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?"

Comments

Um...

[Lord_Dweomer]

Ok, I skimmed TFA because I didn't understand half of it. From what I gathered though, it seems as if the whole 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriter things, except the behavior of the group mimicks each other in some ways as they focus on a "task".

Good example of emergent behavior

[Dachannien]

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.)

Re:Good example of emergent behavior

[EvilTwinSkippy]

"Emergent" behavior? No I dare say that in the case of ants, there is a collective idea about what the problem is, and roughly how to solve it. The details are left to individuals.

Supplies low? Forage for food. Den flooding? Get the larvea out of the water. Territory being incroached by invaders? Attack.

Chemical trails might explain how ants know where to go, and roughly what they will do when they get there. It doesn't explain their ability to work out the logistics on the fly.

A great example of this are army ants. They actually build large, complex structures out of the bodies of their members. There are elaborate assembly and unassembly steps. Chemical markers to not explain how they do it.

Here's an idea

[Oswald]

What can be achieved with multiple minimalist robots?"

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.")

NanoBots

[spankey51]

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.

The same for spiders?

[Sebastian Jansson]

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?

stigmergy

[Antilles]

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:

http://img126.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img126&image=3df or aging12gz.jpg

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.co m/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=6926rVVASg&isbn=0195131592&itm=3

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

[gh]

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.

An interesting corollory

[carburaettorr]

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.....

Applied Taoism

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Anyone asking about how an entire population can work toward a collective goal ought to read the Tao Te Ching.

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.

Obligatory Ant Wars reference

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Scary?

[daniil]

Silly BBC reporter writes: What might really worry us is the most recent discovery made in Professor Franks' Ant Lab. It seems that ants are not just dumb miracles of evolution - they can learn from experience. When you destroy their nest and make them migrate to a new one, they manage it very efficiently, as you would expect. If you repeat the exercise next day, they achieve the same thing - but this time they do it even faster. Now that's scary.

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

Re:Scary?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the reason it's scary is that somehow the ants have a memory system. It's not that they just adapt to a new environment, it's that they can somehow collectively remember and apply those past lessons. Social memory is a little scary because you're seeing a "intelligence" forming from very dumb individuals, memory means you can progessively learn faster and faster (of course there is a limit, but the principle is the same).

This is fascinating stuff - but does anybody else think we're way behind the times? The fact that it's taken us THIS long to figure things like this (that are fairly trivial) is a little disheartening.

And I'm tired of seeing all this crap only used by researchers - when are we going to get some engineers to start using this stuff? Sure it's applied in phone networks, but who cares? We need more stuff like this in real life products we can BUY and fiddle with... we are so behind where we should be, it's sad.

Re:Neurons

[tzanger]

I thought it was common knowlege that ants communicated through scent trails?

Re:Neurons

[Oligonicella]

How about this then? Ants not only leave trails, but when the worker returns to the nest she actively solicits fellows to go back with her with antennae taps and pheromones. Failing to elicit, she may even pick one up and carry it back.

Smart Ants Have Smart Ant Babies

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Another advantage to swarms - graceful degradation

[David_Shultz]

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.

Collective Behavior Can also be Catastrophic

[0x1234]

It occurs to me that large social collections can also act in very nasty, self destructive and profoundly stupid ways that an individual generally would'nt (e.g., mob violence, lemming behavior, lynching, 1929 run on banks, Jonestown, on and on.)

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".