Category: Uncategorized

FOUR INSECT TASKS. "Another way to characterize social insects collective behavior consists in defining specific functions to describe insects’ tasks. It is possible to identify four main categories of functions: coordination, cooperation, evaluation and collaboration." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE UNITS. "The principles that underlie the interactions between insects are carried out through local information of a global model. Each insect follows a set of few rules. For example, the ants can perform, on average, approximately 20 different elementary behaviors." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

PROBABILISTIC BEHAVIOR. "A colony of social insects is quite similar to a decentralized system composed of autonomous units that are distributed in the environment, and could be described by simple probabilistic cause-effect behaviors." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

PARTIAL AND UNSUPERVISED. "We know that the individual insects do not require representation, schema, or explicit knowledge of global structure they produce. A single insect is not able to evaluate the global situation to centralize the information about the state of the entire colony and later to control the tasks that need to be made by other workers. There is no supervisor in these colonies." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

INSECT SWARM INTELLIGENCE. "(1) Individuals of the same species cooperate in the care for the young ones; (2) individuals share the reproductive division of labor, sterile individuals work for the benefit of fertile individuals; (3) an overlap of at least two generations exists, so that the offspring can help parents to carry out the tasks necessary to the life of the colony." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this section on the subject of the evolution of complexity. The story of enzymes was informative: culturally we have an image of an enzymes as exquisitely tailored to a very specific function, a frozen perfection of evolution; but in fact they are simply just molecules in a great tide of evolution whose forms are full of maladaptations, imprecisions, and transient forms. Great swaths of their history has been lost to the disinterested and restless actions of evolution that has obliterated 99% of her experiments. View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY MODEL. "However, plant specialized metabolism, which has expanded exponentially over the past 500 million yr, provides a phylogenetically rich system for studying evolutionary processes leading to metabolic complexity on varying biological, chemical, architectural and time scales." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12416/full View in LinkedIn

SWEPT AWAY. "In short, most evolutionary intermediates – nodes on a phylogenetic tree – were swept away in parallel by distinct lineages, even those intermediates providing historical fitness advantages in organismal populations." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12416/full View in LinkedIn

MULTI-ROBOT COOPERATION PLUSSES. "Tasks are basically too complex for a single robot to achieve because single robot is spatially limited; Using multiple simple robots may be cheaper and simpler than handling one complex robot; Multi-robot systems are more flexible and fault-tolerant than single robots acting alone." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

GIANT GAPS. "It is very common to find huge phylogenetic gaps that will never be known with certainty even with the most sophisticated means of ‘resurrecting’ so-called ancient proteins, particularly as the phylogenies used for such calculations represent a very sparse sampling of extant organisms." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12416/full View in LinkedIn