Here is a terrific presentation entitled “Macrotermes as models of swarm cognition” by Scott Turner. He writes: This presentation was given at the Workshop on Research Efforts and Future Directions in Neuroergonomics and Neuromorphics sponsored by the US Army Research Office on 23-25 October 2007 in College Park Maryland. The presentation outlines the developing theme…
Some fantastic footage of swarming Starlings.
True to the spirit of stigmergy I was pleased to learn of a wiki dedicated to all things stigmergical – StigmergyLive.
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…
Swarm is a composite being of hundreds of thousands of bees driven by a human intelligence. Swarm is technically intangible, as his body is merely an aggregate of tiny forms, and he can fly through the air or assume any shape and size he desires. Swarm can also mentally influence the actions of other bees,…
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…
Here’s an article that talks about using mechanical drones to efficiently monitor the vast area that is Australia’s bush fire zone. The article mentions Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and stigmergy – two notions that are of particular interest to my work. The article: Learning from birds to study fires on the fly
manwithoutqualities 