[HN Gopher] The ants go marching methodically
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The ants go marching methodically
Author : shsachdev
Score : 49 points
Date : 2023-07-08 14:03 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.arizona.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.arizona.edu)
| raattgift wrote:
| Ant rafts are also very interesting.
|
| Additionally, ants can show a sort of fluid motion.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016658108 [2011]
|
| https://news.gatech.edu/news/2014/06/12/going-inside-ant-raf...
| [2014]
|
| https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/Ants_as_Fluids.html [images and
| videos]
|
| Ant mills are also interesting behaviour.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
| ryanblakeley wrote:
| I would have been more surprised to learn that they do a truly
| random walk search.
|
| They lay down pheromones to create trails, isn't that part of the
| answer to how they avoid crossing paths?
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| In the books Children of Time and the sequels (Children of Ruin
| and Children of Memory), when Dr Kern's human body is destroyed
| she ends up being existing as an artificial intelligence in
| multiple systems, one being traditional software and another as
| an ant swarm that can process information and carry data (her
| emulated self in this case).
|
| The ants in the book are slightly "uplifted" as a species but are
| still just ants, a species subordinated to the uplifted spider-
| arachnid species.
| palata wrote:
| Super cool! Yet another example showing that animals are more
| complex than we thought :-).
|
| > The researchers also say that the ants' movement could someday
| be used to inform the design of autonomous swarms of robots that
| perform search and rescue missions in disaster areas or explore
| landscapes on other worlds.
|
| Can we stop with the default "it could be useful for search and
| rescue in disaster areas"? That's the default "I don't see an
| application, let me just find an extreme case to justify my
| research".
|
| There is no need to justify it: learning about ants is
| interesting on its own, and so is building a new robot.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They are just putting a kind face on it. Search and rescue
| isn't much different from search and destroy, which is the real
| goal and how they will sell it to military buyers.
| mhb wrote:
| Reading the cynical view that the real goal of x is
| military/harm/etc. is also pretty tiresome.
| palata wrote:
| I don't think so. They are just trying to justify why they do
| that kind of research, in the fear that people won't
| understand "we do research in order to understand more".
| MochaDen wrote:
| Here's the PDF of the paper:
| https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(22)02189-7.pdf
|
| Lot's of interesting stuff -- especially how they coordinate
| their searches (perhaps with the use of chemical trails). It
| would be nice to expand the data set and try to do some analysis
| to see how close to optimal the strategy is...
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| yay, ants! A few thoughts:
|
| - The overall idea passes the smell test. It makes sense that
| covering already explored ground is wasteful and walking in a way
| that minimizes that would be beneficial.
|
| - Ants are known to store a vector from their current position to
| their nest so that they can walk a relatively straight path back
| home. I wonder if this vector is used to limit the chances of
| walking back onto a recent path, too?
|
| - I learned a while ago that not all ants rely on pheromone
| trails to food discovered via exploration. For example, seed
| foraging ants do not rely on food pheromone trails. This is
| because there's a 1:1 between ant and seed and the location of
| fallen seeds is fairly randomized. So, a trail would only be
| misguiding. Modified walking behavior seems related to this -
| it's all about optimizing rate of food brought back to the nest.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Zooming out the ant colony is almost like a life form with
| individual ants as cells.
|
| I sometimes wonder about whether humans are a cell-like life-form
| for our larger civilizations and whether any civilization has
| consciousness of some sort.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Yes, if you keep bees, you find that almost every action you
| take kills at least a few of them, and sometimes a few hundred
| for varroa mite sampling. It's a bit less worrying if you think
| about them more as cells of a distributed organism. Also, they
| will instantly sacrifice themselves for their hives without
| hesitation.
|
| The closest human analog would probably be more like a tribe.
| stillbourne wrote:
| Now that stupid song is stuck in my head, thanks a lot...
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Which song? When the Saints Go Over There?
| mgsouth wrote:
| The ants go marching methodically, hurrah, hurrah!
|
| The ants go marching methodically, hurrah, hurrah!
|
| Avoid they do, to a large degree
|
| Excessively creating entropy
|
| Amazing ent-mol-ogy
|
| As ants go marching methodically
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