Number of evolutionary stable interaction strategies in social insect colonies

Determine how many evolutionary stable interaction strategies can exist in social insect colonies and ascertain whether this number is intrinsically limited across environments, thereby characterizing the possible diversity of stable interaction rules in such complex adaptive systems.

Background

In discussing turbulent, Type 4 environments as complex adaptive systems, the authors use social insect colonies as an analogy for decentralized, self-organizing networks. They emphasize that even in well-studied biological systems like ant and bee colonies, the space of viable, evolutionarily stable interaction strategies is not presently known.

This unknown underscores the broader theme of the paper: in complex adaptive systems, outcomes emerge from interactions and are difficult to predict or enumerate a priori. By citing evolutionary convergence, the authors suggest the set of stable strategies may be limited, but they explicitly note that the number is not known.