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…
Here’s a nice poster from Janet Marsden at Syracuse: Abstract — Geospatial technologies in conjunction with wireless grids will offer a context for locating and coordinating team activities in such a way that the nature of each team member’s effort may be known and understood by other members. This constructed group knowledge enables teams to respond to unforeseen and emergent contingencies…
Turing machine: this via my chum David Livingstone Smith.
The new issue of Swarm Intelligence is now available. The excerpt below from the editors’ introduction – they may not realise it, but it this is as Hayekian as one can get: Swarm Cognition is a novel multidisciplinary approach that encompasses research in neurosciences, cognitive psychology, social ethology and swarm intelligence, with the aim of studying cognition…
My collaborator Marge Doyle and I have set up a LinkedIn group for the many academic disciplines that now have an interest in stigmergy. Go to LinkedIn and search LinkedIn groups for “stigmergy.”
The publisher of the relatively new journal Swarm Intelligence has made all content freely accessible. I’m not sure how long this offer is good for but it’s an opportunity to sample some of the best work being done in this field. Of course, the editorial board is a “Whose Who” of swarm theorists.
Stigmergy – the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment – was first conceptualized by zoologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in his ground-breaking work on termite colonies (Grasse 1959). It wasn’t until 1999 that Grasse’s work was brought to a wider audience by Eric Bonabeau et al (1999) in a special issue of Artificial…
Here’s an article from The Economist on the practical application of swarm intelligence to human optimization problems.
Here is my introduction to the themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research. The full collection is now available here.
Here’s an article in The Philosopher’s Magazine by Igor Aleksander, one of 50 big issues selected to commemorate the 50th issue of TPM.
manwithoutqualities 