The concept of stigmergy was introduced by Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950's to describe the indirect communication taking place among individuals in social insect societies. Stigmergy was originally defined by Grasse in his studies on the reconstruction of termite nests. Grasse showed that the regulation and coordination of the building activity do not depend on the workers themselves but is mainly achieved by the nest: a stimulating configuration triggers a response of a termite worker, transforming the configuration into another configuration that may trigger in turn another, possibly different, action performed by the same termite or any other worker in the colony. Although Grasse's concept of stigmergy was attractive and stimulating, it has been overlooked by students of social insects because it left open the important operational issue of how stimuli must be organized in time and space to allow perfect coordination. Despite the vagueness of Grasse's formulation, stigmergy is a profound concept, the consequences of which are yet to be explored. Not only is stigmergy of potential importance for our understanding of the evolution and maintenance of sociality in animals, from communally breeding species to highly eusocial insects, it may also turn out to be a crucial concept in other fields, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, or the social, political and economic sciences, to which its relevance is intuitively obvious. The aims of this special issue of Artificial Life on stigmergy are: - to provide readers from a variety of fields with an overview of what is known (and what is not) about stigmergy in such various contexts as ethology, distributed problem-solving and robotics, - to invite researchers in these fields to present their new work, - and to give the opportunity to researchers from other scientific communities to present their work in the light of stigmergy.

In the 1950s, Pierre-Paul Grasse introduced the concept of stigmergy to describe the indirect communication taking place among individuals in social insect societies. Grasse originally defined stigmergy in his studies on the reconstruction of termite nests. He showed that the regulation and coordination of the building activity do not depend on the workers themselves but mainly on the nest. The nest structure stimulates a variety of responses from the termites.

A stimulus on a single termite has different results at different times.

It is not the termites themselves, but the nest that provokes the actions.

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