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.

Previously, broad categories such as Research, Interesting Links and Explainer sat alongside more specific labels. They were useful when the site was smaller, but over time the distinctions became less clear.

We’ve now reorganised the site around eight categories: Research, Explainers & Essays, Applications & Products, Organisations, Industry & Market, Events, Reading & Listening, and Site News.

Every article belongs to one of these categories. Its tags describe the subjects, mechanisms and sometimes the editorial perspective that connect it to other articles.

The more interesting change, though, is in the meaning of those tags.

Swarm intelligence concerns coordination arising from relatively simple local interactions. Natural intelligence explores the cognitive and communicative abilities of living organisms. Emergent behaviour, which remains central to this site’s curiosity, describes capabilities that arise from interactions among components, sometimes producing something no individual component possesses.

And biomimicry has a more deliberate meaning here: humans studying nature and applying what they learn to better products, materials and technologies. Nature imitating nature is fascinating, but it’s a different story.

Some of our less conventional labels are staying. Antastic continues to celebrate stigmergy, bzz bzz is for bees, and good-news highlights constructive developments. Doing the apocalypso remains our rather less cheerful window onto military applications of science and technology.

The articles themselves haven’t changed. We’ve simply redrawn the map.

And with more than 200 articles already in the collection, there’s plenty of territory to explore.