<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Francis Heylighen</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fheyligh@vub.ac.be">fheyligh@vub.ac.be</a>></span><br>
Date: Sat, Jul 26, 2014 at 12:28 PM<br>Subject: My review paper on Stigmergy<br>To: "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group" <<a href="mailto:evolcomp@listserv.vub.ac.be">evolcomp@listserv.vub.ac.be</a>>, Global Brain Discussion <<a href="mailto:gbrain@listserv.vub.ac.be">gbrain@listserv.vub.ac.be</a>><br>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>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.</div>
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<div>That also means there will still be time to submit corrections,
if need be: so, if anyone has any feedback, please let me know!</div>
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<div>Francis</div>
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<div>Heylighen, F. (2015). Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination
Mechanism: components, varieties and applications. To appear in T.
Lewis & L. Marsh (Eds.),<i> Human Stigmergy: Theoretical
Developments and New Applications</i>, Studies in Applied Philosophy,
Epistemology and Rational Ethics. Springer.</div>
<div><a href="http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/stigmergy-varieties.pdf" target="_blank">http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/stigmergy-varieties.pdf</a></div>
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<div><b>Abstract</b>: 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.</div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
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Francis Heylighen <br>
Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group<br>
Free University of Brussels<br>
<a href="http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html" target="_blank">http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html</a></div>
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