PLEASE NOTE: The start/end date above is NOT the event date. This event will be held Oct. 10.

JOHNSON CITY — Dr. Thomas Schmickl, the holder of East Tennessee State University’s Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence for the Integration of the Arts, Rhetoric and Science, will offer his second free, public address on Wednesday, Oct. 10, at 8 p.m. in Ball Hall auditorium.

Schmickl will discuss “What is the IQ of One Ant or One Simple Robot and What if More than One Take the Test.” He will explain how the collective cognition mechanisms observed in the natural world can be applied to technical systems. Ant colonies, for instance, inspired mathematicians to develop new algorithms enabling better planning for scheduling problems and the routing of goods in global markets, as well as for optimizing communication networks. Such bio-inspired algorithms led to new design principles of robots, allowing older, heavier robots to be replaced by swarms of smaller, less expensive robots.