drogoul@lpia4.Berkeley.EDU (Drogoul Alexis 42.28.96.38) (12/13/90)
Hello! I am going to work on modelling some activities of an anthill using reactive agents (under a system called Eco-Problem-Solving). I would like to have all the references on this subject (Did somebody use Distributed Artificial Intelligence to model eco-systems like anthills ? What are the other works on "artificial ethology" ?). Thanks a lot. Alexis DROGOUL LAFORIA - Universite PARIS VI 75232 PARIS CEDEX 05 FRANCE
fostel@eos.ncsu.edu (Gary Fostel) (12/21/90)
Ants fall into a catagory that is probably heavily populated in the world of small scale biology. A great deal of their behavior is controlled by what seem to be simple environmental cues (e.g. the elevation of the ground to avoid wasting energy going uphill) and by a set of temporary cues depositied by other ants as pheromes. The ants follow gradients of certain pheromes and the collective action of the ants following the steady accumulation of the pheromes in the environment together with the facts of the environments layout lead astonishingly enough to copnvergence on a small set of similar observable behaviors. There is a rough anaolgy to neural systems here that is probably closest in very young brains that are still growing connections based on some simple envrionmental cues. The model is, as above, more pervasis then simpy ants and neurons since something like it is at work in specialization during development in general as some cells decide to produce the proteins needed to build a liver and some for a lung based -- at least in part -- on the relative concentration of some biochemical marking agents. This has been shown pretty conclusively in the development of fruit fly larvea anyway. The conditions needed for this rather loose collection of constraints to converge towards well defined structures from such an ergodic soup is quite amazing to me ... but mother nature seems to have the technique well in hand. But on the subject of ants and learning and AI : there's gold in them that hills. Wish you luck digging it out. ----GaryFostel---- Department of Computer Science North Carolina State University
newsgst@sequoia.execu.com (Net News) (12/23/90)
There was a guy at the MIT media lab (I thought was working under Minsky) that was using ants to demonstate some of the principles (there were principles? don't hold me as affirming that) in his society of mind stuff. All I remember is seeing a demo sometime when I was haunting the halls over there (fun!). The little ants (it was graphic) were modelled as far as food finding and trail making behaviour was concerned. Someone might have a better idea on what was happening and I have no idea where the ant guy's work ended. E.O.Wilson's new book on ants is supposed to be really neat. That about exhausting my knowledge on that topic. jj newsgst@execu.com jjoy@lucy.wellesley.edu