COLLECTIVE-INDUCED COMPUTATION

Many natural systems, such as social insects, perform complex computat ions collectively. In these groups, large numbers of individuals commu nicate in a local way and send information to its nearest neighbors. I nterestingly, a general observation of these societies reveals that th e cognitive capabilities of individuals are fairly limited, suggesting that the complex dynamics observed inside the collective is induced b y the interactions among elements and is not defined at the individual level. In this paper we use globally coupled maps, as a generic theor etical model of a distributed system, and Crutchfield's statistical co mplexity, as our theoretical definition of complexity, to study the re lation between the complexity the collective is able to induce on the individual and the complexity of the latter. It is conjectured that th e observed patterns could be a generic property of complex dynamical n onlinear networks.