Intelligence all the way down

What is intelligence? Is it only about logic puzzles and language? Our bodies and even individual cells deal with enormous complexity of building and maintaining themselves, they have their goals, their adaptivity mechanisms, their memory. We had to build giant computers and train neural networks to approximately simulate protein folding, while proteins happily fold themselves in a few milliseconds. Behavior of matter is complex and challenging even at the smallest scale, and the task of packing atoms into a crystal lattice structure doesn’t look that different to the type of puzzles that are sometimes used to measure intelligence. So, does non-intelligence even exist?

The artwork is an web-native interactive simulation of a multiagent system similar to physarum-polycephalum. Simple local rules lead to formation of complex network structures, phenomena that is often referred to as Collective Intelligence. These particular agents also get disturbed by loud sounds for some reason.