Social Cognitive Maps and Swarm Perception

[Vitorino RAMOS]

Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Perception and Distributed Search on Dynamic 
Landscapes, CVRM-IST 127E-2005 technical report, final draft submitted to 
Brains, Minds & Media, Journal of New Media in Neural and Cognitive 
Science, NRW, Germany, 2005.

http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/Vramos-BMM.pdf

ABSTRACT: Swarm Intelligence (SI) is the property of a systems whereby the 
collective behaviors 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 behaviors, 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.

KEYWORDS: Swarm Intelligence and Perception, Social Cognitive Maps, Social 
Foraging, Self-Organization, Distributed Search and Optimization.

hope u could enjoy it. best, v.

~ v. ramos [http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/]