A simple mechanism is presented, based on ant-like agents, for routing and load balancing in telecommunications networks, following the initial works of Appleby and Stewart (1994) and Schoonderwoerd et al. (1997). In the present work, agents are very similar to those proposed by Schoonderwoerd...

Some authors have hypothesized that the observed self-synchronized activity in ant colonies provides some adaptive advantages, and, in particular, it has been suggested that task realization may benefit from this ordered temporal pattern of behavior (Robinson, 1992; Hatcher et al., 1992). In this...

Self-organization was originally introduced in the context of physics and chemistry to describe how microscopic processes give rise to macroscopic structures in out-of-equilibrium systems. Recent research, that extends this concept to ethology, suggests that it provides a concise description of...

A simple model of recruitment-based foraging in ants illustrates the idea that synchronized patterns of activity can endow a colony with the ability to forage more efficiently when a minimal number of active individuals is required to establish and maintain food source exploitation. This model,...

We introduce a simple mathematical model of regulation of division of labour in insect societies based on the notion of fixed response thresholds. Individuals with different thresholds respond differently to task-associated stimuli. Low-threshold individuals become involved at a lower level of...

Complex architectures grown by simple agents moving randomly on a 3D lattice and depositing bricks deterministically depending on local configurations of bricks are presented. Some of these architectures are strikingly similar to real wasp nest architectures. But most algorithms, in the space of...

Social insects provide us with a powerful metaphor to create decentralized systems of simple interacting, and often mobile, agents. The emergent collective intelligence of social insects---swarm intelligence---resides not in complex individual abilities but rather in networks of interactions...

A model of division of labour in insect societies based on variable response thresholds is introduced. Response thresholds refer to likelihood of reacting to task-associated stimuli. Low threshold individuals perform tasks at a lower level of stimulus than high threshold individuals. Within...

Self-organizing maps (SOM) are unsupervised, competitive neural networks used to project high-dimensional data onto a low-dimensial space. In this article we show how SOM can be sued to draw graphs in the plane. The SOM-based approach to graph drawing, which belongs to the general class of...

We suggest that group effect need not be invoked to explain the differences in latency times exhibited by groups of different sizes in the initiation of building in the termite {\it Macrotermes subhyalinus} (Rambur), and in the initiation of aggressive behavior in various subspecies of the honey...