War is an exchange of information with terrible human consequences. Perhaps eventually any loss of life will be unacceptable, and it will just be our robots versus your robots. But until then greater information may lead to greater casualties.

Some scientists are now looking to emulate termite “architecture” in robots, which may ultimately lead to automated navies. It’s not termite art but termite war. An excerpt from the Economist:

“Individual termites are, of course, far too dim to understand such things as convection and solar flux. Instead, a few simple rules encoded in their nervous systems by evolution and regulated by signalling chemicals called pheromones steer them to produce their mounds in all their architectural glory. This kind of behaviour, in which simple actions combine to produce sophisticated results, is called emergence.

Now human designers are getting interested in emergence, too. In a paper just published in Science, a group at Harvard, led by Justin Werfel, describes termite-inspired robots that can build things by combining magnetic bricks of a standard size. All their human controller has to do is program them with a few appropriate rules and leave them to get on with it.

Robot construction teams are not, in themselves, new. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have already demonstrated a system which uses remotely controlled flying robots to build things. What makes Dr Werfel’s approach different is that instead of having a controlling force, in the form of a computer program, sitting at the centre telling everything else what to do (as was the case in Pennsylvania), control is distributed throughout the system’s components, which cannot communicate with each other. The robots, which are little wheeled contraptions, do not need to see the bigger picture.

In the case of termites, the bigger picture is provided by natural selection, which has, over the millennia, refined the rules that individual termites obey. In the case of Dr Werfel’s robots, a human designer specifies the desired outcome and, with the help of a program developed by the team, generates the rules that will lead to its construction, with which each robot is then programmed. All that remains is to place a foundation brick to show the robots where to start building.”