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Alife Digest Number 003
Artificial Life Digest, Number 3
Friday, March 9th 1990
Issue's Topics:
army ants
army ants
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 90 12:25 PST
From: Craig W. Reynolds <cwr@white.sww.symbolics.com>
Subject: army ants
Back on February 17th, Rudy Rucker asked about Artificial Life studies of
ants. Several people contributed literature citations on real ants, and I
wanted to add one more. Later Rucker asked "why ants?" and Mike Travers
(creator of AGAR, an animal construction kit (demoed at ALife II)) replied:
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 90 23:34 EST
From: Michael Travers <mt@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
...I'm interested in modeling cooperative behavior in general, and ants
were a good place to start...
(Similarly, my interest in cooperative behavior lead me to work on flocks.)
...In my modeling system, there is a loose but aesthetically pleasing
similarity between the group behavior of ants and the group behavior of
the behavioral modules (agents) within a single ant brain...
This theme, and the emergence of complex behavior from independent agents
linked by communication, are discussed in a very readable article a year
ago:
"Army Ants: A Collective Intelligence" by Nigel R. Franks
in American Scientist, March-April 1989, pages 138-145.
Author's address: Nigel R. Franks, School of Biological Sciences,
University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, England.
The article includes a lot of entomological information about the life
cycle of army ants, describes some computer simulations of their foraging
behavior, and discusses the view of an ant colony as a single organism. An
organism capable of some rather astounding collective behaviors. About the
the "intellectual capacity" of an ant colony he remarks:
"The processing power of the human brain is the result of the wiring
together of 100,000,000,000 neurons, one of which alone could not
process the simplest thought. Similarly, problem solving by army ant
colonies is achieved through communication among some 500,000 workers,
each of which has fewer than 100,000 neurons."
I couldn't help but carry out the multiplication and note that such an ant
colony would have just about half as many neurons as a human being.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 90 16:31 EST
From: Allan C. Wechsler <ACW@yukon.scrc.symbolics.com>
Subject: army ants
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 90 12:25 PST
From: Craig W. Reynolds <cwr@WHITE.SWW.Symbolics.COM>
Back on February 17th, Rudy Rucker asked about Artificial Life studies of
ants. Several people contributed literature citations on real ants, and I
wanted to add one more. Later Rucker asked "why ants?" and Mike Travers
(creator of AGAR, an animal construction kit (demoed at ALife II)) replied:
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 90 23:34 EST
From: Michael Travers <mt@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
...I'm interested in modeling cooperative behavior in general, and ants
were a good place to start...
(Similarly, my interest in cooperative behavior lead me to work on flocks.)
...In my modeling system, there is a loose but aesthetically pleasing
similarity between the group behavior of ants and the group behavior of
the behavioral modules (agents) within a single ant brain...
This theme, and the emergence of complex behavior from independent agents
linked by communication, are discussed in a very readable article a year
ago:
"Army Ants: A Collective Intelligence" by Nigel R. Franks
in American Scientist, March-April 1989, pages 138-145.
Author's address: Nigel R. Franks, School of Biological Sciences,
University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, England.
The article includes a lot of entomological information about the life
cycle of army ants, describes some computer simulations of their foraging
behavior, and discusses the view of an ant colony as a single organism. An
organism capable of some rather astounding collective behaviors. About the
the "intellectual capacity" of an ant colony he remarks:
"The processing power of the human brain is the result of the wiring
together of 100,000,000,000 neurons, one of which alone could not
process the simplest thought. Similarly, problem solving by army ant
colonies is achieved through communication among some 500,000 workers,
each of which has fewer than 100,000 neurons."
I couldn't help but carry out the multiplication and note that such an ant
colony would have just about half as many neurons as a human being.
Hofstadter flamed on and on about the anthill analogy in GEBaEGB. There
was a whole dialog about Aunt Hillary.
Even though an ant colony has a rank-10 neuron count, like ours, the
synapse speed is between 2 and 4 orders of magnitude slower. So our
"event rate" has rank 13 or so, while the anthill's is about rank 10.
You would have to replay a film of an anthill with a rank-3 speedup in
order to see it "thinking".
Has anybody filmed ants with that kind of time-lapse?
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