This document discusses agility in nature and biological systems. It provides examples of how fish school and flock using simple rules, how ants build structures through local interactions without central planning, and how trees communicate and help each other through mycelial networks. These biological systems exhibit properties of self-organization, emergence and adaptation through decentralized control and local interactions between autonomous agents following simple rules.

1. BIOAGILITY
TathagatVarma
Country Head, Chinasoft

2. What is agility?
The ability of a body, organism or a system to sustain and grow
by being able to:
• sense, analyse and comprehend expected and unexpected
situations as they unfold,
• respond and organise, self and collectively, quickly and
gracefully to planned and unplanned changes,
• anticipate potential issues and avoid or mitigate them as
required or as possible,
• exploit unexpected opportunities and maximise gains before
they dry up,
• initiate potential game-changing ideas well-ahead of the
opportunity, and
• learn and adapt from previous experiences, make
sustainable improvements and evolve on continuous basis.

3. External
Stimuli
Internal
Response
Agility is the
ability to
sustain
internal
changes with
respect to
external
changes.
Agility is not
the end goal.
Short-term
survival and
long-term
growth is!

4. Agility in Nature?

5. Learn?

6. “Imprinting”

7. Communicate?

8. “Wood Wide Web”

9. Survive?

10. Huth & Wissel, 1992?
•The motion of a fish is only influenced by the position and orientation of its
nearest neighbors.
•The new velocity and the turning angle of each fish (after a time step) are
calculated by probability distributions taking into account random influences.
•The movement of each model fish is based upon the same behavior model,
i.e. the modeled fish group swims without a leader.
•The basic behavior patterns are attraction (be near fish of same species to
avoid oddity effect), repulsion (avoid collision if too close) and parallel
orientation (neighbors in 0.3 to 3 body length)

12. Why?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoaling_and_schooling

13. Org Chart?

14. BOIDS, 1986
Separation:
steer to avoid
crowding local
flockmates.
Collision
Avoidance.
Alignment:
steer towards the
average heading of
local flockmates.
Velocity
Matching.
Cohesion:
steer to move
toward the average
position of local
flockmates. Flock
Centering.
A Boid’s
Neighborhood::
flockmates outside
this are ignored

15. Leader?

16. Hierarchy

17. Blueprint?

18. An Ant Colony

19. Process?

20. Scaling?

21. Self-Organize?

22. ANT STRUCTURES

23. ANT COLONIES
• Ants often make tall structures (at least on “ant-scale”) out
of dirt. Sometimes, even using themselves!
• Ant Colonies don’t have any centralized planning or
leadership, or “process”
• Ants can’t detect anything far away! Most can’t see,
• They can only smell using their antennae, or use it for
touching.
• So, how do they do it?

24. HOW ANTS DO IT?
• Local interactions among individual ants is the key
• GuyTheraulaz and team observed there are just three simple rules handling
grains of sand:
• Pickup grain at constant rate (~2 grains/minute)
• Drop near other grains
• Choose grains previously handled by other ants
• In case of ant rafts, they simply form air pockets at local interactions
• As soon as they find a gap on the road, they start forming the bridge, and
only dismantle when the “load” lightens up

25. SUPERORGANISM

26. COMPLEX SYSTEM
A system in which large networks of components with no central control and
simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior,
sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.

27. COMMON
PROPERTIES
Autonomous agents: simple behavior
Complex collective behavior
Simple rules
No central command or control
Hard to predict the next immediate step
Signaling among agents
Adaptation
Self-organization
Emergence
Dynamic

28. AUTONOMOUS
AGENTS

29. SYNCHRONIZATION

30. SELF-ORGANIZING
Systems in which organized behavior arises without an internal or
external controller or leader are sometimes called self-organizing.

31. EMERGENT

33. THE GAIA
HYPOTHESIS?

34. RECAP

35. REFERENCES
• https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/11/ants-self-organization-quanta
• https://aeon.co/essays/the-most-important-connection-in-any-network-is-the-local?
• https://youtu.be/Xq7hHP-2fP8
• https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-37353570/how-trees-use-the-wood-wide-web
• https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-44643177/how-trees-secretly-talk-to-each-other
• https://medium.com/@BiomimicryInst/how-to-bioshift-your-organization-956710dba0ca
• http://order.ph.utexas.edu/Camazine.pdf
• https://daily.jstor.org/how-do-fish-schools-work/
• http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
• http://doursat.free.fr/docs/CS790R_S05/CS790R_S05_Flocking_Schooling.pdf
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoaling_and_schooling
• https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-wood-wide-web/478224/
• http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Welcome_to_AntWiki