life inspired

"This article presents a brief history of the Evolving Cellular Automata (EvCA) project. In the EvCA project, a genetic algorithm was used to evolve cellular automata to perform certain (nontrivial) computational tasks, in an effort to gain more insight into the question: “How does evolution produce sophisticated emergent computation in systems composed of simple components limited to local interactions?” Next to providing many interesting results and useful insights, the EvCA project seems to have spawned a whole research area of its own. Here, a brief overview is given of how it all started, developed, and inspired further work"The EvCA project: A brief history - Hordijk - 2013 - Complexity - Wiley Online Library

Labels: cellular automata, collective behavior, evolution

"Collective behaviour, arising from local interactions, allows groups to respond to changing conditions. Long-term studies have shown that the traits of individual mammals and birds are associated with their reproductive success, but little is known about the evolutionary ecology of collective behaviour in natural populations. An ant colony operates without central control, regulating its activity through a network of local interactions. This work shows that variation among harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) colonies in collective response to changing conditions is related to variation in colony lifetime reproductive success in the production of offspring colonies." Full paper @ Nature

Labels: ants, collective behavior, foraging

"Collective behavior comes through the ability of neighboring objects to communicate and interact with each other. Villar et al. [...] produced three-dimensionally patterned, interconnected networks of lipid-bounded structures functionalized with transmembrane proteins, which allowed electrical communication along specific pathways." Full article @ Science

Labels: biomimetics, collective behavior, development, self-assembly

"bacteria, seemingly the most basic and solitary of life forms, are, in fact, communicating with each other. They are counting themselves, their cousin species, and the unrelated 'others' in their vicinity and changing their behavior as a group in response to the results of this census. Researchers who study this behavior, known as quorum sensing, believe this ability is the origin of multicellularity and communal behavior. It may also yield important practical benefits, such as new approaches for combating drug-resistant bacterial infections in humans." Full article @ PNAS

Labels: bacteria, collective behavior, quorum sensing

"The capacity for groups to exhibit collective intelligence is an often-cited advantage of group living. Previous studies have shown that social organisms frequently benefit from pooling imperfect individual estimates. However, in principle, collective intelligence may also emerge from interactions between individuals, rather than from the enhancement of personal estimates. Here, we reveal that this emergent problem solving is the predominant mechanism by which a mobile animal group responds to complex environmental gradients. Robust collective sensing arises at the group level from individuals modulating their speed in response to local, scalar, measurements of light and through social interaction with others. This distributed sensing requires only rudimentary cognition and thus could be widespread across biological taxa, in addition to being appropriate and cost-effective for robotic agents." Fullarticle @ SCience

Labels: collective behavior, collective intelligence

"Our results suggest that individuals with similar genotypes may not actively select into friendships; rather, they may be placed into these contexts by institutional mechanisms outside of their control. Our work highlights the fundamental role played by broad social structures in the extent to which genetic factors explain complex behaviors, such as friendships." Full articke @ PNAS

Labels: collective behavior, genotype-phenotype map, human behavior, social networks

"The yellow slime mold Physarum polycephalum exploring an agar plate. Courtesy of Audrey Dussutour
The slime mold Physarum polycephalum remembers where it’s been, allowing the single-cell amoeboid to more efficiently navigate its environment. The key [is] a kind of externalized spatial memory system, based on the trail of translucent slime it leaves in its wake, that allows the organism to recognize and avoid already-explored areas." Full news article @ The Scientist Magazine. Original article:

Reid et al [2012] "Slime mold uses an externalized spatial 'memory' to navigate in complex environments." PNAS. 10.1073/pnas.1215037109

Labels: collective behavior, collective intelligence, slime mold, stigmergy

"Bumblebees are remarkable navigators. While their flight paths may look scattered to the casual eye, all that buzzing about is anything but random. Like the travelling salesman in the famous mathematical problem of how to take the shortest path along multiple stops, bumblebees quickly find efficient routes among flowers. And once they find a good route, they stick to it. The same goes for other animals from hummingbirds to bats to primates that depend on patchy resources such as nectar and fruit. Perhaps this is not such a surprising feat for animals with relatively high brain power. But how do bumblebees, with their tiny brains, manage it? " Full synopsis @ PLOS Biology

Labels: biocomplexity, collective behavior, complex systems

"The interactions revealed here may help account for the rapid changes in speed and direction that enable real animal groups to stay cohesive and amplify important social information". Full paper @ PNAS

Katz et al [2011]. PNAS November 15, 2011 vol. 108 no. 46 18720-18725

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"Collective motion, where large numbers of individuals move synchronously together, is achieved when individuals adopt interaction rules that determine how they respond to their neighbors’ movements and positions. These rules determine how group-living animals move, make decisions, and transmit information between individuals. Nonetheless, few studies have explicitly determined these interaction rules in moving groups, and very little is known about the interaction rules of fish. Here, we identify three key rules for the social interactions of mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki)". Herbert-Read et al [2011].PNAS November 15, 2011 vol. 108 no. 46 18726-18731

Labels: collective behavior, fish, Swarms

Labels: collective behavior, collective intelligence

"By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism." Full Story @ New York Times

Labels: collective behavior, collective intelligence, Swarms