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Robot Swarm Behavior Suggests Forgetting May Be Important To Cultural Evolution
Hallie Siegel writes: Can we learn about human cultural evolution by studying how group behaviour in robots evolves? Researchers in the Artificial Culture Project are trying to do just that. Prof. Alan Winfield from the Bristol Robotics Lab discusses his latest research on modelling the process by which cultural memes develop in robots when they pass learned behaviours to other robots in their group. Some interesting findings suggest imitation noise (ie. when the behaviour isn't learned perfectly) and forgetfulness (i.e. when the robot has only limited memory of the behaviours it is trying to imitate) lead to stronger cultural memes in the robot behaviour.
They may have crap memory but they have good pheromone receptors. All she was doing was forcing the ant to strengthen the path signal.
On a random side note, we have fairly large ants (1/2 inch) around here that make these 6 foot diameter circles cleared of all material. 30 or so years ago I sat with a six pack and watched them for hours on end. It was kind of fascinating.
Some percentage (presumably >50%) of the ants seemed to be driven to take material from inside the mound and deposit it outside the mound.
Some percentage (presumably 50%) seemed to be driven to pick up some material from outside and deposit it inside (probably MBAs).
Some were lazy and would either drop or pick up material just a few inches from the hole, some a few feet and some adventurous souls would wander 10 to 20 feet away.
The result was a net movement of material from inside the hole and a distribution of material that was maximized around the whole and tapering to nearly zero about 3 feet from the hole. Given monsoonal rains that tapering pretty much ensures the hole is high enough above the local ground level that flooding is rare.
Bloody inefficient but they got there.