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Stigmergy ( ) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent. Agents that respond to traces in the environment receive positive fitness benefits, reinforcing the likelihood of these behaviors becoming fixed within a population over time.
Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. 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 may lack memory or individual awareness of each other.
Later on, a distinction was made between the stigmergic phenomenon, which is specific to the guidance of additional work, and the more general, non-work specific incitation, for which the term sematectonic communication was coined, E.O. Wilson, 1975/2000, p.186 by E. O. Wilson, from the Greek words sema "sign, token", and tecton "craftsman, builder": "There is a need for a more general, somewhat less clumsy expression to denote the evocation of any form of behavior or physiological change by the evidences of work performed by other animals, including the special case of the guidance of additional work."
Stigmergy is now one of the key concepts in the field of swarm intelligence.Parunak, H. v D. (2003). "Making swarming happen." In Proc. of Conf. on Swarming and Network Enabled Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR), McLean, Virginia, USA, January 2003.
In computer science, this general method has been applied in a variety of techniques called ant colony optimization, which search for solutions to complex problems by depositing "virtual pheromones" along paths that appear promising. In the field of artificial neural networks, stigmergy can be used as a computational memory. Federico Galatolo showed that a stigmergic memory can achieve the same performances of more complex and well established neural networks architectures like LSTM. (2025). 9783030059170 ISBN 9783030059170 (2025). 9789897583513 ISBN 9789897583513
Other eusociality creatures, such as termites, use pheromones to build their complex nests by following a simple decentralized rule set. Each insect scoops up a 'mudball' or similar material from its environment, infuses the ball with pheromones, and deposits it on the ground, initially in a random spot. However, termites are attracted to their nestmates' pheromones and are therefore more likely to drop their own mudballs on top of their neighbors'. The larger the heap of mud becomes, the more attractive it is, and therefore the more mud will be added to it (positive feedback). Over time this leads to the construction of pillars, arches, tunnels and chambers.Beckers, R., Holland, O. E. and Deneubourg, J.L. "From local actions to global tasks: Stigmergy and collective robotics." Artificial life IV. 1994, p.181-189.
Stigmergy has been observed in bacteria, various species of which differentiate into distinct cell types and which participate in group behaviors that are guided by sophisticated temporal and spatial control systems. Spectacular examples of multicellular behavior can be found among the myxobacteria. Myxobacteria travel in containing many cells kept together by intercellular molecular signals. Most myxobacteria are predatory: individuals benefit from aggregation as it allows accumulation of extracellular which are used to digest prey microorganisms. When nutrients are scarce, myxobacterial cells aggregate into fruiting bodies, within which the swarming cells transform themselves into dormant myxospores with thick cell walls. The fruiting process is thought to benefit myxobacteria by ensuring that cell growth is resumed with a group (swarm) of myxobacteria, rather than isolated cells. Similar life cycles have developed among the cellular . The best known of the myxobacteria, Myxococcus xanthus and Stigmatella aurantiaca, are studied in various laboratories as prokaryote models of development.
On the Internet there are many collective projects where users interact only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is an example of this. The massive structure of information available in a wiki, Infoworld: A conversation with Steve Burbeck about multicellular computing or an open source software project such as the FreeBSD kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.Heylighen F. (2007). Why is Open Access Development so Successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information , in: B. Lutterbeck, M. Baerwolff & R. A. Gehring (eds.), Open Source Jahrbuch 2007, Lehmanns Media, 2007, p. 165-180.Marko A. Rodriguez|Rodriguez M.A. (2008). A Collectively Generated Model of the World , in: Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, eds. M. Tovey, pages 261-264, EIN Press, , Oakton, Virginia, November 2007
In addition the concept of stigmergy has also been used to describe how cooperative work such as building design may be integrated. Designing a large contemporary building involves a large and diverse network of actors (e.g. architects, building engineers, static engineers, building services engineers). Their distributed activities may be partly integrated through practices of stigmergy.Christensen, L. R. (2007). Practices of stigmergy in architectural work. In Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM Conference on Conference on Supporting Group Work (Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, November 04–07, 2007). GROUP 2007. ACM, New York, NY, 11-20.Christensen, L. R. (2008). The Logic of Practices of Stigmergy: Representational Artifacts in Architectural Design. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (San Diego, CA, USA, November 8–12, 2008). CSCW '08. ACM, New York, NY, 559-568.
Some at the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement in 2014 were quoted recommending stigmergy as a way forward.
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