Slashdot Mirror
Of Ants and Robots
conJunk writes "The BBC has an interesting story about Ants and their leaderless collective behavior. It goes on to describe these cool little robots called U-bots. They have a super-simple instruction set and if you let them loose in a room full of frisbees it looks, to the casual observer, like intelligent and guided work." From the article: "Being small is going to be a problem. So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
Maybe if we get a whole bunch of stupid FPs together...
"So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
/. ...no, wait.....
Obvious:
Each neuron in our brain is dumb compared to our entire brain.
Same thing with these ants and these robots..
Unfortunately, you can't get a can of Raid and put an end to a room full of robots when they becme too much of a nuisance...
Humans manage, except for the smart part.
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They sure look like Replicators to me.
Will they be sorting tiny screws in space?
So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?
Isn't this a question for elementary school teachers?
If this wasn't a Saturday morning, I bet I could come up with a really good punchline for this.
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted Slashdot personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground frisbee caves.
Well, Slashdot had a story on this yesterday...
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/04/135 5253&tid=172&tid=158
You need to read slashdot more.
This is a good example of emergent behavior - in fact, perhaps an even better example than that of ants, because the fact that ants release a chemical trail to help other ants find sources of food could be considered a form of communication. (It depends how strict you are with your definition of emergence.)
There's a good article on their learning process here.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but human intelligence comes to mind as one possibility. (I'm assuming neurons count as "minimalist.")
I for one welcome our new frisbee-sorting overlords ...
Exciting stuff, and powerful in its simplicity.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is King.
There you see, dupes are good!
And here I tought the fact that complex problems can be broken down and solved by simplistic devices was a founding tenant of computer science.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Research like this will be perfect for future endevours in nanoscale robotics. When little bots are abounding on a truely massive scale, think of the benefits...
Cheaper, more reliable, and more intelligent in numbers (so to speak.) It sounds like a good way to go about constructing complex organisms from nanoscale machines... Hmmm what does that sound like?
I'd like to see a simulation of this minimal intelligence on a large scale with, say, 2000 virtual U-Bots.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
your brain is a bunch of dumb things (neurons) doing something less dumb
Maybe a tad offtopic, but I have for some time thought of spiders and their logic, it would be interesting to see project that spin an artificial net, simulating the thought process of a spider.
Have anyone seen such a thing?
No actual text necessary, me thinks.
I work with small autonomous robots who accomplish basic tasks by working together. As a computer engineer I handle both the hardare and software, so I understand how they would appear 'smart' and 'guilded'. The trick is all in the programming, so that they work together to complete the task without proper communication. As long as they can react well enough to their surroundings (by reacting to eachother) and know what task they are to accomplish, it will look like they are working together as a guilded collective when really they're independant and autonomous.
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Isn't there a way around this?
Click on those banner ads "Your computer clock may be off, do you want to fix it?".
Should this not be +5 funny?? What went wrong here? :)
One of the key aspects of ants is changing the local environment via phermone, like temporary registers in a computer, which is then "read" by other ants in a stochastic manner. An example of a monte carlo sim running a ant foraging demo is:
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One of the top people in this field is Marco Dorigo over in Italy, and he has chaired many conferences on this subject, as well as published a few books. The best book he (along with 2 others) has published so far, imho, is "Swarm Intelligence"
isbn:0195131592
http://search.barnesandnoble.c
Ive read this one cover to cover, and its been a terrific jump start to apply various aspects of ant properties (search, TSP, emergent task switching, graph partitioning, etc)
Rodney Brooks at MIT has done quite a bit of research in the past in this area quite a few years ago. It seems that the links regarding his projects are currently broken, but do a bit of googling, I'm sure you can find his papers on the subject.
Cambrian Intelligence is pretty good book that covers his techniques for AI in robotics. It's essentially a collection of eight early papers by Brooks.
This has been around in conventional AI for a while. There exists an optimization technique, which goes by the name of Ant Colony Systems (ACS) http://www.geocities.com/fastiland/Teaching/acs/sw arm.html. This technique uses the observed intuition that ants are often able to find the most optimal path between a food source and the nest without any global all knowing power telling them what it is. The way they do it is by leaving a trail of chemicals (Pheromones) whose odor persists for a while. A lot of ants play it safe and use the trail with the highest pheromone scent, however there are a few rebels who strike out a new path and few which prefer to take paths with lower pheromone concentrations. Thus with the expense of very few ants (agents) the colony as a whole is able to map out the most interesting parts of the state space with a loss of very few individuals and often able to get the most optimal paths. Needless to say this approach works best in bounded state spaces.
Just wanted to point out how stupid behavior and non-conformism at an individual level can often lead to a vibrant and healthy group and how it has been known to and exploited by computer scientists riding the Moore's law wave.....
Damn it everybody I know has an awesome sig.
you made hundreds of thousands of these U-Bots and just let em' go! They'd be everywhere looking for frizbees and it would... you know, become an everyday part of life. Out to dinner with the lady and you have to kick one off of the table because it was trying to take her plate. Eventually it would become commonplace to carry a sidearm with one's self to defend one's family frizbee from an inevitable onslaught of war-mongering (although not really, they only look like they have a purpose) washing machine-looking frizbee sorters... Think of the carnage! U-Bots in the bathroom, in the study, out in the yard duking it out with Fido (and with such a simple algorithm, beating fido with completely unfair strategem like turning the frizbee around in Fido's mouth until either his neck breaks or he lets go!) The more intelligent of us would move to Canada and purchase red frizbees with white centers. As for the U-bots They would have a great fortress made of yellow frizbees. And a queen...
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Human too are capable of working on a large, semi-understood goal with individual actors working out the details as they go. We've been doing it for eons. And we don't know why.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
A student at MIT did this in around 1997. While I think this is a little more advanced programaticaly, they are much larger.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
as previously seen on Slashdot.
Ant Wars has a java simulator so you can see your ant state machine in action (click on the play arrow).
I can't see what's so scary about it. Just because they can learn to perform a task (a hardwired one?) faster doesn't mean they'll start building foot-proof nests two weeks later, not to mention taking over the world. Yet another journalist has jumped the gun and rushed to greet "our new ant overlords" way too early :7
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
See Douglas Hofstadter's seminal book for discussion of ant colonies, AI, emergent behaviour, etc. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465 026567/qid=1110055317/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/103-1941748-8383854?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Maybe these robots could to be sent up in the shuttle when it returns to flight. That way we could observe their behaviour and finally find out if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space!
I'm pretty certain I saw this program on (very) late night BBC Open University TV about two years ago. It got me very interested in this sort of behaviour, but the more research I did into insect behaviour, the more apparant it became that some kind of simple pheremone system is actually used in nature to control things. Many swarm intelligence projects now use "Pheromone robotics" to mimic nature that little more closely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_Intelligence
In true Michael Crichton fashion, his book Prey delivers a good story with enough technical background thrown in to give the reader a bit of insight to the technology contained in the story.
The story is exactly the same sort of thing as these frisbee robots are attempting to become, just a different scale. Kewl and scary at the same time!
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Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Personally, I'd like to see dung beetle logic mimicked in robots... it would be fascinating to see robots form and roll a big sphere of poop.
they are Tasty to boot!
So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?
Hey, isn't the democracy based on the same assumption - if you put together a bunch of dump small things, they will make a good choice?
"So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
Oh, I don't know. Ask the millions of dumb cells that make up your body. They seem to be doing a pretty good job.
So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
Microsoft asks itself the same thing everyday
Holldöbler, B. & E.O. Wilson. 1990. The ants. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I can tell you how NOT to do it. Take a look at the U.S. congress, senate and pesidential cabinet and you'll see what happens when a bunch of dumb small things do something stupid on e adaily basis. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
My wife has a Roomba www.irobot.com I can only wonder what 1000 of those would be like if they were let loose in a giant hotel. The floors might actually stay clean briefly... Or what if those little robots in the article we more like Moles and sent to the landfill to sort everything. Teach em to kill fire ants and let them loose in South Texas!!
I think that this is a really important avenue of research but can't help wondering why exactly this project was funded.
Robotics is of course great fun and can certainly be inspiring but all this was presented (albeit indirectly by a superficial BBC report) as a valid study in terms of what the miniture robots can achieve.
It doesn't take the 'Milliard Gargantubrain' to work out that all this stuff is better and cheaper simulated on computers. Cellular Automata have in various incarnations been here before (including countless ant based examples) . How does making it physically real advance the subject at all? Aside from the obvious 'it looks cool' and 'it allows us to write in general terms about ants instead of the truly vexing question of how intelligence can function equally well as a distributed system'.
Really, help me out here. Surely any one of us could have created and run 50,000 simulations in the time it took them to solder up the PICs (or whatever microcontrollers it was that they used). I'm not penny pinching here I'm just wondering if this was the best way to go about the problem.
"Myrmecology, noun, - The Scientific Study Of Ants. This has been Roseanne, your guide to the world of facts."
"So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
Implement a moderation system!
Actually, wait, that hasn't worked...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Q: "So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
:)
Isn't that essentially what sociology is about?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Finally, a beowulf cluster of ants!
... and then they built the supercollider.
The "dumb" ants do smart things because their ancestors also did smart things, partly by chance, primarily by evolution, and so they survived and had children while the others died before they were able to conceive.
A bunch of dumb robots appearing to act as if they were composing an Intelligent Design is blasphemy. Everyone knows that a superior, humanlike intelligence is behind any sophisticated emergent behavior.
--
make install -not war
Bravo!
There's a decentralized simulator called Breve that includes a module called Gatherers that will demonstrate the behavior of the U-Bots. There's a few other canned demos, or you can write your own. Lots of eye candy.
Runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.
This stuff has grown terribly, terribly boring.
As far as I'm concerned the question as to how ants know how to organize themselves is on the same order as the question, "how does bread know it should fall on the buttered side?", or "how do coin flips know they should be random?"
If our hearts begin to flutter and our imagination begins to soar at the sight of an anthill, it's depressing.
They might team up with dolphins. Ideally, though, another cephalopod - the octopus - would be the ideal cooperative species with dolphins. The Simpsons have already taught us that dolphins can walk on their fins - imagine them using octopi (who can also exist outside of water for periods of time and survive) as ink-shooting, stick wielding headgear! WE'D BE DOOMED!1!
What if we get stupid people to write silly comments in a forum? It could produce some good idea, now and then, showing apparent intelligence without really having it.
Hey, we ourselves could...
Oops...
Erm, forget it.
Hey, you've got your email in obscured form on your sig, but not on your profile... you might want to tick that "spam armouring" option in preferences -> comments.
'..you should know what you talk about first before you talk. You are misusing the term "cellular automata" where in reality what you were looking for was the term "autonomous agents".'
Lol. No. The term I was looking for and used correctly was 'Cellular Automata'. If you are still in doubt consider 'Langton's Ant' here, (random example) here or do a search.
While you certainly can try to model Ant behaviour using MultiAgent systems (/'Adaptive Agents'/'Autonomous Agents'), I hope you will agree that, you can also have a serious stab at it with Cellular Automata. Personally I still consider the latter a fruitful branch on the tree of knowledge hence my selection of term. Finally, both Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms have also been used to model ant-inspired behavior. In the latter the distributed and 'social' properties of 'Agents' are not as important as simulated evolutionary processes.
The researcher in the project neglected to mention what I see as a huge advantage to using swarm-intelligence: graceful degradation. That is, in most common machines and software, if a single part breaks down, the effects on the systems functioning can be catastrophic. However in other systems, such as a neural network for example, the deterioration of a section of the system will not lead to a total loss of function -the sytem will degrade gracefully. It seems to me a reasonable assumption that this will apply similarly to swarms, so long as there aren't key robots whose existence is essential to the proper functioning of the system.
This sounds like the Rodney Brooks part of Fast Cheap and Out of Control.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
So, until I had a VERY clear understanding of the of the behavoural limits of a "collective intelligence" system, I'd be careful of getting overly optimistic about where I could apply it.
I'd certainly test and study the living hell out of it before employing it in a situation where I could experience "mission critical failures".
Another book for the (ant) pile is Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson.
All out of bubblegum...
I clicked on the link, "cool little robots called U-bots", and found much to my suprise, that it loaded right up, and wasn't slashdotted, apparently due to a lack of interest. Anyway, they show little robots sorting things, and from the pictures, it seems that they have a looong way to go, getting the colored pucks sorted correctly. Perhaps this is a picture of when they started the task, and we will eventually be treated to a picture of the finished sorting project.
I absolutely agree. I don't have the reference, but it's a known fact, that the message, how many new workers and soldiers have to be breed (the ratio), is being transmitted by hormones/pheromones while cross-feeding. That means, that on the second day, the composition of the population has adapted itself a bit to the new requirements. There's no need to call on a mysterious collective mind for explaining this! Give it an ant's lifetime (about a month?) and the time for coping with a destroyed nest will be back to the initial value.
when miscooked, they resemble a boot!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Atleast they be comforted by the fact they dont have to read these blogs. Come on...
Life is too short for a 40 hour work week.
I'd wager that the information content of a typical ant-trail is greater than that of the typical slashdot post. It may not seem like it to us, because we don't place as much value on things like "go left around this rock" as we do on things like "I soviet Russia the rocks go left around you!" but from an information-theory standpoint the ants have us beaten hands down.
--MarkusQ