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Complex systems are those systems that are comprised of a large number of interacting units, such as neurons in a brain, and individual animals in fish schools and ant colonies. Each unit acts on its own, using only local information, and there is no centralised control of the collective.

The thousands of tiny interactions between the individuals leads to sophisticated ‘emergent’ behaviour at the group level, such as solving mazes, making efficient trade-offs and building self-assembled, adaptive structures. This is sometimes referred to as ‘swarm intelligence’, and offers an alternative approach to the hierarchical, top-down control used in most human-designed systems.

I will outline some of my past and future work in this field - using a combination of field work, lab studies and computational models to uncover how ant colonies and the slime mould Physarum polycephalum use simple behavioural rules to gain the benefits of swarm intelligence. 

Biography
I study the behaviour of natural distributed systems, which are systems consisting of many individual units, each acting on its own with no centralised control of the collective. The thousands of tiny interactions between the individuals leads to sophisticated ‘emergent’ behaviour at the group level, such as solving mazes and trade-offs.

I spend my time figuring out the mechanisms and simple behavioural rules that individuals use to gain the benefits of emergent collective behaviour, and working out ways we can implement those rules in human systems.

I am a lecturer at Macquarie University, and my main study organisms are ant colonies, as well as the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. https://chrisrreid.wordpress.com/

Evolution, Ecology and Genetics Seminar Series