Ants Build Complex Structures With a Few Simple Rules

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140409-the-remarkable-self-organization-of-ants/

by digital55 • 12 years ago

129 45 12 years ago

simonsfoundation.org

th3iedkid• 12 years ago

wow! its incredible how they design a lattice that can help all occupants survive within water !

niels• 12 years ago

Here's a good explanation of Ant Pheromones and how it's used as a routing topology in the MUTE P2P software.

http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml

cgh• 12 years ago

Related: "Ant Colony Optimization" by Dorigo and Stutzle. They also provide sample code in C.

webwielder• 12 years ago

Nature's own artificial intelligence.

Glide• 12 years ago

Wouldn't that just be intelligence?

mantrax4• 12 years ago

Just like people believed the Universe revolves around Earth, they still have this naive believe that they're the center of intelligence in the Universe. Any other display of intelligence is explained as a combination of simple chemical, mechanical and electrical processes. But don't be quick to judge humans, though, after all, their brains are built on a combination of simple chemical, mechanical and electrical processes themselves.

prot• 12 years ago

Now I always wonder: if such simple creatures as ants can build such complex structures and are unbelievably successful as species, without any central body enforcing their behavior, why do we humans, need all those numerous laws and regulations that no human alone can fully comprehend? And why everyone believes we need central authority in order to achieve something? Ridiculous.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

One ant colony and the next are persistently engaged in bloody war.

koenigdavidmj• 12 years ago

If you think humans are inherently good and orderly, you obviously don't have children.

mildtrepidation2• 12 years ago

While I see your point, I think it's invalid to equate humans and ants in this context. I am not an entomologist, but I don't think ants have nearly the sophistication in terms of cognitive function and social interaction that humans do.

Without making a value judgment, I just don't think we're capable of being that kind of drone. We're too conscious of our situation and that of others around us -- with "around us" expanding massively following the advent of print, radio/TV, and now the internet.

lovemenot• 12 years ago

I suspect that ants are not that kind of drone either. It seems plausible that, from the perspective of an ant, life is in some sense as rich and complex as it is for us.

Sure, we can model their collective behaviour using simple rules and randomness. Yet this says little about individuals' motivations. Similarly, one can model parts of an economy. Yet a software agent does not have the inner sense of a person. A visiting alien with no comprehension of humans' subjective perspective might well (wrongly) consider our cities as we tend to see ants' colonies; just an artifact of some basic economic rules.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

Their behavior is enforced directly by evolutionary constraints. If an ant colony's behavior fails to be adaptive, that colony dies out.

Humans have developed intelligence and culture, which allows us to consciously adapt our behavior over timespans shorter than a generation. Thus we also have developed more adaptable rules that are embedded in culture rather than genes.

That said, both ants and humans arise from the same evolutionary process. Human government is different from, but not any less natural than, ant behaviors.

dllthomas2• 12 years ago

"Human government is different from, but not any less natural than, ant behaviors."

Though genetic influence is likely more attenuated.

chipsy• 12 years ago

We have a built environment that influences each moment-to-moment action: For example, architecture is full of little tricks that influence crowd routing without actively telling people "YOU THERE, go this way." UX is a whole field about this kind of stuff.

So what we have is better than the ants in certain ways, because we have an ever-increasing capacity to reprogram behaviors and reason about them without relying on genetic changes; it's going to surface itself as an ugly, inefficient, inequitable, system because we use human judgment to fill in so many gaps, but that's why we also have such a strong incentive to keep automating everything.

vacri• 12 years ago

And why everyone believes we need central authority in order to achieve something?

An ant colony is a life-support system for a queen. You're lionising a feudal system, where the life of the commoner is meaningless and dangerous, while the nobility is pampered and insulated. All the commoners are achieving is continued life for the nobility, and they do so frequently at the cost of their own lives. They are entirely disposable.

Similarly, the 'complex structures' that ants build are mind-numbingly simplistic, when compared to the ones humans create.

hharrison3• 12 years ago

Yes. AI/cog sci could learn a lot from this. Intelligent structures are self-organized, the order isn't imposed from above or from some "central executive."

jerf• 12 years ago

The correct tense is "is learning". They've been studying this for years. This is not news to the AI/cog sci community, to the point that it's insulting to claim that it is.

hharrison3• 12 years ago

Yes and no. I am aware of the status of the field (well, AI less so). I myself am a psychologist working on the self-organization of behavior. Yes, we have been using examples like termites and ants for years. But we are far from the mainstream. For example, in Pinker's How the Mind Works, he dismisses self-organization as "fairy dust".

Some aspects of our work have been trickling into the mainstream. But if you don't assume that the mechanisms of mind are computations on representations, then it is very difficult to get a job without compromising your principles.

And perhaps you could argue that the mainstream thinks this system of computations is the result of self-organization on some lower level. And I wouldn't disagree. But for the majority of the field that is just lip service. Their research goals are to uncover the algorithms that the mind is running. There's no self-organization at that level.

Of course there are always exceptions. But if anyone is still reading this and is interested I can provide literature staking out the relevant positions.

ghotli• 12 years ago

Take a look at Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind. Consciousness as an emergent property of the communication between simple agents is a large arm of cognitive science.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671...

hharrison3• 12 years ago

I am aware of Minsky's work, see my other reply. I was too flippant in my comment. Perhaps I should have said intelligent behavior, rather than intelligent structures, is self-organized.

But, I don't think any approach to consciousness can be considered a large arm of cognitive science. Most cognitive scientists don't want to touch consciousness with a ten-foot pole. But of course you're right that connectionism lives on.

Let me try to explain the kind of self-organization I have in mind. Consider the fundamental question "how is behavior organized"? The behaviorists pointed to organization in the environment. Cognitivists point to organization of internal representations. Connectionists and similar approaches point to organization of neural structures. Yes, something intelligent emerges from simple, perhaps self-organized, components in this scheme. But they are unwilling to take self-organization to the level of behavior.

In my opinion, a true self-organizational approach to behavior is to say that behavior emerges from the interaction between organism and environment. This is the level at which we need to accept self-organization. It is far from the mainstream. The mainstream approach to vision, for example, starts with the retinal image and asks what can be inferred from it. Yes, maybe they say that this inference engine is itself a self-organized structure. But it still reifies an input-process-output view of cognition. The sensory system receives input, constructs a model of the world. The "higher cognitive" centers formulate plans from this model. The action system instantiates these plans.

To bring it back to the ants: The ants demonstrate what can be done without explicit planning. Modern cognitive science studies explicit planning, even if they agree that this capability emerges from simple components.

As I said in the other post, I could provide literature if you are interested in any of these specific debates.

mildtrepidation2• 12 years ago

Want your employees to cooperate better? Follow this ONE CRAZY RULE we learned from ants!

will_brown• 12 years ago

There is another interesting structural phenomenon built by ants, mass graves.

I have first hand observed that when a ant pile/mound is damaged (pour water on the mound, spray with ant poison, or just kick the mound), the ants over the next few days will simultaneously rebuild the original structure and relocate the dead ants to a newly build structure. Though I can not recall if the new structure is composed entirely of the dead ants or if dirt is involved as well.

ntoll3• 12 years ago

I'm currently reading "Ant Encounters - Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior" by Deborah M.Gordon. It covers a lot of related material and is a very engaging read.

inoop• 12 years ago

I highly recommend 'Self Organization in Biological Systems' by Camazine et. al.

Each chapter describes a single mechanism found in biology: e.g., ant foraging, termite nest building, etc. For each such mechanism they first provide an accessible, well-written description of the process from a biological perspective, and then go on to simulate it using numerical analysis and computer simulation.

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Organization-Biological-Systems-P...

ntoll3• 12 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. It's in my to-read list ~ along with far too many other books ;-)

dfc3• 12 years ago

Before I saw your comment I made a top level comment about a book but wanted to repeat it here so that you saw it. If you are interested in ants take a look at Ants by holldobler and wilson.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ants-Bert-Holldobler/dp/0674040759

ntoll3• 12 years ago

Blimey... at £104.95 I think I'll grab it from the library. ;-)

sbirchall• 12 years ago

Also reading Edward O. Wilson (aka "Lord of the Ants") or watching any of the fine documentaries about him is well worth it. I highly recommend "Consillience" - it's written in a fresh and lively style and it can't help but capture your imagination.

danso• 12 years ago

I feel compelled to repost the NYT's excellent, terrifying article on "Crazy Ants", particularly the section about how the constant stream of dead ant bodies also creates functional structures:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy-ants.html

Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television.

Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It’s common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.

methodover• 12 years ago

Wow, what an article.

Ants in Texas are terrible. Off the top of my head --

1. I was stung by a swarm of fire ants when I was ten years old. I had been standing, and hadn't realized that I was standing right on an ant bed. I remember an adult carrying me away, and blinding pain.

2. Ants infested the office of my last job in Texas. Every desk was equipped with an ant motel. One of the water fountains near my desk was completely unusable because of the infestation. All attempts to eradicate the ants failed.

3. At my last apartment in Texas, the ant infestation was so bad that significant numbers of them would crawl up the tires and get in my car. I'd be driving along and realize that there were ants crawling on my hands. I was actually worried that I would take the infestation with me when I moved to the bay area -- but thankfully I haven't seen one since I moved.

aaronetz• 12 years ago

I've just recently watched a very good documentary about ants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-gIx7LXcQM . They are a truly amazing organism. Does anyone know of any ant games? I thought it would be cool to have a strategy game where you build an ant colony, defend it from disasters and attackers, etc.

pyronite• 12 years ago

SimAnt has a good reputation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimAnt

Old, but still a novel concept.

splawn• 12 years ago

If you like tabletop, Myrmes looks cool http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/126792/myrmes

MarkTee• 12 years ago

It's been a long time since I played it, so I don't know how it holds up, but there's Empire of the Ants.[1]

It's more combat-oriented than something like SimAnt, but you still have to manage things like food, construction of your anthill, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Ants_(video_game...

theorique• 12 years ago

Ants are really good at working as a team.

The famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" describes the scary power of a massive ant infestation.

http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html

briantakita• 12 years ago

Similar idioms can be used for building products with complex requirements (with minimal incidental complexity) & resilient codebases.

bayesianhorse2• 12 years ago

Ants also have a risk-management algorithm and can be compared to businesses. Their business model is to send ants out of the nest and bring back calories, water and protein. These resources are then turned into more ants.

In the most ideal case, this is an exponential growth curve. But "investing" in a new food source, meaning to send out a fraction of the capital to get more revenue, is also risky. There are predators, rain and heat. Would be tough luck on a colony, if they send out half the ants at the same time and then some hungry predator just feeds off the ant street.

So the ants do have some sort of risk management algorithm. I don't know how it works completely, but essentially the decision to send out workers is influenced by the amount of workers in the nest and the frequency of ants coming back with a "profit".

As with any well managed portfolio and a little bit of luck, the growth curve then is exponential, while not exactly crazy, and the end result after a few years is a prosperous colony, having accumulated so much capital, that they don't know how to spend it on growing themselves.

That's when they start to spawn a new generation of ant queens, which is a horrendously wasteful and expensive exercise, but all of these newly mated ant queens, if she survives the first few days, will go into stealth-mode and found her own startup colony.

Someone• 12 years ago

I think there also is a limit to growth. If population density gets to high, the average ant has to walk so far for food that getting food costs more energy than the food brings in.

bayesianhorse2• 12 years ago

There seems to be a an intellectual reflex that whenever the topic of exponential growth comes up, people have to bring up growth limits and population density...

In this case though, I don't think that resource limits apply that much. Individual ants feed each other, so they can survive quite long periods without food, and they don't grow much beyond carrying capacity. If circumstances change, they can do a "soft landing" by downsizing the colony slowly or even moving the colony.

In fact, colony size seems to be most often limited by burning off excess capital in sexual broods.

Compared with most other insects, ants are actually much worse at building up biomass. But the queen ant's survival is actually safer because the colony manages risk and growth.

dfc3• 12 years ago

If you are ever interested in browsing (reading from start to finish would be a lot of ants reading) a fascinating book about ants take a look at Ants by Holldobler and Wilson:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ants-Bert-Holldobler/dp/0674040759

taivo• 12 years ago

There's quite a nice and easy to use program (a programming / modeling environment) for exploring and getting an intuition of how a system of many individuals who follow simple rules and interact with each other can give rise to interesting complex behavior. The modeling environment is called NetLogo, and it's basically a multi-turtle version of the old famous Logo programming language. It has lots of different models included in its example model library, including about ants, and the models have modifiable source code. I have quite enjoyed playing around with it, and have even used it in some presentations about how simple rules can give rise to complex behavior.

http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

bitwize• 12 years ago

This is no job for traditional science; we'll need a whole new kind! Quickly, to the Wolfram-Signal!

overdrivetg• 12 years ago

Anyone interested in this kind of emergent behavior should check out a great project I worked on years back called Starlogo at the MIT Media Lab. It was designed to help anyone understand decentralized systems and emergent behavior.

Here's a video with a demo of ants foraging for food - basically ants are red, food is blue, and pheromones are green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9liT8epLnAQ

You could "program" individual ant behavior and tweak parameters to see how that impacted the overall behavior (how far do ants go from the nest? How fast do pheromones dissipate? etc).

It's mostly defunct now, but it looks like there is an online version called StarLogo Nova, you see a sample and play with it at http://www.slnova.org/djwendel/projects/2/

lgieron• 12 years ago

The ants bridge looks very much like structures from World of Goo, I wonder if it has been an inspiration for the game mechanics.

Ants Build Complex Structures With a Few Simple Rules

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