I will read the preprint but at first glance this is rather dull and not new at all. Structured / organized / quasi and semi-organized behavior, even complex behavior appears from the interaction of dead simple rules, a.k.a. “Emergence”. Discovered 80 years ago by von Neumann and Ulam, the cellular automaton, e.g. Conway’s GoL.
Why is it worth a paper to explain that even more complex rules lead to complex behavior? Furthermore, your agents ARE coordinating, they are literally using the environment as a communication channel. In fact I’d argue that this “client-server” model is far more effective for the swarm than p2p.
What is truly interesting is the follow up this opens up: What is the protocol / comm language the agents are using? Obviously it’s not things like “do this and that” but rather actions that encode meaning, like a modulation.
I might take that up as research.