The latest issue of EPISTEME is now available – the theme is computer simulations – an topic that is seeing a great deal of growth. Alexander RieglerCarlo MartiniGerhard SchurzIgor DouvenJ. McKenzie AlexanderJan SprengerKevin J. S. ZollmanPaul HumphreysRainer HegselmannStephan HartmannUlrich Krause
How do the dancers visualize his cues? How do they respond to one another in the group dynamic? How do they remember? And how does he? There’s a fascinating experiment reported in the LA Times (and blog) on distributed cognition being run by David Kirsh in association with maestro choreographer Wayne McGregor. Of course, the reason the…
True to the spirit of stigmergy I was pleased to learn of a wiki dedicated to all things stigmergical – StigmergyLive.
The latest issue of Seed features an article entitled “The Hive Mind” by Benjamin Phelan: The selfless behavior of ants, bees, and wasps has confounded scientists for more than a century. Is the question a red herring or the key to a new evolutionary synthesis? Speaking…
A human brain has 10,000,000,000 cells so a colony of 40,000 ants has collectively the same size brain as a human. If the human population is 6,760,000,000 (2009) and the ant population is 1 quadrillion 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1999). If my mathematics is correct the brain cell count of the ant population is nearly 4 times that…
Sad as it is, we were chuffed to discover that our co-authored paper is the 57th most popular paper in Chalmers’ MindPapers database out of a total of 18,477 papers.
Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making. There’s an article in the Economist entitled “Decisions, decisions: What people can learn from how social…
The new issue of EPISTEME is now available. Table of Contents Special Offer ALL issues free until Feb 28 – hurry now while stocks last :)
