The definition of stigmergy in Wikipedia is that, "It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even individual awareness of each other." So while Facebook, for example, is designed to work based on human responses it does also retain 'marks' which are used to determine a range of actions that can be subsequently taken in response. However, communication between the human agents, who have stores of memories, is the whole reason Facebook has succeeded. Can we look at part of a distributed active system, even one that relies on human IO, and say that part of it is stigmergic? OK, but the next question is why? What can you do with that point of view? I think (it is obvious that) human beings are sometimes reacting without fully realizing what is going on and instead base their responses on prevailing commonalities of insight (like prevailing memes). This kind of reaction might be likened to a stigmergic reaction. Subsequent interactions can then be used to refine the first attempts to understand what is going on (or what someone else is trying to say.) So perhaps by looking at foundational or simple methods that can combine stigmergy with more traditional AI methods so that stigmergic reactions can be integrated with previous reactions (for example successive statements) someone might be able to gain a little more insight in AGI. However, this implies that simple reactions must be context-sensitive to different combinations of events and they have to be sensitive to hidden parts that need to be inferred and discovered in order to appreciate special meanings (or to invoke special reactions) related to individuation of the agents. So I can see one way how this extension of the definition of stigmergy might be used to yield some novel experimental results. If I only had the time...
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