13 ms·
Ant mill
- perihelions 5y agoHow would you modify ant logic to fix this bug?
- TranquilMarmot 5y agoMake a random ant take a random deviation from the phermone trail every few hours
- avianlyric 5y agoWouldn’t be enough to form pheromone trail strong enough to cause other ants to follow. At best it would just cause ant mills to slowly bleed ants into their surroundings where individuals are at a high risk of predation or simply becoming lost and starving anyway. At worst they follow a random path back into the ant mill.
- TranquilMarmot 5y agoIf it's truly a "death spiral" aren't they all going to die anyway? The off chance that one breaks the loop and finds it back to the colony seems better than just infinitely going in a loop. But I'm no ant entomologist haha
- avianlyric 5y agoYou should watch the videos of these things. They have thousands of individual ants in them, sure having one or two break away and making it back is better than zero. But it’s better in the same way that zero rice falling out of bag is better than one or two grains falling out, zero is definitely better, but nobody bothers to pickup dropped grains of rice.
- saint_angels 5y agofollowing unrewarding pheromone trail for too long could trigger a timeout and walk in the random direction. Then search for a new trail. Even better if an ant could just return to the last visited anthill on timeout
- marcosdumay 5y agoI'm sure you will get enough problems with the definition of "unrewarding" and time control to make the change a net loss. How stable is the travel speed of ants anyway? Because trails do change form all the time.
- ummwhat 5y agoHow can you fix bugs and still have ants?
- neogodless 5y agoYou don't squash the bugs... you just get the bugs to result in the desired behavior.
- marcosdumay 5y agoYou are fixing the bugs, not eliminating them.
- nescioquid 5y agoIt's not a bug, it's an hymenoptera! As a comic in all seriousness, though, I would imagine any search strategy that avoids a local maximum could be useful, such as other siblings have pointed out. But I wonder if the ants even have a way of detecting they are trapped in a local maximum. If the signal detection is simply based on the strength of the signal, I don't know how they could detect the trap. If the pheromones of each ant were somewhat different, and if ants have memory -- maybe that's what would be required. Otherwise if all ants just take random walks deviating from the signal, would you expect them to become isolated, or simply form a more elaborate ant mill whose position changes until the path to the nest is found or they become exhausted?
- perihelions 5y agoIdea: spend one neuron to track how often the ant thinks it's turning right (left). The input could be differential motion between sets of legs, or an internal accelerometer (if it exists). It takes very little storage to track an exponential moving average (just one persistent variable), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average#Exponential_moving_average https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average#Exponential_mov... If the average "winding number" goes very high over a period of some minutes, then you're probably moving in circles. But then there's this failure mode: figure-8 loops...
- mFixman 5y agoWhat if an ant is trying to go up a steep mound in a spiral?
- perihelions 5y agoThen it's being an idiot. Ants can easily climb vertical walls (and trees).
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoThey can even travel fully upside-down on my ceilings. Cliff overhangs are no obstacle for them.
- maxbond 5y agoI have seen figure-8 ant mills on YouTube, fwiw. It involved a "going underground" step, eg, go through a tunnel, pop out, turn and walk over the tunnel, turn and go back into the tunnel. I'll see if I can find it again.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoOr ants on a Klein bottle.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- donkarma 5y agoi would probably try to attack the root cause
- lultimouomo 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection The tortoise and hare algorithm seems well suited!
- kyberias 5y agoBut tortoise and hare have much more complex brains!
- maxbond 5y agoI would wager that, if you get a large ant mill going, the level of pheromone signal would become enormous and be sustained for as long as the mill is going and the ants are alive. So, a sustained, very high level of pheromones might trigger some kind of break-glass response where they invert their logic and seek _low_ levels of pheromone, seek if get _off_ of their track. Or perhaps they begin to erase the pheromone trail (if they can). Which breaks the ant mill, but now you have to get back to having a functioning colony. Don't know how that would work.
- saint_angels 5y agorespect for arriving at a local maxima and calling it a day
- convolutionart 5y agoCan we determine if it's a bug instead of a worst case scenario for an optimal algorithm?
- ricksunny 5y agoCue projections of the ant mill metaphor onto human society.
- mistermann 5y agoThe "See also" section has some similar phenomena.
- divbzero 5y agoAre there analogs of this behavior in other species? Or in humans?
- jlengrand 5y agoNot what you're searching for but this one is weird as hell : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS45_L8fLLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS45_L8fLLc
- Cupertino95014 5y agoDamn. Comments are turned off. I was really looking forward to reading those.
- sitkack 5y agoDownload the video, repost it with comments on, enjoy your bounty.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 5y ago'Self licking ice cream cone' as I first heard it described is similar, although the currently available definitions have unfortunately oversimplified it.
- 88j88 5y agohumans exhibit this behavior in the corporate setting while following the agile processes but losing the scent of value
- dinvlad 5y agounderrated comment!
- throwaway744678 5y ago
- csours 5y agoAnts are dumb. I would never get caught in something like this. Checks HN Checks YouTube Checks Insta
- saint_angels 5y agoin both cases reward function needs some tweaking
- praptak 5y agobuys NFT because other humans did
- lukifer 5y agoIt's any interesting question whether or not it's rational to invest in a speculative bubble, solely on the basis of everyone else also investing in that same bubble. On a per-transaction basis, each step can be individually rational, even as it contributes to an eventual net loss systemically. Steering clear of such "Keynesian beauty contests" [0] is a curious sort of collective action problem. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
- agumonkey 5y agojust yesterday biking back i ran into a fleet of birds eating bread, as i got close to the first one, he flew away, then the others etc etc I realized that it's probably just a safe heuristic to do what others do. It can lead to lemmings falling off a metaphorical cliff, but I'd bet 10$ our social nature is a direct descendant of that. Even mirroring desires that cause so much troubles in human lives.
- dinvlad 5y agoI find this is both a blessing and a curse of a society (no matter in which animal kingdom). Provides safety when it's needed, and the opposite of safety when followed blindly.
- praptak 5y agoTo me it looks like attempts to axiomatize natural numbers with first order logic. You can assure there's a "zero" and an infinite chain of successors starting from it but you cannot assure there are no cycles disconnected from the chain.
- KhoomeiK 5y agoCan you elaborate on this / provide further reading?
- praptak 5y agoWikipedia page on Peano axioms maybe. Edit/elaborate: First order rules like "no element X has successor(X)=0" and "two distinct elements have two distinct successors" assure there is a chain of successors that starts with zero and does not cycle into itself. This however does not mean that every model is isomorphic to the natural numbers because a cycle of elements separate from this chain does not falsify any of the rules(axioms). So you need an additional rule to stipulate that every element of the set is reachable from zero. To express this you have to go outside first order logic.
- Sniffnoy 5y agoThis is incorrect. You cannot assure that there are no bi-infinite chains disconnected from the starting chain, but you can assure that there no cycles disconnected from the chain. To see this, note that Peano proves that, given x and y, if there exist z and w such that x+z=y and y+w=x, then x=y. Really, introducing natural numbers -- with addition and multiplication -- is overcomplicating this. There's absolutely no multiplication involved here; you could think of this as a purely additive thing, I suppose, but really directed graphs with outdegree 1 (i.e., functions on a set) are a better fit (if you want a simple model like that).
- praptak 5y agoI meant naturals with zero and successor only.
- gumby 5y agoI’m a big fan of decentralizing my code (even within a single process) so that as much as possible a function works on localized state. This ant situation is a good example of the value of a few global variables.
- gumby 5y agoBy the way I was hoping this article would be either a device for milling ants into something useful (food? Varnish?) or a whimsical name for something that stamped out a huge number of small objects. The actual definition turns out to be even more interesting.
- cleansingfire 5y agoI was hoping that the ants were somehow milling food, perhaps using small rocks and sand (or a mutualistic relationship) over time to break it down. If a valuable food source was locked up and could only be accessed this way, I can certainly imagine an ant colony evolving to mill it somehow. They already farm fungus and aphids. I predict a new kind of ant mill will be discovered!
- gumby 5y agoThat would be super cool! Given that we are busy killing off all the vertebrates, perhaps in a few million years their technology will be as advanced as ours. Then the ant archeologists will wonder if these strange giant quadrupedal creatures could have been intelligent, perhaps even enough to have a civilization.
- KhoomeiK 5y agoThe more one looks at the animal kingdom, the more one wonders where the clear demarcators of individuality are. Emergent behaviors like this suggest to me that maybe the ant colony itself is more of an independent organism than any individual ant. Isn't this true of humans too when we rely on entire supply chains for our food, water, and electricity?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kibwen 5y agoSimilar to a fractal, the difference between an organism and a superorganism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism) depends on how close you zoom in. It's easy to think about an ant colony as a superorganism, and from there to think about human civilization as a superorganism, and then the entire Earth's biosphere as a single superorganism. Then you can go the other way and think about how every human body is its own superorganism; your body is composed of approximately as many human cells as non-human cells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome). You are an entire ecosystem.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoThe human body and the ant colony are units of reproduction; an individual ant, like an individual cell, cannot reproduce. Only the colony or the human can do that. Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to reproduce on their own. It is a mistake to generalize from the ant colony to human society, much less to the entire world.
- picture 5y agoWould human reproduction to human societies be similar to mitosis to cells? Or does the unit of reproduction require mixing genes
- 5y ago
- failrate 5y agoAnts are both hardware and software.
- pkdpic 5y agoAssuming the ants are unaware when they are in an ant mill, wouldn't it be naive to assume that we would be able to recognize if/when we were in an equivalent phenomena as humans? I would say no, unless there were similar phenomena documented in a statistical majority of known species and also maybe only if a statistical majority of ants experienced this. It sounds like its super rare. Still, human mill, culture mill, economic mill etc. Brain exploding slack emoji. Favorite HN post of the week.
- syvolt 5y agoAn ant mill seems similar to events that have occurred to humans in the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- madaxe_again 5y agoI would argue that a majority of humans are in a human mill, blindly following the next person, who follows the next person, ad infinitum, and are blind to it. I say this not scornfully, but rather as an outside observer, who having been flicked off the trail by a series of accidents, now observes the same humans passing by, over and over. Or perhaps they’re different humans, but are functionally indistinguishable. Same wants, same needs, same counterproductive and counterintuitive but “normal” decisions and behaviours. A fundamental feature of behaviour in the animal kingdom is mimicry, memetics, whatever you want to call it - and the behaviours which propagate are usually favourable to the gestalt, rather than the individual.
- halpert 5y agoWhat does it mean the follow another human in this context? I went to the store today. I believe I did so by my own free will. I wasn’t aware of anyone else going to the store.
- oceliker 5y ago> An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution. I’m pretty sure I could also get stuck in a loop in a forest if the circular trail is 370m in circumference, let alone the human-sized equivalent of it (which, assuming a human walks at 3 mph, would be 7.5 miles or 12 kilometers)
- panarky 5y agoTo travel 370 meters in 2.5 hours, an ant would have to travel 41 millimeters per second. That seems like a very fast ant.
- bnegreve 5y ago41 mm/s is not fast, according to this website a black ant runs at 80mm/s: https://idswater.com/2019/12/13/how-fast-is-an-ant-in-mph/ https://idswater.com/2019/12/13/how-fast-is-an-ant-in-mph/
- mathattack 5y agoI had to convert. That equals an inch and a half. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen ants scurrying around that fast. May depend on which type of ants. Alternatively - could an ant run a meter in 25 seconds? Seems reasonable. A quick Google search shows some can go upwards of 800mm/sec but they’re outliers. https://www.sciencealert.com/world-s-fastest-ants-clock-855-millimetres-per-second https://www.sciencealert.com/world-s-fastest-ants-clock-855-... Btw - I appreciate that you took the time to check the numbers yourself. Very few people do the math on their own first.
- londons_explore 5y agoI just wonder who marked an individual ant in presumably rough forest terrain, and then watched it for 2.5 hours...
- alisonkisk 5y agoAll you need to do is warch one ant for a minute or few and extrapolate.
- mojomark 5y agoSo, the. followers" enter a do-loop because they somehow got sepearated from the leading foraging group. To me, the interesting question is - how are foraging leaders differentiated from the followers. Seems like the former would have a much more complex set of rules to follow to explore and navigate the uncertaintaies of the world ahead of them.
- travisgriggs 5y agoCan this be generalized as what happens when a feedback loop finds a local maxima? We see these all over, in software and society. What makes this particular phenomena fascinating to me, is that it can be right under our nose, going on around us (because the circles can be big), and we don't realize it. Our regularly observed behavior and model of ants isn't this, and when we see one wandering, we don't realize there might be a bigger thing going on. And then we zoom out and there's this "aha" reveal moment, where we discover a model other than what we thought was going on.
- mizzao 5y agoOne example: the current US healthcare system with providers, insurers (e.g. middlemen), and end users?
- appleflaxen 5y agoIs it a local maxima, or is it a metastable solution? Or are those the same thing, at their root? (this is a legitimate question; I have a very limited math background, and would love to understand the distinctions better, or what variable is being locally maximized, if that's what this is)
- envp 5y agoMetastability and local maximums are the same. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability
- redcalx 5y agoReminds me of the turkey's circling a dead cat video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns5MA69MXuE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns5MA69MXuE
- londons_explore 5y agoIt seems surprising these can happen in nature... There is an efficient no-communication no-memory-required way out of such a cycle... If the feet of every ant slightly smell of 'ant was here', then when that smell gets too strong the ants should stop following one another and walk towards that scent being less strong. Such an 'algorithm' could easily evolve. It uses the same scent and pheromone communication used by ants for lots of other tasks, and there is a strong evolutionary push towards colonies who can escape such spirals.
- convolutionart 5y ago
- cleansingfire 5y agoI'm curious how often this leads to mass death. I suspect that there is some escape from this, or else conditions leading to an ant mill are extremely rare, because it seems evolutionarily expensive. On the other hand nature is profligate with life, and especially bugs. For example perhaps once exhausted to a certain point, the pheromone scent changes to one that signals not to follow.
- jason_pomerleau 5y agoI’ve often used this phenomenon to illustrate that activity is not the same as accomplishment. Movement doesn’t necessarily mean achievement.
- silentsea90 5y agoI feel attacked here.
- slickrick216 5y agoYou see this in incident response. Trying to prove a negative can’t be done to sociopaths standard but if one is in a leadership demands it then analysts go and do it. This leads to a feedback loop. Then entropy kicks over time and the importance of proving the negative dwindles to the point it gets closed. People wonder why all that time was wasted. AARs get written and usually ignored. Time marches on.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoLike when American manufacturers hire an MBA to run the company and they decide to stop manufacturing and do tricks with money in an endless loop until one of those goes wrong and the entire company collapses.
- tzs 5y agoThat reminds me of this sheep loop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifbNL0t31Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifbNL0t31Tw
- JadoJodo 5y agoMy brother got into something similar a few days ago. I was on the phone with him when he saw 3 cars in the drive-thru line at McDonalds on MLK day. He joined the line but by the time he got to the voice box, he realized it was closed (though the exterior lights made it seem as if it were open). By the time he left and went someplace else, the line had grown to 5 or so. He started laughing on his way back home as he drove back by the same McDonald’s and said there were now 15 cars in the line.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- iancmceachern 5y agoI've been one of these ants before. The key is seeing the bigger picture and not just following the ant in front of you.
- anthropodie 5y agoFound this video on reddit[0] and found out that it's a real phenomenon. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/s8mogr/ants_seem_to_be_worhipping_something_here/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/s8mogr/ants_se...