Wikipedia_as_a_complex_system.pdf

The home of stigmergic systems 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

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. 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. After outlining the system, an analysis of some crucial parameters such as communications overhead and number of spacecraft is presented to demonstrate scalability. Keywords Stigmergy; Satellite cluster; Autonomy; Distributed; Coordination; Task allocation Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Ltd.

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. Stigmergy is a property supervening on informational amplification and decay in complex adaptive social environments, environments that have sets of “search space” constraints. 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 Like this: Like Loading...

The Desktop Regulatory State 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 Collaboration M/C Journal: "Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work" Introduction 1The steady rise of Wikipedia.org and the Open Source software movement has been one of the big surprises of the 21st century, threatening stalwarts such as Microsoft and Britannica, while simultaneously offering insights into the emergence of large-scale peer production and the growth of gift economies. 2Many questions arise when confronted with the streamlined efficacy and apparent lack of organisation and motivation of these new global enterprises, not least “how does this work?” Stigmergic collaboration provides a hypothesis as to how the collaborative process could jump from being untenable with numbers above 25 people, towards becoming a new driver in global society with numbers well over 25,000. Stigmergic Collaboration 3Pierre-Paul Grasse first coined the term stigmergy in the 1950s in conjunction with his research on termites. Collaboration is dependent upon communication, and communication is a network phenomenon. 1. 2. 3. 4. Non-Textual Mass Collaboration Conclusion

Scientific Commons | A Community for Scientific Information Solving the division of labour problem using and evolved heterogeneity (abstract) (2008) James, E. Noble, J. Watson, R. 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 Eric Bonabeau

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 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 site is temporarily divided up into several different divisions that are linked together only on this home page. The Second Life link is concerned with applications in the rapidly expanding field of artificial worlds.

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. Stigmergy structures provide persistent information that serves to organize the behavior of otherwise independent entities. Illustrative examples in human societies include games such as chess. Although the term stigmergy is relatively new, the phenomenon itself is ancient. Stigmergy and "Self" Stigmergy is intimately related to the somewhat slippery notion of "self." More on Evolution of Computing