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From: fostel@eos.ncsu.edu (Gary Fostel)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Artificial ants
Keywords: Behavior modelling, DAI
Message-ID: <1990Dec20.172257.29926@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu>
Date: 20 Dec 90 17:22:57 GMT
References: <3436@litp.ibp.fr>
Sender: news@ncsuvx.ncsu.edu (USENET News System)
Reply-To: fostel@eos.ncsu.edu (Gary Fostel)
Organization: North Carolina State University
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    Ants fall into a catagory that is probably heavily populated in the
    world of small scale biology.  A great deal of their behavior is 
    controlled by what seem to be simple environmental cues (e.g. the
    elevation of the ground to avoid wasting energy going uphill) and by
    a set of temporary cues depositied by other ants as pheromes. The
    ants follow gradients of certain pheromes and the collective action
    of the ants following the steady accumulation of the pheromes in the
    environment together with the facts of the environments layout lead
    astonishingly enough to copnvergence on a small set of similar observable
    behaviors.  There is a rough anaolgy to neural systems here that is
    probably closest in very young brains that are still growing connections
    based on some simple envrionmental cues.

    The model is, as above, more pervasis then simpy ants and neurons since
    something like it is at work in specialization during development in
    general as some cells decide to produce the proteins needed to build a 
    liver and some for a lung based -- at least in part -- on the relative
    concentration of some biochemical marking agents.  This has been shown
    pretty conclusively in the development of fruit fly larvea anyway.  The
    conditions needed for this rather loose collection of constraints to
    converge towards well defined structures from such an ergodic soup is
    quite amazing to me ... but mother nature seems to have the technique
    well in hand.  

    But on the subject of ants and learning and AI :  there's gold in them
    that hills.  Wish you luck digging it out.

----GaryFostel----                      Department of Computer Science
                                        North Carolina State University