The division of labour is a central feature of the most sophisticated biological systems, including genomes, multicellular organisms and societies, which took millions of years to evolve. Here we show that a well-organized and robust division of labour can evolve in a matter of days. Mutants emerge within bacterial colonies and work with the parent strain to gain new territory. The two strains ...

It is now recognised that people often collaborate when completing information seeking tasks, and a number of specialised tools and systems have been developed to support such behaviour. Such systems often allow for distribution of search results among collaborators. The goal of this division of labour is to enable concurrent work while also preventing redundancy in results distribution. This p...

Functional specialization, or division of labour (DOL), of parts within organisms and colonies is common in most multi-cellular, colonial and social organisms, but it is far from ubiquitous. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the evolutionary origins of DOL; the basic feature common to all of them is that functional differences can arise easily. These mechanisms cannot explain the...

Division of labour is one of the possible strategies to efficiently exploit the resources of autonomous systems. It is also a phenomenon often observed in animal systems. We show an architecture that implements division of labour in Sensor/Actuator Networks. The way the nodes take their decisions is inspired by ants’ foraging behaviour. The preliminary results show that the architecture and the...