Insects and Agents: Extending the Metaphor

Published: 27 Mar 2025, Last Modified: 27 Mar 2025MABS2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Stigmergy, Biomimetics, Learning, Evolution, Modeling Technologies.
TL;DR: We suggest an extension of the widely-used stigmergic metaphor inspired by some insect behaviors that go beyond the original schema.
Abstract: Social insects were an early inspiration for work on multi-agent systems, and continue to provide parsimonious design patterns for models of decentralized coordination. But the original stigmergic pattern has limitations in accommodating intelligent environments and learning agents, including such socially relevant problems as opinion dynamics. This paper describes an insect example, long-range migration, that goes beyond these limitations. We present a simple formalization of the original stigmergic schema, and inspired by migratory insects, show how it can be extended to accommodate systems that the original stigmergic schema could not handle.
Submission Number: 1
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