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Of Ants and Robots

Posted by Zonk on Sat Mar 05, 2005 02:56 PM
from the both-pretty-much-work-the-same dept.
Robotics Science
conJunk writes "The BBC has an interesting story about Ants and their leaderless collective behavior. It goes on to describe these cool little robots called U-bots. They have a super-simple instruction set and if you let them loose in a room full of frisbees it looks, to the casual observer, like intelligent and guided work." From the article: "Being small is going to be a problem. So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"
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  • Maybe if we get a whole bunch of stupid FPs together...

  • Neurons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2005, @02:58PM (#11854190)
    Each neuron in our brain is dumb compared to our entire brain.

    Same thing with these ants and these robots..
    • our brain, in fact is pretty dumb, especially if you don't train it for a couple of years after manufacturing one.


      Building 'brains' is easier than training them it seems. In fact, you can do so with absolutely unskilled labour :)

      • Re:Neurons (Score:2, Interesting)

        by tzanger (1575)
        I thought it was common knowlege that ants communicated through scent trails?

          • Re:Neurons (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Oligonicella (659917) on Saturday March 05 2005, @04:27PM (#11854740)
            How about this then? Ants not only leave trails, but when the worker returns to the nest she actively solicits fellows to go back with her with antennae taps and pheromones. Failing to elicit, she may even pick one up and carry it back.

  • Look out... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Avyakata (825132) on Saturday March 05 2005, @02:58PM (#11854191) Homepage Journal
    Unfortunately, you can't get a can of Raid and put an end to a room full of robots when they becme too much of a nuisance...

  • You talking to me? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2005, @02:58PM (#11854192)
    So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?

    Humans manage, except for the smart part.

  • Um... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lord_Dweomer (648696)
    Ok, I skimmed TFA because I didn't understand half of it. From what I gathered though, it seems as if the whole 1000 monkeys on 1000 typewriter things, except the behavior of the group mimicks each other in some ways as they focus on a "task".

    • Not quite. Ants don't really understand cooperation, but their instictive behaivior is such that they end up working together. The U robots have no instructions to cooperate, but those they have make them look like they do.

  • Ob Simpsons (Score:4, Funny)

    by FusionDragon2099 (799857) <fusiondragon2099@gmail.com> on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:00PM (#11854210)
    Will they be sorting tiny screws in space?

  • so.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:00PM (#11854212)
    So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?

    Isn't this a question for elementary school teachers?
  • So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?

    If this wasn't a Saturday morning, I bet I could come up with a really good punchline for this.

  • I for one welcome our U-Bot overlords (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:01PM (#11854217)
    I'd like to remind them that as a trusted Slashdot personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground frisbee caves.

  • Good example of emergent behavior (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dachannien (617929) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:05PM (#11854239)
    This is a good example of emergent behavior - in fact, perhaps an even better example than that of ants, because the fact that ants release a chemical trail to help other ants find sources of food could be considered a form of communication. (It depends how strict you are with your definition of emergence.)

    • "Emergent" behavior? No I dare say that in the case of ants, there is a collective idea about what the problem is, and roughly how to solve it. The details are left to individuals.

      Supplies low? Forage for food. Den flooding? Get the larvea out of the water. Territory being incroached by invaders? Attack.

      Chemical trails might explain how ants know where to go, and roughly what they will do when they get there. It doesn't explain their ability to work out the logistics on the fly.

      A great example of this are army ants. They actually build large, complex structures out of the bodies of their members. There are elaborate assembly and unassembly steps. Chemical markers to not explain how they do it.

      • The use of word "emergent" here means that it "emerges" from very simple building blocks (that's just in case someone thinks it's for emergencies).

        Anywho, any examples of what you provided only reinforce the parent statement. Each ant knows very simple things it can do. When all of them do those things, they do so without a central commanding point. When thousands of such simple things are done in unison, a very complex behaviour emerges, such as building fortifications or harvesting food. The fact that t

  • Squid... (Score:5, Informative)

    by th1ckasabr1ck (752151) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:05PM (#11854240)
    ... are also far more intelligent than the average human being realizes.

    There's a good article on their learning process here [stanford.edu].

  • Here's an idea (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Oswald (235719) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:06PM (#11854243)
    What can be achieved with multiple minimalist robots?"

    Not to put too fine a point on it, but human intelligence comes to mind as one possibility. (I'm assuming neurons count as "minimalist.")

      • It only seems like a waste until you've tried it.

        Implementing real world solutions to simulated problems always brings up quite a number of "interesting" problems. Things you never thought would be obstacles turn out to be nightmares in the real world. And on the flip side. sometimes a quirky solution to a problem presents itself.

        I was working with some friends recently in testing a cross compiler for a robotics platform. They had a simulator and their code worked just fine in it.

        But in the real robo

  • Turing Machines... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EvilTwinSkippy (112490) <[yoda] [at] [etoyoc.com]> on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:11PM (#11854284) Homepage Journal
    And here I tought the fact that complex problems can be broken down and solved by simplistic devices was a founding tenant of computer science.
    • I have no idea why you were modded insightful. Several problems:
      (1) A Turing machine must be designed to solve a particular problem. OK, so there are Universal Turing machines too. Fine. You still need to design an algorithm and find the encoding of a TM which implements it. This is a non-trivial task. (Just think about the complexity of the operations GCC attempts, and consider that C is strictly weaker than Turing machines).
      (2) The Myrmidons, robotic or otherwise, are capable of only finitely ma

  • NanoBots (Score:2, Interesting)

    by spankey51 (804888)
    Research like this will be perfect for future endevours in nanoscale robotics. When little bots are abounding on a truely massive scale, think of the benefits...

    Cheaper, more reliable, and more intelligent in numbers (so to speak.) It sounds like a good way to go about constructing complex organisms from nanoscale machines... Hmmm what does that sound like?
    I'd like to see a simulation of this minimal intelligence on a large scale with, say, 2000 virtual U-Bots.

  • brain (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Khashishi (775369)
    your brain is a bunch of dumb things (neurons) doing something less dumb

  • The same for spiders? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sebastian Jansson (823395) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:17PM (#11854320) Homepage
    Maybe a tad offtopic, but I have for some time thought of spiders and their logic, it would be interesting to see project that spin an artificial net, simulating the thought process of a spider.

    Have anyone seen such a thing?

  • Autonomous Small Robot Behavior (Score:4, Informative)

    by KingOfTheNerds (706852) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:23PM (#11854358) Homepage
    I work with small autonomous robots who accomplish basic tasks by working together. As a computer engineer I handle both the hardare and software, so I understand how they would appear 'smart' and 'guilded'. The trick is all in the programming, so that they work together to complete the task without proper communication. As long as they can react well enough to their surroundings (by reacting to eachother) and know what task they are to accomplish, it will look like they are working together as a guilded collective when really they're independant and autonomous.
    • I remember putting together a mind-storms based robot after getting a kit one Christmas. It was a simple "hit the bumper, back up and turn" algorythem. Only I randomized the amount of time spent backing up and turning.

      People thought it was some sort of sophisticated artificial intelligences. I didn't have the heart to tell them how simple the working really where.

      On that note, I would also like to bring to the attention of the slashdot community the immense body of work that's been done using "the game

  • stigmergy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Antilles (49894) <jpatterson@realt ... m ['er.' in gap]> on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:28PM (#11854386)
    One of the key aspects of ants is changing the local environment via phermone, like temporary registers in a computer, which is then "read" by other ants in a stochastic manner. An example of a monte carlo sim running a ant foraging demo is:

    http://img126.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img126&image=3df or aging12gz.jpg

    One of the top people in this field is Marco Dorigo over in Italy, and he has chaired many conferences on this subject, as well as published a few books. The best book he (along with 2 others) has published so far, imho, is "Swarm Intelligence"

    isbn:0195131592
    http://search.barnesandnoble.co m/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?userid=6926rVVASg&isbn=0195131592&itm=3

    Ive read this one cover to cover, and its been a terrific jump start to apply various aspects of ant properties (search, TSP, emergent task switching, graph partitioning, etc)

  • Rodney Brooks (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gh (68417)
    Rodney Brooks [mit.edu] at MIT has done quite a bit of research in the past in this area quite a few years ago. It seems that the links regarding his projects are currently broken, but do a bit of googling, I'm sure you can find his papers on the subject.

    Cambrian Intelligence [amazon.com] is pretty good book that covers his techniques for AI in robotics. It's essentially a collection of eight early papers by Brooks.

  • An interesting corollory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by carburaettorr (770105) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:29PM (#11854396)
    This has been around in conventional AI for a while. There exists an optimization technique, which goes by the name of Ant Colony Systems (ACS) http://www.geocities.com/fastiland/Teaching/acs/sw arm.html [geocities.com]. This technique uses the observed intuition that ants are often able to find the most optimal path between a food source and the nest without any global all knowing power telling them what it is. The way they do it is by leaving a trail of chemicals (Pheromones) whose odor persists for a while. A lot of ants play it safe and use the trail with the highest pheromone scent, however there are a few rebels who strike out a new path and few which prefer to take paths with lower pheromone concentrations. Thus with the expense of very few ants (agents) the colony as a whole is able to map out the most interesting parts of the state space with a loss of very few individuals and often able to get the most optimal paths. Needless to say this approach works best in bounded state spaces.

    Just wanted to point out how stupid behavior and non-conformism at an individual level can often lead to a vibrant and healthy group and how it has been known to and exploited by computer scientists riding the Moore's law wave.....

  • It would be funny if... (Score:5, Funny)

    by spankey51 (804888) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:30PM (#11854400)
    you made hundreds of thousands of these U-Bots and just let em' go! They'd be everywhere looking for frizbees and it would... you know, become an everyday part of life. Out to dinner with the lady and you have to kick one off of the table because it was trying to take her plate. Eventually it would become commonplace to carry a sidearm with one's self to defend one's family frizbee from an inevitable onslaught of war-mongering (although not really, they only look like they have a purpose) washing machine-looking frizbee sorters... Think of the carnage! U-Bots in the bathroom, in the study, out in the yard duking it out with Fido (and with such a simple algorithm, beating fido with completely unfair strategem like turning the frizbee around in Fido's mouth until either his neck breaks or he lets go!) The more intelligent of us would move to Canada and purchase red frizbees with white centers. As for the U-bots They would have a great fortress made of yellow frizbees. And a queen...

  • Applied Taoism (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EvilTwinSkippy (112490) <[yoda] [at] [etoyoc.com]> on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:32PM (#11854414) Homepage Journal
    Anyone asking about how an entire population can work toward a collective goal ought to read the Tao Te Ching.

    Human too are capable of working on a large, semi-understood goal with individual actors working out the details as they go. We've been doing it for eons. And we don't know why.

  • Scary? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by daniil (775990) * <evilbj8rn@hotmail.com> on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:40PM (#11854462) Journal
    Silly BBC reporter writes: What might really worry us is the most recent discovery made in Professor Franks' Ant Lab. It seems that ants are not just dumb miracles of evolution - they can learn from experience. When you destroy their nest and make them migrate to a new one, they manage it very efficiently, as you would expect. If you repeat the exercise next day, they achieve the same thing - but this time they do it even faster. Now that's scary.

    I can't see what's so scary about it. Just because they can learn to perform a task (a hardwired one?) faster doesn't mean they'll start building foot-proof nests two weeks later, not to mention taking over the world. Yet another journalist has jumped the gun and rushed to greet "our new ant overlords" way too early :7

    • Re:Scary? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2005, @04:04PM (#11854606)
      No, the reason it's scary is that somehow the ants have a memory system. It's not that they just adapt to a new environment, it's that they can somehow collectively remember and apply those past lessons. Social memory is a little scary because you're seeing a "intelligence" forming from very dumb individuals, memory means you can progessively learn faster and faster (of course there is a limit, but the principle is the same).

      This is fascinating stuff - but does anybody else think we're way behind the times? The fact that it's taken us THIS long to figure things like this (that are fairly trivial) is a little disheartening.

      And I'm tired of seeing all this crap only used by researchers - when are we going to get some engineers to start using this stuff? Sure it's applied in phone networks, but who cares? We need more stuff like this in real life products we can BUY and fiddle with... we are so behind where we should be, it's sad.

  • Godel, Escher, Bach (Score:5, Informative)

    by coinreturn (617535) on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:43PM (#11854486)
    See Douglas Hofstadter's seminal book for discussion of ant colonies, AI, emergent behaviour, etc. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465 026567/qid=1110055317/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/103-1941748-8383854?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

  • Phenomenal (Score:4, Informative)

    by delta_avi_delta (813412) <dave@murphy.gmail@com> on Saturday March 05 2005, @03:54PM (#11854565)
    I'm pretty certain I saw this program on (very) late night BBC Open University TV about two years ago. It got me very interested in this sort of behaviour, but the more research I did into insect behaviour, the more apparant it became that some kind of simple pheremone system is actually used in nature to control things. Many swarm intelligence projects now use "Pheromone robotics" to mimic nature that little more closely. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_Intelligence [wikipedia.org]
  • The idea of emergent behavior arising spontaneously from "dumb" parts was covered extensively in Kevin Kelly's Out of Contol. In fact, I was reading it at the same time as I was reading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and I ended up reading both rather slowly because there was such rich mental resonance between the two (one fact, one fiction) both talking about the same thing.

  • subjects suck. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pandaemonium (70120) on Saturday March 05 2005, @04:27PM (#11854738)
    "So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"

    Oh, I don't know. Ask the millions of dumb cells that make up your body. They seem to be doing a pretty good job.
  • So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?

    I can tell you how NOT to do it. Take a look at the U.S. congress, senate and pesidential cabinet and you'll see what happens when a bunch of dumb small things do something stupid on e adaily basis. ;P



  • I think that this is a really important avenue of research but can't help wondering why exactly this project was funded.

    Robotics is of course great fun and can certainly be inspiring but all this was presented (albeit indirectly by a superficial BBC report) as a valid study in terms of what the miniture robots can achieve.

    It doesn't take the 'Milliard Gargantubrain' to work out that all this stuff is better and cheaper simulated on computers. Cellular Automata have in various incarnations been here
  • Q: "So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"

    Isn't that essentially what sociology is about? :)

  • Collective Behavior Can also be Catastrophic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 0x1234 (741699) on Sunday March 06 2005, @02:49AM (#11857606)
    It occurs to me that large social collections can also act in very nasty, self destructive and profoundly stupid ways that an individual generally would'nt (e.g., mob violence, lemming behavior, lynching, 1929 run on banks, Jonestown, on and on.)

    So, until I had a VERY clear understanding of the of the behavoural limits of a "collective intelligence" system, I'd be careful of getting overly optimistic about where I could apply it.

    I'd certainly test and study the living hell out of it before employing it in a situation where I could experience "mission critical failures".

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