Dov must surely have intended “stigmergy”! David McFarland certainly does: pp. 166, 178, 198. I hope this is picked up for the hardcopy review of McFarland’s Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds. Robots can be simply reactive to certain elements of their environment; they can demonstrate ‘stigmercy’, or ‘[t]he production of behavior…
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
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…
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…
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.
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…
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,…
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.
manwithoutqualities 