The hypothesis explored is that collective intelligence is not only the province of groups of animals, and that an important symmetry exists between the behavioral science of swarms and the competencies of cells and other biological systems at different scales. The implications of this approach are outlined, as is the possible impact of tools from the field of diverse intelligence for regenerative medicine and synthetic bioengineering.

Recurrent neural networks are used to forecast time series in finance, climate, language, and from many other domains. Reservoir computers are a particularly easily trainable form of recurrent neural network. Recently, a “next-generation” reservoir computer was introduced in which the memory trace involves only a finite number of previous symbols. The inherent limitations of finite-past memory traces are explored in this proposal. 

Chimpanzees excel at inference tasks which require that they search for a single food item from partial information. Yet, when presented with 2-item tasks which test the same inference operation, chimpanzees show a consistent breakdown in performance. A diverse zoo-housed cohort comprising all 4 great ape species under the classic 4-cup 2-item task, previously administered to children and chimpanzees, and a modified task administered to baboons...