Latest Posts

Researchers have demonstrated a decentralised security mechanism that allows cooperating robots to reject malicious information while continuing to trust legitimate neighbours.

28-Oct-2026

A new mathematical analysis establishes a surprising equivalence between collective decision-making in bee swarms and reinforcement learning.

28-Oct-2026

A Clearer Map of Adaptive-Emergent Adaptive-Emergent has undergone a little housekeeping. After accumulating more than 200 articles, it was time to rethink how they are organised, and particularly how we distinguish between the kind of article being published and the ideas it explores.

25-Oct-2026

A newly dated conference programme reveals substantial research activity in decentralised space robotics and cooperative planetary exploration.

24-Oct-2026

Act I Part 1: The Game with No Player The adaptive-emergent blog has over 100 posts on swarm and natural intelligence: communication even though some of these describe the most basic microbial life. In many cases we can model this behaviour as algorithms: what appears as intention is in fact mathematics. In this series on cellular automata, we delve deeper into the numbers.

Updated 22-Oct-2026

Marine animals repeatedly evolve collective behaviours because their shared environment rewards coordinated responses to food scarcity, predation and physical conditions.

22-Oct-2026

Researchers have built an active material whose robotic components spontaneously synchronise their movements without instructions from a central controller.

22-Oct-2026

A new bee-inspired coordination algorithm allows robot swarms to allocate changing tasks without central management or synchronised clocks.

22-Oct-2026

The tenth IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics has opened extended-abstract submissions and is seeking proposals for specialist workshops and tutorials.

22-Oct-2026

Social-network researcher Damon Centola challenges conventional assumptions about groupthink in an extended feature accompanying his new book, Goodthink: The New Science of Collective Intelligence.

22-Oct-2026

An independent developer has released an open-source simulation demonstrating six drones maintaining formation while navigating obstacles without a central flight controller.

22-Oct-2026

A new book proposes a mathematical framework for explaining how organised collective behaviour emerges from interactions among independently acting participants.

22-Oct-2026