[P2P-F] Fwd: My review paper on Stigmergy

Sat Jul 26 19:41:12 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Francis Heylighen <fheyligh at vub.ac.be>
Date: Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 12:28 PM
Subject: My review paper on Stigmergy
To: "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group" <evolcomp at listserv.vub.ac.be>,
Global Brain Discussion <gbrain at listserv.vub.ac.be>

 Here is the paper on stigmergy I just sent to the editor of a book for
which it was invited. It is an update with some additional sections of an
older working paper.

It now provides a pretty clear and comprehensive review of the whole
stigmergy concept and its implications. It should provide a standard
reference on the topic, if anyone needs a good citation on stigmergy. It
will just be a while more before we have the detailed publication data.

That also means there will still be time to submit corrections, if need be:
so, if anyone has any feedback, please let me know!

Francis

------------------------------

Heylighen, F. (2015). Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination Mechanism:
components, varieties and applications. To appear in T. Lewis & L. Marsh
(Eds.),* Human Stigmergy: Theoretical Developments and New Applications*,
Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics. Springer.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/stigmergy-varieties.pdf

*Abstract*: The concept of stigmergy has been used to analyze
self-organizing activities in an ever-widening range of domains, from
social insects via robotics and social media to 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 components of 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, persistence, sematectonic vs. marker-based, and quantitative
vs. qualitative), while emphasizing the fundamental continuity between
these cases. This continuity can be understood from a non-linear,
self-organizing dynamic that lets more complex forms of coordination evolve
out of simpler ones. The paper concludes with two specifically human
applications in cognition and cooperation, suggesting that without
stigmergy these phenomena may never have evolved.

-- 

Francis Heylighen
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
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