How ants avoid wasted effort: new research
Stumble It!Usually we think of the importance of sharing 'positive' intelligence between organisational team members (for example Virtual Team Behavior - Curiosity and Learning). However recent UK research on foraging Pharaoh ants indicates that sharing 'negative' intelligence to avoid wasted effort may be just as important.
In Scents and sensibility: How foraging ants get the food we read how Pharaoh ants scouting for food place a tiny scent marker on branches that do not lead to a reward, according to a study just published in Nature, the weekly British science journal.
The team concludes that the ants use a repellent pheromone to mark unrewarding branches at "decision-points" - where branches fork.
"It provides advance warning, like human road signs situated before junctions," the authors suggest.
Pheromone-based messaging is the oldest and most evolved form of biological signalling and its potential application in mobile and distributed human teams is described in The perfect mobile group communications system.
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Bioteams Books Reviews
The coming shape of organizations and teams
Belbin sees Bioteams as the next step. Dr R Meredith Belbin, regarded as the father of "team-role" theory and one of the worlds foremost experts on teams predicts that we will evolve into bioteam forms. In his book "The Coming Shape of Organisation" Belbin picks out five observations human teams need to learn from "a diminutive masterclass" of social insects such as bees, ants and termites.
Buy it now from:
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Related Collaboration Research & Science Articles
Pattern recognition in bees: new research
Bees recognise human faces
The pattern recognition skills of bees are well-known, thought to have evolved to enable them to discriminate between different types of flowers. As social insects, they can also recognise and differentiate between their hivemates. Now a new study shows that these capabilities are so powerful that bees can recognize human faces better than some humans and with one-ten thousandth of the brain cells. The results may help lead to better face-recognition software. To read boingboing synopsis.
Wikipedia as a Multi Agent System
Here is an interesting article which uses Wikipedia as an example of a collaborative multi-agent system (MAS) involving both human and non-human agents. The same approach could be used to map any collaborative system.
What team members can learn from software agents
Human agents - learning from advances in distributed computing
I am delighted to republish a bioteams guest essay on “Agents: Technology and Usage” by James Odell which is attached in full as a pdf.
The good thing about a pheromone marker is that it fades over time; it has a built-in sunset clause. A path that was once deemed unproductive can be re-explored and re-evaluated in the future when conditions have changed.
Very good point - I really the idea of 'sunset clauses' on experience and information. It is too easy to say this always/never works and not re-evaluate. I guess this what makes the difference between a team having 10 years experience and a team having 1 years experience repeated 10 times.