tragic Genius of Eugène Marais (The author, Conrad Reitz, very kindly shared some of his thoughts with me). The Soul of the White Ant Introduction by Keith Addison EUGÈNE Marais was a South African…
Here’s an article in this month’s Atlantic. Rejecting the views of classic political philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau that primitive humankind started out as a collection of scattered, unorganized individuals, Fukuyama writes: “Human sociability is not a historical or cultural acquisition, but something hardwired into human nature.” Nowhere is Wilson, who pioneered this view,…
John Graves shares his worth with Wiki-to-Text and Stigmergy & Wealth of Networks for a Learning2gether session. StigmergySwarm intelligence
Stigmergy yet again – well, there is no escaping it. While I wouldn’t call stigmergy a new paradigm (that’s too pompous – in any event, paradigms only have shape in a historical sense), stigmergy is one of the most fruitful mechanisms around that speaks to distributed cognition. Check out this paper nicely titled “Standing on the…
Check out the latest themed issue of Swarm Intelligence. Here is the freely available introduction. Nice to see the term “cognition” used since I have been using the term in this regard for a few years.
Here’s a snappy piece by Alva Noë on man vs. machine. Is the ant smart? Or stupid? Maybe neither. Or, most intriguingly of all, maybe it is both? Is there an experimentum crucis that we might perform to settle a question like this once and for all? No. Intelligence isn’t like that. It isn’t something that…
manwithoutqualities 