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Nice topic for science coffee - see the first author :-)

Bonnie Bassler's TED talk on quorum sensing is quite interesting. Worth checking out, if you haven't done so already: http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

presentation: http://youtu.be/4efE_gO9lFo

random idea: how about using this thing as the "pheromone" to be by released by robots in a swarm... Recognizing an area as being of interest, for some reason, would lead to more "pheromones" being released there. This would in turn attract other robots to the area, by virtue of having also maximization of connectivity to the rest of the swarm as part of the navigation algorithm.

If this works as they claim this would be really interesting. Still no clue how they might be able to make this work though! Anybody?

A neoliberal look on AI and swarms

Pretty nifty... we should look into this.

the cited paper by Baluška et al (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2010.09.003) is a 2 page summary on the view that roots display swarm intelligence. Nothing really new compared to what those same authors have been writing about, but nice compilation of recent references on the subject.

Trolled :)

please see my Flyfire entry from MIT some posts below ...

yeah I saw it, it's also mentioned in the article

nice podcast to hear also what there plans for the future are

Could we use this for swarm robotics research?

aren't these the creatures that also Christos bred not so long ago? (like the phrase: forget the zombies .. this is the real threat!")

just read that too, the paper is here (I think that is the one at least): http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/139388/files/PNAS-2009-Mitri-0903152106.pdf

It is a bout a commercial aircraft which encounterd a bird swarm during flight and was forced to go back to the departure point.

"weapons for mass construction" - they want to solve everything with a new type of internet. including "swarm awareness" and "hive intelligence"

Spot the ACT friends...

Can we extract a new swarm behaviour out of the sperm: Sperm swimming at low Reynolds number have strong hydrodynamic interactions when their concentration is high in vivo or near substrates in vitro. The beating tails not only propel the sperm through a

smart!

"As in a colony of ants, "there's no centralized leader per se," Rubenstein says." Thought of ant colony document permanently on Dario's desk. Some relevance?

Development in brain computer interfaces developed by DARPA is progressing.

At SRI International in Silicon Valley, researchers have developed perhaps the most impressive microbot army yet: the MicroFactory. It's an ant colony made robotic, with half-millimeter machines zipping around to construct truly impressive structures.

With self-assembly guiding the steps and synchronization providing the rhythm, a new class of materials forms dynamic, moving structures in an intricate dance. Researchers have demonstrated tiny spheres that synchronize their movements as they self-assemble into a spinning microtube.

This is quite similar to the following paper. Here they show how tiny variations of particle parameters can produce clearly distinct structures: Thermal and Athermal Swarms of Self-Propelled Particles --> http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.0180

Oh, I like this one. One more point for swarm intelligence! :)

We could have come up with an inspiration like this !!! As creative as the roots :-) "These male amphibians use their calls to attract the female, who can recognise where it comes from and then locate the suitor. The problem arises when two males are too close to one another and they use their call at the same time. The females become confused and are unable to determine the location of the call. Therefore, the males have had to learn how to 'desynchronise' their calls or, in other words, not call at the same time in order for a distinction to be made."