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...
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.
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.
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.")
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?
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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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
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
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
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.
"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.
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."
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.
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".