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