I came across a “review” of The Lives of Ants by Keller and Gordon. The book seems to have been very well received across several publications. Here is the Economist‘s “review” kindly sent to me by Shannon Selin. This pheromone-driven behaviour means that although single ants are not clever, collectively they are capable of complex…
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 are some nice distinctions drawn about complexity theory by someone coming to the subject with a fresh and curious mind.
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.
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…
Here’s an introduction to swarm intelligence featuring Christian Jacob – one a podcast from CBC Radio 1; the other a video from the Discovery Channel. Another string to Jacob’s bow is his swarm artwork.
manwithoutqualities 