The other day I was sitting in the bathroom (don't laught) looking at the floor and then I saw a little red ant there. My first impulse was to kill it, but, as I was going expend some more minutes with my bussines I decided to do an experiment, which I'll describe next: I took the champoo and draw a circle (of about 4cm) around the ant, letting it locked up inside with the intetion of seeing how the ant would react to this. The ant began to follow the wall of champoo, apparently looking for a way out, going back and fort the exact center of the circle and staying there a while, like if it was deciding where to try next. It did three attempts to walk over the wall without success, it sank into it and slid inside again. Then it started to follow the wall again (kind of desperately). At the end it went to the center of the circle again and remained a few seconds there, then it walked directly into the wall of champu (this time underneath it) and, half walking, half swimming, it succeded to pass trough. I must confess that I did not expect the ant to be able to find a way to get out there. I belived ants where more like an instinct based automat than an intelligent animal. Conclusion: The ant was served with a problem, it tryied several (kind of ingenious) ways of getting out of there, and it did it. The ant solved the problem. Epiloge: Of course, I respect intelligence very much and for that reason I let the little ant continue it's way and live. Now I have an anthill in the kitchen. If it fits, I would like to hear your thougts about this and animal intelligence in general.

Quote: Original post by owl
Now I have an anthill in the kitchen.

Um, maybe we should run some intelligence tests on you. [grin]

I only know a little bit about insect intelligence, but there is some overlap between this field and computer vision & robotics, as the CV/robotic researchers are interested in the instinct based algorithms that insects seem to follow, and the insect biologists are interested in the application work in various areas the computer science guys do (like in optic flow or behaviour-based robotic systems, for example).

From what I've heard and read, I think insects still seem to follow a set of coded rules (even if we don't know what all of those rules are), but the interplay between these rules is so deep very intelligent behaviour results. For example, one researcher has done tests on bees, getting them to fly through a maze with markers indicating the correct direction, and after some fly through the bees figure out what the markers mean and can correctly navigate through the maze, even when the maze is modified.

So yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff that AI researchers can learn from insects. Simple code behaviours can build up to really awesome behaviour!

Ants can "farm" and build ant bridges too :)

I think we all follow the same method of trial and error although species do it at different rates, or in this case rinse, lather, repeat.

Quote: Original post by Caitlin
Ants can "farm" and build ant bridges too :)

I'm not sure if you are referring to ant farms or not with those quotation marks, but some types of ants really are farmers!

:) Thats what I was referring to :)

Quote: Original post by Caitlin
:) Thats what I was referring to :)

I thought so; but I think that ants cultivating fungus is really neat, so I wanted to post the link [smile].

To make this post somewhat on the topic of game A.I., it really is amazing what kinds of emergent behaviour can result from just implementing a series of simple rules. For example, just add a wall following routine and a light/noise avoiding routine to a robot control system, and you get a "cockroach" robot. Simple behaviour would be even easier to put into game agents, because you don't have to worry about the whole issue with sensors.

Quote:
To make this post somewhat on the topic of game A.I., it really is amazing what kinds of emergent behaviour can result from just implementing a series of simple rules. For example, just add a wall following routine and a light/noise avoiding routine to a robot control system, and you get a "cockroach" robot.

I have done this in a number of autonomous systems I designed. The most advanced one wasn't really simple but worked quite well. It was a flight computer for R/C airplanes that could taxi, takeoff, fly, land, and taxi back to park. The system evolved aver about 8 months from a simple "plane saver" system that would return a plane back to radio coverage if the pilot let if fly out of radio coverage - that system was very simple. In the end the guys that came to me for the design decided that they didn't want to bother with it so it died.

Quote: Original post by Caitlin
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Quote: The most advanced one wasn't really simple but worked quite well. It was a flight computer for R/C airplanes that could taxi, takeoff, fly, land, and taxi back to park.

Why not just go out and buy a Piccolo avionics set? ;) I'm sure that your skills make your 8 months of time worth a lot more than the value of a commerical product for RC/UAVs!

Cheers,

Timkin