Co-operation emerges spontaneously and is maintained as long as interactions among individuals endure. Collective information processing capabilities may arise spontaneously from sets of individual components that exchange and store information locally. Biological entities are complex systems that exhibit a number of the above properties, some of which have been already identified in social insects. Consider the case of ants. In addition to the experimental and observational work on these aspects of real ant societies, there is an extensive list of theoretical and modelling studies that make use of complexity theory for studying insect social behaviour.
Elements switch between states when their input exceeds a specific threshold value.
New values of state variables are assigned by non-linear functions. Cellular automata . CA are composed of a large number of elements spatially arranged in arrays. Interactions follow very simple rules that may be either deterministic or probabilistic. Cellular automata are capable of complex behaviour such as spatiotemporal chaos, self-organised pattern formation, etc.