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Of Ants and Robots

Posted by Zonk on from the both-pretty-much-work-the-same dept.

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?"

7 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Squid... by th1ckasabr1ck · · Score: 4, Informative
    ... are also far more intelligent than the average human being realizes.

    There's a good article on their learning process here.

  2. Autonomous Small Robot Behavior by KingOfTheNerds · · Score: 4, Informative

    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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  3. Godel, Escher, Bach by coinreturn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  4. Re:Good example of emergent behavior by MyIS · · Score: 3, Informative
    The use of word "emergent" here means that it "emerges" from very simple building blocks (that's just in case someone thinks it's for emergencies).

    Anywho, any examples of what you provided only reinforce the parent statement. Each ant knows very simple things it can do. When all of them do those things, they do so without a central commanding point. When thousands of such simple things are done in unison, a very complex behaviour emerges, such as building fortifications or harvesting food. The fact that there is no central ant generalissimus to point them around means that it is an emergent behaviour.

    This area of AI is a fascinating one. Games like Grand Theft Auto can exhibit very basic examples of it.

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  5. Phenomenal by delta_avi_delta · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  6. Kelly's Out of Control, Stephenson's Diamond Age by Nova+Express · · Score: 2, Informative
    The idea of emergent behavior arising spontaneously from "dumb" parts was covered extensively in Kevin Kelly's Out of Contol. In fact, I was reading it at the same time as I was reading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and I ended up reading both rather slowly because there was such rich mental resonance between the two (one fact, one fiction) both talking about the same thing.

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  7. Re:Good example of emergent behavior by David_Shultz · · Score: 2, Informative

    I disagree with your refutation that this is an example of emergent behaviour; I believe this is just the type of case where we would want to use the term "emergence". The behaviour that is being described as emergent is the ability of the units to work together to exhibit some sort of collectively intelligent behaviour, as if they were being guided by some sort of overseer. However, the lack of existence of any such overseer leads us to call this behaviour emergent -it emerges as a result of the individual units and the way they interact. This is precisely the same way we use the term "emergence" when talking about neural nets. There are very simple artificial neurons, and yet the behaviour of the system can seem quite advanced. This behaviour is in no way programmed into the nodes themselves -it emerges as a result of the way they interact. The fact that there is a "collective idea" about how to solve the problem doesn't mean it is not emergent behaviour, because we could say the same thing about neural nets. If that were the case, then there would be no need for the term "emergence" at all. However, this wouldn't seem right at all, since we don't really have any better way to describe what happens when a collection of input/ouput nodes is able to somehow accurately predict English past tense (among other nifty things neural nets can do). Your statement about how chemical trails don't "explain their ability to work out the logistics on the fly". Hits directly on this issue. Of course the ants can't work out the logistics of the problem -they couldn't even understand it if the answer were given to them. However, the collective group of ants can be uncontroversially described as "working out" the logistics of the problem. This should strike you as odd, and is exactly why we would want to talk about emergent behaviour in this case. The same thought can be applied to the complex structures that the army ants can build.