Just as stigmergy in the biological world is about the interplay between organisms and the nonliving structures they build and inhabit, stigmergy in computing is about the interplay between computers and the persistent data structures they build and use to coordinate their behavior. While many such structures explicitly organize cooperative computing behavior, e.g., data-bases and registries, others evolve organizing roles quite different from the intent of their creators.
Digital stigmergy structures are data models populated and modified by a distributed community of "clients" that also interrogate the current state of the data. The shared data supports emergent organization, or cooperation, in otherwise independent entities. Familiar examples within single computers include:
In multicellular computing, stigmergy structures provide a persistent and reliable means of communication between individual machines and a reliable way to store the persistent data, i.e., the cues required for the collaborating group of digital entities to survive and grow. Familiar examples in corporate intranets and in the Internet include databases, file servers, DNS servers, email servers, and all manner of routers and other communications structures. Consider for example a customer database for a corporation. Its model is typically a relational data model of customers, their orders, and their accounts. It is populated and read by sales personnel, the shipping dept., accounts receivable personnel, and perhaps to some extent by the customers themselves if there is a Web interface for orders.
On a larger scale, computerized trading of financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, options, commodities and more arcane financial derivatives are traded on computerized exchanges such as the Nasdaq. In these cases the "market" -- which we sometimes speak of as if it were a living entity -- is a store of information about current bid and ask prices and recent trades that traders (and computerized automated trading "bots") use to organize their trading strategies. The resulting trades, in turn, change the "market" moment to moment in ways that further affect traders and their computerized trading bots.
Most recently the excitement in multicellular computing is being generated by novel stigmergy structures in the World Wide Web. These include not only databases that support Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures, but also widely distributed data in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, edge-of-the-web page caches such as those provided by Akamai and Google's internal replicated caches, crawler indexes, and AdSense ad-servers.
Computing stigmergy structures are fundamentally different from physical/biological stigmergy structures in that they occupy a world of bits not atoms. Since physical stigmergy structures obey the laws of 3-dimensional space, they provide location, shape and proximity and they prevent interpenetration. The location and shape of physical/biological stigmergy structures determine to a great degree what sorts of interactions can take place between the participating organisms. In contrast, stigmergy structures in computing systems are embedded in various network topologies determined by rules that provide logical structure to the various data repositories. So in most cases we can only imagine rather than see the "shape" of digital stigmergy structures. However the stigmergy provided by simulated 3-D environments, such as in Second Life or World of Warcraft create a simulated visible world. And short range peer-to-peer wireless interaction, e.g., BlueTooth connections within a public place such as a bar or nightclub are creating localized stigmergy structures. And digital " Grafitti Walls" accessible by cellphone texting become stigmergy structures in social gatherings. Thus the physical stigmergy structure of the social gathering blends with the digital stigmergy structure of the wireless communication.
Most designed complex computing systems support persistent human organization such as corporations, universities, or governmental agencies. Corporations are not only a type of collective “self,” recognized in law, but also are a “self” based upon their stigmergic structures. The people in the company create external structures that serve, in turn, to help organize their activity. These typically include buildings (offices, factories, warehouses, etc.), equipment (ships, trucks, milling machines, desks, copiers, and computers), records (the “books,” the contracts and other documents), and persistent financial structures such as bank accounts and shares of stock and bonds issued by or owned by the corporation. Increasingly today the most important structure in a corporation is not the bricks and mortar, but the IT infrastructure – the physical and logical networks (VPNs), databases, and applications that manage and transform business-critical information.
Because an organization's digital stigmergy structures are vital to its function their security is vital to the survival and competitive strength of the organization. Therefore, the security of these structures has become the major focus of IT organizations as they attempt to protect the computing portion of the corporate "self."
“Selfness” in computing systems is often misconstrued to be about the identity of the connected leaf devices and the identity of authorized users. Yet the identity of a given machine can’t be the determining factor since machines can be lost, stolen or compromised by a virus or worm. Nor can the identity of the person be the determining factor since people move from company to company, they forget their passwords, they leave their passwords around on sticky-notes, or they choose trivial easily guessed passwords.
For these and other reasons, we are beginning to recognize that the perimeter of an institutional network, i.e., the collection of PCs and other personal devices used by employees, is ultimately indefensible. Moreover, the perimeter is also becoming indefinable because it now intersects with supplier and customer systems and the corporate employees themselves work remotely, sometimes in a disconnected mode. Yet, just inside the fragmenting perimeter lies the core of the corporate infrastructure, i.e., the definable and defensible IT infrastructure comprised of the network, databases, and institutional application servers. That core stigmergy structure is the corporate IT “self.” The fundamental job of the staff in an IT organization is to maintain this vital corporate computing infrastructure. They play a role similar to ants maintaining the nest, or bees maintaining the hive.
Contact: sburbeck at mindspring.com
Last revised 7/12/2009