Scientific Commons | A Community for Scientific Information Solving the division of labour problem using and evolved heterogeneity (abstract) (2008) James, E. Noble, J. efficiently. Information and material flows in complex networks (2006) Helbing, Dirk Armbruster, Dieter Mikhailov, Alexander S. In this special issue, an overview of the Thematic Institute (TI) on Information and Material Flows in Complex Systems is given. Evolving a Stigmergic Self-Organized Data-Mining (2004) Ramos, Vitorino Abraham, Ajith not easily accessible or possible to be found. , a kind of indirect communication and learning by the environment found in social insects... Swarms on Continuous Data (2004) KEYWORDS: Swarm Intelligence, Ant Systems, , Data-Mining, Exploratory Data Analysis, Image Retrieval, Continuous Classification.... Web Usage Mining Using Artificial Ant Colony Clustering and Genetic Programming (2004) Abraham, Ajith Ramos, Vitorino Usage Mining, Swarm Intelligence, Ant Systems, , Data-Mining, Linear Genetic Programming. Roth, Martin Semet, Yann Collet, Pierre
Stigmergy Stigmergy is a mechanism of indirect coordination between agents or actions.[1] The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even individual awareness of each other.[1] History[edit] The term "stigmergy" was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. Stigmergy is now one of the key[4] concepts in the field of swarm intelligence. Stigmergic behavior in lower organisms[edit] Applications[edit]
The home of stigmergic systems This site was set up in 2001 to provide a record of the thinking behind the development of stigmergic systems. In 2004, work on new projects was halted in order to re-assess the theory in light of the new thinking coming out of neurological research. Brain imaging techniques were revealing that the functioning of the human brain is totally different from the way it had been envisaged in the twentieth century. The old ideas, based upon systems theory and computer technology, were rapidly being replaced by a far superior theoretical model based upon new concepts of dynamic, complex systems. The implications for information technology are far reaching and it was decided that the next step forward should be to encompass all further work within these new theoretical frameworks. To this end, work has now started on practical examples to be developed in the stigmergic environment known as Second Life. The Primer link provides a brief synopsis (with an example) of the thinking in 2004.
Novel stigmergy structures in the Internet The vast messaging structure called the Internet harbors many self-organizing multicellular digital structures. More evolve every year. And multitudes of "single cell" devices, PCs, laptops, iPod/Pad/Phones, Android smart phones, and various sensor and effector devices communicate with the many digital stigmergy structures discussed below. Linux source code, for example, can be thought of as a software termite mound, that is, a new kind of digital stigmergy structure. The Internet supports many other public stigmergy structures that are collectively managed and used by humanity[1]. Examples of emergent digital stigmergy structures in the Internet include: Google and other search sites -- consisting of crawlers, databases and servers. Note that all of these novel communities are organized around new stigmergy structures, i.e., new digital selves, of a sort that didn’t exist previously. [1] “humanity” is an overstatement. Contact: sburbeck at mindspring.com Last revised 9/1/2013
Stigmergy - the secret of complex organization Cooperation in multicellular systems requires information sharing. Entities such as cells in a multicellular body, social insects in a colony, people in societies, or computers in the Internet do not generally obey commands from some central controller; they share information by indirect and distributed paths. Independent entities deposit long-lived cues in external structures that are subsequently sensed by others. The cues may be attached to connective tissue within one body, to surfaces of shared nests such as termite mounds, or placed in shared databases or web-sites as the case may be. Illustrative examples in human societies include games such as chess. The term stigmergy was coined in the 1950’s [1] to put a name to such communication for social insects and the stigmergy structures that they build, e.g., termite mounds (photo above), ant hills, beehives and even the pheromone-marked ant trails of nomadic social ant species such as army ants. Stigmergy and "Self"
Stigmergic collaboration - Meta Collab Stigmergic collaboration is the process of collaboration that utilizes an intervening encodable media such as a canvas, a word processing document, email or a wiki. Many if not most collaborative processes can be considered stigmergic collaboration as the use of encodable media is generally the norm. The employment of such media typically extends a collaborative group's reach enabling more participants to work across greater spans of geography and time, as well as extending group's memory and capacity to engage greater levels of complexity. Several works on the subject are listed below. Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration Edit Mark Elliott's PhD dissertation Abstract Edit This thesis presents an application-oriented theoretical framework for generalised and specific collaborative contexts with a special focus on Internet-based mass collaboration. Stigmergic Collaboration: the evolution of group work Introduction Stigmergic Collaboration 1. Edit 2. Edit 3. 4.
Stigmergic Collaboration biologist and computer scientist discover the 'anternet' | School of Engineering A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet." Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. "The next day it occurred to me, 'Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!'" Harvester ants. It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food.
Stigmergic Cognition All things stigmergy Special Issue of Cognitive Systems Research Join the Linkedin Stigmergy group: Agents interact with others and their environment to circumvent cognitive limitation. Though the concept of stigmergy has been associated with ant- or swarm-like “agents” with minimal cognitive ability, stigmergy offers a powerful analytical tool to be deployed in the human domain. • A context or environment: o Comprised by an indefinite number of local environments o Only partially perceivable through an internal dynamics that govern its temporal evolution • Agents: o There are a multiplicity of agents populating with no one individual or clustering of individuals having global knowledge o Rationality is bounded o Behavior is self-organized o Behavior is stochastic o Behavior is dynamical • Novel features: o Arise from interactions that are neither predictable nor reducible to simpler constituents. Like this: Like Loading...
Acta Astronautica - Stigmergy based behavioural coordination for satellite clusters Abstract Multi-platform swarm/cluster missions are an attractive prospect for improved science return as they provide a natural capability for temporal, spatial and signal separation with further engineering and economic advantages. As spacecraft numbers increase and/or the round-trip communications delay from Earth lengthens, the traditional “remote-control” approach begins to break down. It is therefore essential to push control into space; to make spacecraft more autonomous. An autonomous group of spacecraft requires coordination, but standard terrestrial paradigms such as negotiation, require high levels of inter-spacecraft communication, which is nontrivial in space. This article therefore introduces the principals of stigmergy as a novel method for coordinating a cluster. After outlining the system, an analysis of some crucial parameters such as communications overhead and number of spacecraft is presented to demonstrate scalability. Keywords Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.
Biological system design From the CD-ROM "Concepts and strategies" by Peter Small Modular route to complexity The ideas for creating stigmergic systems for the Web originated during the writing of the two books Lingo Sorcery and Magical A-Life Avatars (written for multimedia designers who wanted to learn how to use lists and objects). The central theme of these books was to show how object oriented programming techniques can be used to develop products that went beyond a developer's imagination. It was found that designing systems in this way, resulted in productions that went not only beyond the designer's imagination, but also beyond the designer's ability to comprehend the growing complexity that begins to emerge. It soon became clear that we were dealing with something far more exciting than mere computer programming; we were entering the esoteric world of chaos and complexity theory. Amazingly, this did not lead to the design of large, complicated programs. Objects Understanding objects Creating a new generation
The home of stigmergic systems