Signs, Traces and Cues

Photo – Signal traces, September 2013, Vitorino Ramos.

[…] While pheromone reinforcement plays a role as system’s memory, evaporation allows the system to adapt and dynamically decide, without any type of centralized or hierarchical control […], below.

“[…] whereas signals tends to be conspicuous, since natural selection has shaped signals to be strong and effective displays, information transfer via cues is often more subtle and based on incidental stimuli in an organism’s social environment […]”, Seeley, T.D., “The Honey Bee Colony as a Super-Organism”, American Scientist, 77, pp.546-553, 1989.

[…] If an ant colony on his cyclic way from the nest to a food source (and back again), has only two possible branches around an obstacle, one bigger and the other smaller (the bridge experiment [7,52]), pheromone will accumulate – as times passes – on the shorter path, simple because any ant that sets out on that path will return sooner, passing the same points more frequently, and via that way, reinforcing the signal of that precise branch. Even if as we know, the pheromone evaporation rate is the same in both branches, the longer branch will faster vanish his pheromone, since there is not enough critical mass of individuals to keep it. On the other hand – in what appears to be a vastly pedagogic trick of Mother Nature – evaporation plays a critical role on the society. Without it, the final global decision or the phase transition will never happen. Moreover, without it, the whole colony can never adapt if the environment suddenly changes (e.g., the appearance of a third even shorter branch). While pheromone reinforcement plays a role as system’s memory, evaporation allows the system to adapt and dynamically decide, without any type of centralized or hierarchical control. […], in “Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes“, V. Ramos et al., available as pre-print on arXiV, 2005.

[…] There is some degree of communication among the ants, just enough to keep them from wandering of completely at random. By this minimal communication they can remind each other that they are not alone but are cooperating with team-mates. It takes a large number of ants, all reinforcing each other this way, to sustain any activity – such as trail building – for any length of time. Now my very hazy understanding of the operation of brain leads me to believe that something similar pertains to the firing of neurons… […] in, p. 316, Hofstadter, D.R., “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid“, New York: Basic Books, 1979).

[…] Since in Self-Organized (SO) systems their organization arises entirely from multiple interactions, it is of critical importance to question how organisms acquire and act upon information [9]. Basically through two forms: a) information gathered from one’s neighbours, and b) information gathered from work in progress, that is, stigmergy. In the case of animal groups, these internal interactions typically involve information transfers between individuals. Biologists have recently recognized that information can flow within groups via two distinct pathways – signals and cues. Signals are stimuli shaped by natural selection specifically to convey information, whereas cues are stimuli that convey information only incidentally [9]. The distinction between signals and cues is illustrated by the difference on ant and deer trails. The chemical trail deposited by ants as they return from a desirable food source is a signal. Over evolutionary time such trails have been moulded by natural selection for the purpose of sharing with nest mates information about the location of rich food sources. In contrast, the rutted trails made by deer walking through the woods is a cue, not shaped by natural selection for communication among deer but are a simple by-product of animals walking along the same path. SO systems are based on both, but whereas signals tends to be conspicuous, since natural selection has shaped signals to be strong and effective displays, information transfer via cues is often more subtle and based on incidental stimuli in an organism’s social environment [45] […], in “Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes“, V. Ramos et al., available as pre-print on arXiV, 2005.

Simulacra and Simulation

According to Baudrillard, Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original. While, Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. “Simulacres et Simulation” is a 1981 philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard seeking to interrogate the relationship among reality, symbols, and society:

[…] Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of symbols, signs, and how they relate to contemporaneity (simultaneous existences). Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is of a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality, nor even deceptive mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality nor do they hide a reality, they simply hide that anything like reality is relevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is and are rendered legible; Baudrillard believed that society has become so saturated with these simulacra and our lives so saturated with the constructs of society that all meaning was being rendered meaningless by being infinitely mutable. Baudrillard called this phenomenon the “precession of simulacra”. […] (from Wikipedia)

“Simulacra and Simulation” is definitely one of my best summer holiday readings I had this year. There are several connections to areas like Collective Intelligence and Perception, even Self-Organization as the dynamic and entangled use of symbols and signals, are recurrent on all these areas. Questions like the territory (cultural habitats) and metamorphose are also aborded. The book is an interesting source of new questions and thinking about our digital society, for people working on related areas such as Digital Media, Computer Simulation, Information Theory, Information and Entropy, Augmented Reality, Social Computation and related paradigms. I have read it in English for free [PDF] from a Georgetown Univ. link, here.

Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is the property of a system whereby the collective behaviours of (unsophisticated) entities interacting locally with their environment cause coherent functional global patterns to emerge. SI provides a basis with which it is possible to explore collective (or distributed) problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model. To tackle the formation of a coherent social collective intelligence from individual behaviours, we discuss several concepts related to Self-Organization, Stigmergy and Social Foraging in animals. Then, in a more abstract level we suggest and stress the role played not only by the environmental media as a driving force for societal learning, as well as by positive and negative feedbacks produced by the many interactions among agents. Finally, presenting a simple model based on the above features, we will address the collective adaptation of a social community to a cultural (environmental, contextual) or media informational dynamical landscape, represented here – for the purpose of different experiments – by several three-dimensional mathematical functions that suddenly change over time. Results indicate that the collective intelligence is able to cope and quickly adapt to unforeseen situations even when over the same cooperative foraging period, the community is requested to deal with two different and contradictory purposes. [in V.Ramos et al., Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Collective Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic Landscapes]

(to obtain the respective PDF file follow link above or visit chemoton.org)