How stigmergy can be used

A visitor to the site wrote:

I work in the wire drawing industry where there is no general knowledge of the very many technologies being used by everyone. All the time people are searching for up-to-date information. A stigmergic site, which puts together information on new technologies of wire drawing would be useful for all and a valuable resource for students.

This is the kind of situation a stigmergic system is ideally suited for.

It would be far too difficult and expensive for any single person to gather this information in one place and keep it up-to-date. But, a Web site that can attract everyone interested in wire drawing and get them to share their sources of information could do this at very little cost.

Stigmergic system technique

An evolutionary strategy can be used to create a Web site that begins to attract people interested in wire drawing (see link Intelligent use of Web logs). Then a simple database framework is put on the site, where visitors can create agents to tell others about sources of information on wire drawing (see link Kempelen Box).

At first there may be little response, but there is a natural tendency for people to act altruistically by adding improvements to a collection of information if it is narrowly focused. Once this starts to happen, an evolutionary process comes into effect and the quality of the information increasingly improves (see link Kempelen box design).

Now think of all the tens of thousands of niche subject areas where there is a need for a single source to collect together the latest developments and trends. This is the future potential of evolutionary and stigmergic strategies.