in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

also a bit of a tangent, but if biological computation is of interest, this talk will surely blow your mind:

This is a rabbit hole that I have gone to something like 1% (0.01%?) depth into. I popped up way before getting a blueprint of the lay of the land. So, taking a disclaimer here that the structure of ideas on this might be incoherent as I don't have enough clarity as I didn't go deep enough into the thick of these things and then zoom out to get the birds view picture. Most of the stuff that I list here are the ones that I have either bookmarked or found to be interesting during my spelunking. But I emphasis that I haven't personally chased down to comprehend their proper form, function and/or how they relate with each other. First up there seems to be a wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_of_computation which has some interesting models and a related section with further ones. But using the structure you have provided as a baseline, one thing missing there is rewriting ideas used by Post / Semi-Thue systems (which I think comes under the abstract rewriting systems category in Wiki's classification). Here are some links: 1/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_canonical_system 2/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Thue_system 3/ This looks like a good paper to read about this: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82345385.pdf Next up is the idea of formalizing what computation is. Most of my understanding comes from this well written blogpost by Ron Pressler: https://pron.github.io/posts/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-computation If you are academically inclined and willing to dig down, there is some deeply funny stuff happening with Chomsky hierarchy of formal grammars, automata, data structures (chain, tree, lattice, graphs), algorithms and their complexity classes. There are some non-trivial highly regular deep structure there. There are these books if you want to chase this rabbit holes: 1/ Computation: Finite and Infinite Models — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/326791.Computation 2/ Understanding Computation: https://computationbook.com/ 3/ Nature of Computation: http://nature-of-computation.org/ 4/ Computability and Complexity: http://hjemmesider.diku.dk/~neil/comp2book2007/book-whole.pdf 5/ Models of Computation: https://cs.brown.edu/people/jsavage/book/pdfs/ModelsOfComputation.pdf 6/ Models of Computation and Formal Languages: https://www.amazon.com/Models-Computation-Formal-Languages-R-Gregory/dp/019510983X/ One thing (I could be wrong here) about the above books I think is that they operate under the mainstream consensus of agreeing that Church-Turing Thesis formalizes what computation is. Though Alan Turing and Church's hypothesis is said to have given a bounded form to the mechanism of computation, there are ideas like that of Robert Rosen proposing that Church Turing Thesis is wrong and can't possibly stand as a model for all computation physically realizable. There is something called epistemic cut and other ideas which I haven't been able to unbundle yet. Here are some relevant reading materials if these rabbit holes intrigue you: Robert Rosen's paper: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF02477996.pdf Is Church-Turing thesis true? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00976283 Survey on these ideas: https://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~cgutierr/papers/computabilityLife.pdf Epistemic cut: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27049 Significant idea about Pattee’s work seems to be the interplay of duals like adjoints in Category Theory (I am punching above my weight class here):

"There are two realities to this thing. Just like light is a wave and a particle at the same time. Information and construction, structure and function, are irreducible properties of the same physical object that exist in different layers with different protocols."

the mainstream consensus of agreeing that Church-Turing Thesis formalizes what computation is. Though Alan Turing and Church's hypothesis is said to have given a bounded form to the mechanism of computation, there are ideas like that of Robert Rosen proposing that Church Turing Thesis is wrong and can't possibly stand as a model for all computation physically realizable. There is something called epistemic cut and other ideas which I haven't been able to unbundle yet.

This is fascinating. Intuitively, it does feel like Church-Turing couldn't possibly have nailed the lower bound on what constitutes the fundamentals of physically realizable computation. That just feels phenomenally unlikely considering that those were the first models we formalized. There's gotta be some wiggle room left under there.

The study of models of computation more powerful than the Turing machine is called Hypercomputation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercomputation

There are various proposals for hypothetical "physical constructions" that are claimed to be compatible with the laws of physics, but which aren't physically realizable. One example is the Alcubierre warp drive, which would supposedly allow the construction of faster-than-light space craft. Another is the Malament–Hogarth spacetime, which would supposedly allow hypercomputation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malament%E2%80%93Hogarth_spacetime

Some philosophers have a different perspective. They think about the problem like this: Physical law prevents any physical assembly of atoms from performing any computation more powerful than a Turing machine. Computers are Turing machines. This leads to the unacceptable doctrine of "physicalism", where the human brain has no more powers than a computer. Obviously we are more than just computers! What about Qualia and The Hard Problem of Consciousness? (eg, Chalmers) Obviously computers cannot possess Qualia and cannot possess Consciousness by their very nature. Therefore there is something wrong with Physicalism. Roger Penrose took a different path leading to the same result in The Emperor's New Mind. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorum put hard limits on the powers of formal systems to deduce the truth of mathematical statements. Human mathematicians transcend these limits, therefore human brains are more powerful than formal systems. Just because physicalism is abhorent, upsetting, unacceptable, doesn't mean it is untrue. The metaphorical idea that physicalism equates the human brain with an IBM PC is also quite misleading, since brains have an entirely different organization and quite different computational powers in practice. The visceral emotional response that some people have to physicalism results, I think, from fallacious thinking. The formal mathematical equivalence of the computational power of two physical objects means a whole lot less in the real world than people think it does. As I mentioned before, we can't build a physical Turing machine, but we still get a lot done with our brains and computers.