[FRIAM] stygmergy, CA's, and [biological] development

[Jon Zingale]

I think of stigmergy as a niche construction that "constructs" back. Now I
know that this is slightly different than the typical image where we
picture stigmergy as an endofunctor on an agent's behavior, but I think it
helps to explode-out what happens in that endofunctor. Stigmergy then ought
to easily have the duality property that one might just as easily perceive
the agents as an endofunctor on the behavior of an environment.

1. Some termites build a little bit of mound here and then there
2. A mounding threshold is met, and then
3. A "switch" is flipped in behavior of the termites that follow, or the
mound's form signals to future termites, or (favorite dynamical jargon
here), and
4. The termites are now set to go off to do some other task.

OTOH, in theory, one can keep termites without mounds, but (computationally
speaking) it is more difficult to have mounds without termites.

Most salient to me is the desire to define locally (much like
differentiation), stigmergy makes the most sense as a concept once a local
perspective is chosen. The degree to which it can be generalized then
becomes a topic analogous to differential geometry in that we can then
attempt to extend to global properties from the local ones.
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