4 ms·

Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges

97 points by raybb 3y ago

chfritz 3y ago
Impressive! A video I found, showing what that looks like in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BdjxYUdJS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BdjxYUdJS8
gyrate 3y ago
[dead]
SoftTalker 3y ago
The "ant algorithm" has been used for a long time to solve "shortest path" type problems, it's not really intelligence just evolved behavior. Granted there is probably a fuzzy line between the two at some point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...
- uoaei 3y ago
  > Granted there is probably a fuzzy line between the two at some point. If we find a sharp definition of such a line we will know there is truly a difference. Personally though my bet is there is no such line.
- Simon_ORourke 3y ago
  I once mentioned using ACO to a former (mostly dumb, non-technical) manager and was nearly laughed out of the room. Her misapprehension was that to solve the particular problem at hand, which I think was some routing issue for support crews in a utility company, that we'd use actual ants!
  - spiritplumber 3y ago
    Anthill Inside
    - taneq 3y ago
      Out Of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  What's this—an algorithm of ants?
raattgift 3y ago
(Fire) Ant rafts are very cool: https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/The_Ant_Raft.html https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/The_Ant_Raft.html ("ants as fluids" linked at the top of that page grabbed my attention a few years ago; myrmycology meets physics, rather than "just" the robotics angle - see again a few paragraphs further below) An article about Nathan Mlot's work, vintage 2011: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fire-ants-assemble-into-living-waterproof-rafts https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fire-ants... (Outcomes for the ants are sadly not always great in Hu's lab at GATech, e.g. the ones who died in a CT scanner: <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.15400 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.15400>). Some 2021 CU Boulder work: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/03/02/fire-ant-rafts https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/03/02/fire-ant-rafts (and their "Emergent Behavior in Fire Ants", <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrLc-uDv7GU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrLc-uDv7GU>) Another recent study of ant raft dynamics from a physics perspective: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2021.0213 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2021.021... (Also, ants are small: "To conduct experiments, we collected 3–10 g of worker ants (or approx. 3000–10 000 ants)") Another interesting but somewhat sadder behaviour in ants is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill Also really cool are the structures made by burrowing ants <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#/media/File:Walter_R._Tschinkel_and_Pogonomyrmex_badius_nest_cast.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#/media/File:Walter_...>, but the eusocial insects who are the builders most interesting (in a casual sense) to me are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound-building_termites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound-building_termites Their constructions are individually incredible, and there are so many of them. ("... in northeast Brazil ... about 200 million termite mounts spread over an area the size of Great Britain. Some of the mounds are 3m (10 ft) tall and 10 m (33 ft) wide and they are spaced about 20m (66 ft) apart. Underneath the mounds are networks of tunnels ... radioactive dating on 11 mounds ... youngest mound was 690 years old. The oldest was at least 3,820 years and possibly more than twice that"). If we could sensibly communicate, I wonder what they would make of human skyscrapers, and whether they think of themselves as living in arcologies. Sadly, they have an enemy that makes Godzilla seem tame. Thirty-five thousand "urban" victims a day per giant anteater: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v0vc4 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v0vc4 (this is a great video for seeing a number of ant mounds that are "only" about 150cm tall).
SeanAnderson 3y ago
If you find this cool, you might find some other ant behaviors cool! I tried compiling the best I could find here - https://www.reddit.com/r/anterestingasfuck https://www.reddit.com/r/anterestingasfuck I'm also trying to program a digital ant farm: https://ant.care/ https://ant.care/ (code: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/) I really want to figure out how to have ants form bridges/towers to navigate gaps. It's on the roadmap for long-term goals, but there's a lot more to go in the short-term :) Above ground view where the ants leave the nest and collect food using pheromone trails is the next major feature coming up! If you want to talk shop about ants, or help me tinker with code, discord link is in my profile :)
- factormeta 3y ago
  >I'm also trying to program a digital ant farm: https://ant.care/ https://ant.care/ Totally off topic, but your domain reminded me of: https://antville.org https://antville.org JS on the server-side (On JVM since the late 90's)
  - SeanAnderson 3y ago
    Huh, cool. Thanks for sharing! Do you know why it's called antville?
- mxsjoberg 3y ago
  > I'm also trying to program a digital ant farm: https://ant.care/ https://ant.care/ (code: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/) this is really cool!
  - SeanAnderson 3y ago
    Hey thanks! :) Just my lil pet project, heh.
- sco1 3y ago
  My favorite ant behavior is that many tree-dwelling species will actively glide back towards the trunk if they're dislodged so they're less likely to depart the tree entirely. There's a few papers on the topic, this article has some videos :) https://insider.si.edu/2011/06/lofty-experiments-with-gliding-ants-reveals-secrets-of-their-unusual-flight/ https://insider.si.edu/2011/06/lofty-experiments-with-glidin... I didn't see it when I searched, so apologies if I overlooked it.
Nadeem091 3y ago
[flagged]
brandall10 3y ago
Swarm Intelligence is the academic field of study of this going on over 30 years now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Why don't autonomous vehicles use swarm intelligence? Why are the companies trying to make a sufficiently advanced AI for each car, isolated from others, instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_robotics ?
  - thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
    The car will go on the road with cars, people and animals outside of its control. Either it copes or somebody dies. Simple as
    - throwaway60703 3y ago
      Also bicycles, motorbikes, e-scooters, trams, trains, runaway objects... I always thought that the city itself could be part of the swarm system. Roadside sensors could broadcast information to all relevant participants - such as "emergency vehicle incoming, move to the right lane, vehicles ID 123, 456 and 789 stop immediately" or "danger - static object at 45th km", or even "slow down/speed up to 60 km/h to optimize traffic flow".
      - cratermoon 3y ago
        In the science fiction of my youth, where roads or similar systems existed, there were cases where the infrastructure was part of the autonomous vehicle system. It was often car-exclusive, never mentioning pedestrians, mobility devices, or anything that wasn't motorized, but it was an interesting bit of speculation.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      > Either it copes or somebody dies In what way does introducing swarm intelligence preclude coping?
Anon84 3y ago
This kind of behavior has resulted in an amazing class of “Swarm Intelligence” algorithms that somehow never gained widespread adoption. The classic SFI reference that I invested some time working through a few years ago is: https://amzn.to/3GdKJ9o https://amzn.to/3GdKJ9o
DasCorCor 3y ago
I wonder what ant basic training is like…
wodenokoto 3y ago
So a brain is "just" a bunch of neurons communicating, and while no single neuron is intelligent, the whole is intelligent. And ants exhibit somewhat intelligent behaviour as a whole, while none of them are themselves something we consider intelligent. I think this is super interesting and we can go completely off the rails taking this to its logical extremes. Like, the entire planet earth is an intelligence that arises from all interactions between all living things on the planet. In this sense, the speed of thought must be considered extremely slow, with even the most minute decision taking decades if not centuries. There is a theory of consciences (using theory very lightly) that says that conscience is an inherent property of the universe (like gravity) and that any and all systems has conscience. Most of these are not recognizable by conscience humans (although we all seem to agree that we have a sub-conscience, so we are open to the concept of different types of consciences). "Waking up: a guide to spirituality without religion" has a good chapter on this, where he starts with how people who've had their corpus callosum cut, and through experiments we can see that the two halves work independent, but the person is unaware of this. Their experience is still one conscience, even though their do things or know things that is not apparent to the conscience that outsiders generally would communicate to. He then goes on to argue how there can be multiple consciences that are unaware that they are "trapped" and not in complete control. The author is not the only one to bring out this argument, but I thought it was well put in that book. I really like this theory, while at the same time considering pretty far out.
- ttt11199907 3y ago
  Conscious/consciousness. I like the thought experiment though!
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    Thanks for doing the dirty ;) Conscience conscious aha
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    I was just proud I spelled conscience correctly.
- 3y ago
Obscurity4340 3y ago
What is this—an army for ants?
AllegedAlec 3y ago
ctrl-f "Hofstadter" => 0 results I'm disappointed.
- yamrzou 3y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - AllegedAlec 3y ago
    If you're talking about collective intelligence, particularly about intelligence emerging from the colaboration of simple entities working together to form larger structures that feed back on the simple entities, you're awfully close to Hofstadter's Strange Loops.

97 points by raybb 3y ago

Impressive! A video I found, showing what that looks like in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BdjxYUdJS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BdjxYUdJS8

gyrate 3y ago

[dead]

SoftTalker 3y ago

The "ant algorithm" has been used for a long time to solve "shortest path" type problems, it's not really intelligence just evolved behavior. Granted there is probably a fuzzy line between the two at some point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...

uoaei 3y ago
> Granted there is probably a fuzzy line between the two at some point. If we find a sharp definition of such a line we will know there is truly a difference. Personally though my bet is there is no such line.
Simon_ORourke 3y ago
I once mentioned using ACO to a former (mostly dumb, non-technical) manager and was nearly laughed out of the room. Her misapprehension was that to solve the particular problem at hand, which I think was some routing issue for support crews in a utility company, that we'd use actual ants!
- spiritplumber 3y ago
  Anthill Inside
  - taneq 3y ago
    Out Of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
What's this—an algorithm of ants?

raattgift 3y ago

(Fire) Ant rafts are very cool: https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/The_Ant_Raft.html https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/The_Ant_Raft.html ("ants as fluids" linked at the top of that page grabbed my attention a few years ago; myrmycology meets physics, rather than "just" the robotics angle - see again a few paragraphs further below) An article about Nathan Mlot's work, vintage 2011: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fire-ants-assemble-into-living-waterproof-rafts https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fire-ants... (Outcomes for the ants are sadly not always great in Hu's lab at GATech, e.g. the ones who died in a CT scanner: <https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.15400 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.15400>). Some 2021 CU Boulder work: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/03/02/fire-ant-rafts https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/03/02/fire-ant-rafts (and their "Emergent Behavior in Fire Ants", <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrLc-uDv7GU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrLc-uDv7GU>) Another recent study of ant raft dynamics from a physics perspective: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2021.0213 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2021.021... (Also, ants are small: "To conduct experiments, we collected 3–10 g of worker ants (or approx. 3000–10 000 ants)") Another interesting but somewhat sadder behaviour in ants is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill Also really cool are the structures made by burrowing ants <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#/media/File:Walter_R._Tschinkel_and_Pogonomyrmex_badius_nest_cast.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony#/media/File:Walter_...>, but the eusocial insects who are the builders most interesting (in a casual sense) to me are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound-building_termites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound-building_termites Their constructions are individually incredible, and there are so many of them. ("... in northeast Brazil ... about 200 million termite mounts spread over an area the size of Great Britain. Some of the mounds are 3m (10 ft) tall and 10 m (33 ft) wide and they are spaced about 20m (66 ft) apart. Underneath the mounds are networks of tunnels ... radioactive dating on 11 mounds ... youngest mound was 690 years old. The oldest was at least 3,820 years and possibly more than twice that"). If we could sensibly communicate, I wonder what they would make of human skyscrapers, and whether they think of themselves as living in arcologies. Sadly, they have an enemy that makes Godzilla seem tame. Thirty-five thousand "urban" victims a day per giant anteater: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v0vc4 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v0vc4 (this is a great video for seeing a number of ant mounds that are "only" about 150cm tall).

SeanAnderson 3y ago

If you find this cool, you might find some other ant behaviors cool! I tried compiling the best I could find here - https://www.reddit.com/r/anterestingasfuck https://www.reddit.com/r/anterestingasfuck I'm also trying to program a digital ant farm: https://ant.care/ https://ant.care/ (code: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/) I really want to figure out how to have ants form bridges/towers to navigate gaps. It's on the roadmap for long-term goals, but there's a lot more to go in the short-term :) Above ground view where the ants leave the nest and collect food using pheromone trails is the next major feature coming up! If you want to talk shop about ants, or help me tinker with code, discord link is in my profile :)

factormeta 3y ago
>I'm also trying to program a digital ant farm: https://ant.care/ https://ant.care/ Totally off topic, but your domain reminded me of: https://antville.org https://antville.org JS on the server-side (On JVM since the late 90's)
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  Huh, cool. Thanks for sharing! Do you know why it's called antville?
mxsjoberg 3y ago
> I'm also trying to program a digital ant farm: https://ant.care/ https://ant.care/ (code: https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants/) this is really cool!
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  Hey thanks! :) Just my lil pet project, heh.
sco1 3y ago
My favorite ant behavior is that many tree-dwelling species will actively glide back towards the trunk if they're dislodged so they're less likely to depart the tree entirely. There's a few papers on the topic, this article has some videos :) https://insider.si.edu/2011/06/lofty-experiments-with-gliding-ants-reveals-secrets-of-their-unusual-flight/ https://insider.si.edu/2011/06/lofty-experiments-with-glidin... I didn't see it when I searched, so apologies if I overlooked it.

Nadeem091 3y ago

[flagged]

brandall10 3y ago

Swarm Intelligence is the academic field of study of this going on over 30 years now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

cratermoon 3y ago
Why don't autonomous vehicles use swarm intelligence? Why are the companies trying to make a sufficiently advanced AI for each car, isolated from others, instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_robotics ?
- thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
  The car will go on the road with cars, people and animals outside of its control. Either it copes or somebody dies. Simple as
  - throwaway60703 3y ago
    Also bicycles, motorbikes, e-scooters, trams, trains, runaway objects... I always thought that the city itself could be part of the swarm system. Roadside sensors could broadcast information to all relevant participants - such as "emergency vehicle incoming, move to the right lane, vehicles ID 123, 456 and 789 stop immediately" or "danger - static object at 45th km", or even "slow down/speed up to 60 km/h to optimize traffic flow".
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      In the science fiction of my youth, where roads or similar systems existed, there were cases where the infrastructure was part of the autonomous vehicle system. It was often car-exclusive, never mentioning pedestrians, mobility devices, or anything that wasn't motorized, but it was an interesting bit of speculation.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > Either it copes or somebody dies In what way does introducing swarm intelligence preclude coping?

Anon84 3y ago

This kind of behavior has resulted in an amazing class of “Swarm Intelligence” algorithms that somehow never gained widespread adoption. The classic SFI reference that I invested some time working through a few years ago is: https://amzn.to/3GdKJ9o https://amzn.to/3GdKJ9o

DasCorCor 3y ago

I wonder what ant basic training is like…

wodenokoto 3y ago

So a brain is "just" a bunch of neurons communicating, and while no single neuron is intelligent, the whole is intelligent. And ants exhibit somewhat intelligent behaviour as a whole, while none of them are themselves something we consider intelligent. I think this is super interesting and we can go completely off the rails taking this to its logical extremes. Like, the entire planet earth is an intelligence that arises from all interactions between all living things on the planet. In this sense, the speed of thought must be considered extremely slow, with even the most minute decision taking decades if not centuries. There is a theory of consciences (using theory very lightly) that says that conscience is an inherent property of the universe (like gravity) and that any and all systems has conscience. Most of these are not recognizable by conscience humans (although we all seem to agree that we have a sub-conscience, so we are open to the concept of different types of consciences). "Waking up: a guide to spirituality without religion" has a good chapter on this, where he starts with how people who've had their corpus callosum cut, and through experiments we can see that the two halves work independent, but the person is unaware of this. Their experience is still one conscience, even though their do things or know things that is not apparent to the conscience that outsiders generally would communicate to. He then goes on to argue how there can be multiple consciences that are unaware that they are "trapped" and not in complete control. The author is not the only one to bring out this argument, but I thought it was well put in that book. I really like this theory, while at the same time considering pretty far out.

ttt11199907 3y ago
Conscious/consciousness. I like the thought experiment though!
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  Thanks for doing the dirty ;) Conscience conscious aha
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  I was just proud I spelled conscience correctly.
3y ago

Obscurity4340 3y ago

What is this—an army for ants?

AllegedAlec 3y ago

ctrl-f "Hofstadter" => 0 results I'm disappointed.

yamrzou 3y ago
Could you elaborate?
- AllegedAlec 3y ago
  If you're talking about collective intelligence, particularly about intelligence emerging from the colaboration of simple entities working together to form larger structures that feed back on the simple entities, you're awfully close to Hofstadter's Strange Loops.