Human stigmergy: Theoretical developments and new applications

8 years 1 months ago

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: The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze self-organizing activities in an ever-widening range of domains, including social insects, robotics, social media, and human society. Yet, it is still poorly understood, and as such its full power remains underappreciated. The present paper clarifies the issue by defining stigmergy as a mechanism of indirect coordination, in which the trace left by an action in a medium stimulates a subsequent action. It then analyses the fundamental concepts used in the definition: action, agent, medium, trace and coordination. Stigmergy enables complex, coordinated activity without any need for planning, control, communication, simultaneous presence, or even mutual awareness. This makes the concept applicable to a very broad variety of cases, from chemical reactions to individual cognition and Internet-supported collaboration in Wikipedia. The paper classifies different varieties of stigmergy according to general aspects (number of agents, scope, pe...

Ted G. Lewis, Leslie Marsh

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