Here is an interview conducted by Howard Rheingold, as he says motivated by Andy’s Natural-Born Cyborgs. Note Andy’s reference to stigmergic (swarm) behavior though he doesn’t actually use the term. (Via David Livingstone Smith and Mirko Farina).
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.
My talk “Knowledge Wants to be Free: From Hayek to the Hacker” for the 2010 Wirth Conference at Simon Fraser University October 15 & 16, 2010 on “Austrian Views on Experts & Epistemic Monopolies.” I think the talk went down OK. Good to see some old friends and make new friends. Thanks to Wirth for sponsoring the…
With today’s release of the film The Social Network some might be interested in a recent academic study published in Computers in Human Behavior.
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 a chapter from a book by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (all of the Biological Computation Project, University of Alberta) that has just come my way and is entitled From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots. In fact, all the chapters in draft are freely available to be downloaded…
manwithoutqualities 