Search

We show that the intelligence of a swarm of cooperative units (birds) emerges at criticality, as an effect of the joint action of frequent organizational collapses and of spatial correlation as extended as the flock size. The organizational collapses make the birds become independent of one another, thereby allowing the flock to follow the direction of the lookout birds. Long-range correlation violates the principle of locality, making the lookout birds transmit information on either danger or resources with a time delay determined by the time distance between two consecutive collapses.

We study the regression to the origin of a walker driven by dynamically generated fractional Brownian motion (FBM) and we prove that when the FBM scaling, i.e., the Hurst exponent H<1/3 , the emerging inverse power law is characterized by a power index that is a compelling signature of the infinitely extended memory of the system. Strong memory effects leads to the relation H=θ/2 between the Hurst exponent and the persistent exponent θ , which is different from the widely used relation H=1-θ . The latter is valid for 1/3