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...

The spatiotemporal behavior of the spread of influenza in France has been studied, and algebraic spatial correlations (with exponent ) spanning the whole territory have been found to be present as soon as the number of reported cases first starts to increase, about 15 to 25 weeks before the peak...

How infectious diseases spread in space within one cycle of an epidemic is an important question that has received considerable theoretical attention. There are, however, few empirical studies to support theoretical approaches, because data is scarce. Weekly reports obtained since 1984 from a...

Social insects---ants, bees, termites and wasps---exhibit a collective problem-solving ability (Deneubourg and Goss, 1989; Bonabeau et al., 1997). In particular, several ant species are capable of selecting the shortest pathway, among a set of alternative pathways, from their nest to a food source...

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,...

A simple model of the emergence of pillars in termite nests (Deneubourg, 1977) is modified to include several additional features that break the homogeneity of the original model: (1) a convection air stream that drives molecules of pheromone along a given direction, (2) a net flux of...

Self-organizing maps with variable local topology are shown to constitute a reasonably good heuristic to find approximate solutions to the NP-complete k-way graph partitioning problem, where a weighted graph has to be divided into k clusters of equal size while minimizing the total weight 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...