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Robotics Science

Of Ants and Robots 148

Posted by Zonk from the both-pretty-much-work-the-same dept.
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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Of Ants and Robots More

Of Ants and Robots

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  • ....FP. (Score:2, Funny)

    by izakage ( 808061 )
    Maybe if we get a whole bunch of stupid FPs together...

  • Neurons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:58PM (#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 :)

    • Obligatory Ant Wars reference (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      as previously seen on Slashdot. [slashdot.org]
      Ant Wars [ant-wars.com] has a java simulator so you can see your ant state machine in action (click on the play arrow) [ant-wars.com].
    • Every neuron in our body acts just like electric wires transferring signals from one place to another. It cannot be 'justly' compared with ants and robots.
    • Please, each neuron is not independent of each other neuron while each ant is far more independent of the other ants in that you can remove an ant from the collective and it will function on its own. Brain neurons do very little outside the network structure that is established throughout the brain. Neurons have little choice whether they can migrate or operate out of sequence.

      The insight is the realizability of potential through cooperation. Little components, when put together properly yield a myriad of

  • Look out... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Avyakata ( 825132 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:58PM (#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 @03:58PM (#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.

    • Re:Um... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by VoidWraith ( 797276 )
      Sort of, except its a lot less random than monkeys on typewriters. They do have a good idea of what they're doing, its just a lot less of one than what's standard to a robot these days. The goal is to distribute the intelligence so they can still work together and get something done with the efficiency of ants.

      The reason this is good is as he was saying, its a lot cheaper to make 15 simple robots than to make a couple complex one, because the manufacturing cost per unit decreases with the amount of units c

  • Ob Simpsons (Score:4, Funny)

    by FusionDragon2099 ( 799857 ) <fusiondragon2099@gmail.com> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:00PM (#11854210)
    Will they be sorting tiny screws in space?

  • so.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:00PM (#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 @04:01PM (#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 @04:05PM (#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

      • I disagree with your refutation that this is an example of emergent behaviour; I believe this is just the type of case where we would want to use the term "emergence". The behaviour that is being described as emergent is the ability of the units to work together to exhibit some sort of collectively intelligent behaviour, as if they were being guided by some sort of overseer. However, the lack of existence of any such overseer leads us to call this behaviour emergent -it emerges as a result of the individual
      • 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.

        I'm afraid you're unaware of just how much you can accomplish with chemical trails and other simple stimuli. This has been researched extensively. I suggest you read Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems by Eric Bonbeau, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz. It gives a very detailed and math-heavy analysis of actu

  • Squid... (Score:5, Informative)

    by th1ckasabr1ck ( 752151 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:05PM (#11854240)
    ... are also far more intelligent than the average human being realizes.

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

    • This was mentioned here a few weeks back. Now the comments are dupes too, not just the stories!
    • they are Tasty to boot!
    • They're very smart -- and they only live for maybe three to five years.
      http://naturalhistory.broaddaylight.com/nmnh/FAQ_7 5_361.shtm

      What this planet needs is longer-lived squid, who can learn to use tools.
      • They might team up with dolphins. Ideally, though, another cephalopod - the octopus - would be the ideal cooperative species with dolphins. The Simpsons have already taught us that dolphins can walk on their fins - imagine them using octopi (who can also exist outside of water for periods of time and survive) as ink-shooting, stick wielding headgear! WE'D BE DOOMED!1!

    • ahhrrr squiddy, i wasn't mad at ye, i only wanted the gold in ye belly.

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

    by Oswald ( 235719 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:06PM (#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.")

    • (I'm assuming neurons count as "minimalist.")

      Pheeew! I was envisioning hordes of football supporters and couldn't come up with a satisfactory explanation :)
    • And two more things.

      The U-Bots according to the article follow a few rules. However, while one rule contains 'drop item', NONE of the rules contain 'pick up item'. This means that either all N U-bots must have been carrying one item each (a total of N items) in the beginning, which means the place where items get dropped off highly depends on the initial configuration of the robots in the arena. Or, the article is flawed in describing the rules, because they are not sufficient to perform a 'discover, col

      • Re:Here's an idea (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Illserve ( 56215 )
        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
    • Thinking aloud: are neurons more or less intelligent/sophisticated than modern robots?
  • I for one welcome our new frisbee-sorting overlords ...
  • Exciting stuff, and powerful in its simplicity.

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

    by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 ) <yoda AT etoyoc DOT com> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:11PM (#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 @04:17PM (#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 @04:23PM (#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 AT realtycenter DOT com> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:28PM (#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 @04:29PM (#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 @04:30PM (#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 DOT com> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:32PM (#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.

  • A student at MIT did this in around 1997. While I think this is a little more advanced programaticaly, they are much larger.

  • Scary? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by daniil ( 775990 ) * <evilbj8rn@hotmail.com> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:40PM (#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 @05:04PM (#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 @04:43PM (#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
  • Maybe these robots could to be sent up in the shuttle when it returns to flight. That way we could observe their behaviour and finally find out if ants can be trained to sort tiny screws in space!

  • Phenomenal (Score:4, Informative)

    by delta_avi_delta ( 813412 ) <dave.murphy@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:54PM (#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.

  • So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?

    Hey, isn't the democracy based on the same assumption - if you put together a bunch of dump small things, they will make a good choice?

  • subjects suck. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pandaemonium ( 70120 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @05:27PM (#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

  • My wife has a Roomba www.irobot.com I can only wonder what 1000 of those would be like if they were let loose in a giant hotel. The floors might actually stay clean briefly... Or what if those little robots in the article we more like Moles and sent to the landfill to sort everything. Teach em to kill fire ants and let them loose in South Texas!!

  • "Myrmecology"? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jchap ( 628091 )


    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
    • As you say, any one of us could simulate it. That means the part of the problem where simulation is useful has probably been solved. This team is to the point where to learn more, they need to actually make some stuff.

      I'm sure you're familiar enough with the engineering-to-manufacturing process to know that things don't always work out in the real world the way they do in the simulation. It is an old cliche, but it has some truth - at some point in any project you have to shoot the engineers and just bui
    • While you raise an absolutely valid point ('why use hardware to simulate physically when you can use software to simulate virtually'), you should know what you talk about first before you talk. You are misusing the term "cellular automata" where in reality what you were looking for was the term "autonomous agents".

  • turf (Score:2)

    by gilroy ( 155262 )
    Q: "So how can you get a whole bunch of dumb small things doing something smart?"

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

  • Smart Ants Have Smart Ant Babies (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The "dumb" ants do smart things because their ancestors also did smart things, partly by chance, primarily by evolution, and so they survived and had children while the others died before they were able to conceive.
  • A bunch of dumb robots appearing to act as if they were composing an Intelligent Design is blasphemy. Everyone knows that a superior, humanlike intelligence is behind any sophisticated emergent behavior.

  • There's a decentralized simulator called Breve [spiderland.org] that includes a module called Gatherers that will demonstrate the behavior of the U-Bots. There's a few other canned demos, or you can write your own. Lots of eye candy.

    Runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

  • This stuff has grown terribly, terribly boring.

    As far as I'm concerned the question as to how ants know how to organize themselves is on the same order as the question, "how does bread know it should fall on the buttered side?", or "how do coin flips know they should be random?"

    If our hearts begin to flutter and our imagination begins to soar at the sight of an anthill, it's depressing.
    • As far as I'm concerned the question as to how ants know how to organize themselves is on the same order as the question, "how does bread know it should fall on the buttered side?", or "how do coin flips know they should be random?"

      Lucky for you, the researchers aren't asking that question. It's not "how do they know how to organize themselves?" but rather "how do they manage to organize even though they don't know how?"

      And it may be terribly boring to you, but the study of emergent behavior has impor
      • the study of emergent behavior has important practical implications in fields as diverse as economics, city planning, and telecommunications.

        Unless it can predict the stock market and prevent traffic jams; not really.

        The infrastructure of the Internet itself depends on decentralized decision-making.

        Which is orthogonal to emergent behavior as such.

        Thanks to this "terribly boring" stuff, your message was reliably transported from your computer, to slashdot, to everyone else's computers, without any ce
        • Unless it can predict the stock market and prevent traffic jams; not really.

          "Predicting the stock market" is to economics what astrology is to astronomy. And genetic algorithms-- a classic example of emergent behavior-- have been used to control traffic flow.

          Which is orthogonal to emergent behavior as such.

          Exactly what does qualify as emergent behavior in your mind, then?

          There is nothing emergent about a handful of purposefully crafted packets travelling over a purposefully built network arrivi
          • Exactly what does qualify as emergent behavior in your mind, then?

            It's a marketing term. As such it is intentionally vague and ambiguous. If pressed on the matter I would say emergent behavior covers any kind of non-trivial pattern that emerges in a non-obvious way from the application of a small set of simple rules.

            And the Internet is far from a "purposefully built network." It's a chaotic conglomerate of individual computers which have been connected to other individual computers with no roadmap dicta
  • The researcher in the project neglected to mention what I see as a huge advantage to using swarm-intelligence: graceful degradation. That is, in most common machines and software, if a single part breaks down, the effects on the systems functioning can be catastrophic. However in other systems, such as a neural network for example, the deterioration of a section of the system will not lead to a total loss of function -the sytem will degrade gracefully. It seems to me a reasonable assumption that this will a

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

    by 0x1234 ( 741699 ) on Sunday March 06, 2005 @03:49AM (#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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