A Survey of Environments and Mechanisms for Human-Human Stigmergy

Stigmergy (the coordination of agents through signs they make and sense in a shared environment) was originally articulated in the study of social insects. Its basic processes are much simpler than those usually used to model human-level cognition. Thus it is an attractive way to coordinate agents in engineered environments such as robotics or information processing. Stigmergic coordination is not limited to insects. Humans regularly use environmentally-mediated signals to coordinate their activities. This paper develops a schema for analyzing stigmergy among humans, discusses examples (some using a computational environment and others antedating digital computation), and suggests how the use of such mechanisms may be extended.