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...

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...

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...

We introduce a simple model of self-organizing hierarchies in animal societies which relies on a basic positive feedback mechanism reinforcing the ability of a given individual to win or lose in a hierarchical interaction, depending on how many times it won or lost in previous interactions. If a...

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-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...

An extremely large body of theoretical work exists on pattern formation, but vey few experimental results have confirmed the relevance of theoretical models. It is argued in this paper that the notion of agent-based pattern formation, which is introduced and examplified, can serve as a basis to...

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...