in nature, they are also evident in aspects of human society such as governmental and economic systems. Biological: Insect colonies One of the most well known examples of a "natural" decentralized system is one used by certain insect colonies. In these insect colonies, control is distributed among the homogeneous biological agents who act upon local information and local interactions to collectively create complex, global behaviour. While individually exhibiting simple behaviours, these agents achieve global goals such as feeding the colony or raising the brood by using dynamical mechanisms like non-explicit communication and exploiting their closely coupled action and perception systems. Without any form of central control, these insect colonies achieve global goals by performing required tasks, responding to changing conditions in the colony environment in terms of task-activity, and subsequently adjusting the number of workers performing each task to ensure that all tasks are completed. For example, ant colonies guide their global behaviour (in terms of foraging, patrolling, brood care, and nest maintenance) using a pulsing, shifting web of spatio-temporal patterned interactions that rely on antennal contact rate and olfactory sensing. While these interactions consist of both interactions with the environment and each other, ants do not direct the behaviour of other ants and thus never have a "central controller" dictating what is to be done to achieve global goals. Instead, ants use a flexible task-allocation system that allows the colony to respond rapidly to changing needs for achieving these goals. This task-allocation system, similar to a division of labor is flexible in that all tasks rely on either the number of ant encounters (which take the form of antennal contact) and the sensing of chemical gradients (using olfactory sensing for pheromone trails) and can thus be applied to the entire ant population. While recent research has shown that certain tasks may have physiologically and age-based response thresholds, all tasks can be completed by "any" ant in the colony. For example, in foraging behaviour, red harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) communicate to other ants where food is, how much food there is, and whether or not they should switch tasks to forage based on cuticular hydrocarbon scents and the rate of ant-interaction. By using the combined odors of forager cuticular hydrocarbons and of seeds and interaction rate using brief antennal contact, the colony captures precise information about the current availability of food and thus whether or not they should switch to