[HN Gopher] Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges
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Army ants use collective intelligence to build bridges
Author : raybb
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-11-22 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| chfritz wrote:
| Impressive! A video I found, showing what that looks like in
| action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BdjxYUdJS8
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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_algori...
| uoaei wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| raattgift wrote:
| (Fire) Ant rafts are very cool:
|
| 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...
|
| (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>).
|
| Some 2021 CU Boulder work:
|
| 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>)
|
| Another recent study of ant raft dynamics from a physics
| perspective:
|
| 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
|
| Also really cool are the structures made by burrowing ants <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
|
| 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 (this is a great video
| for seeing a number of ant mounds that are "only" about 150cm
| tall).
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| 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
|
| I'm also trying to program a digital ant farm: https://ant.care/
| (code: 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 :)
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