Nice piece in the Technology Review on Ant Colony Optimization. This stuff is totally engrossing to me, realy great Rudy Rucker terrritory. Autonomous, probablistic solutions to complex problems that aren't human-readable — god-dimmy, that's one funky future.
The researchers found that what works for ants and bacteria also works for autonomous pieces of computer code. "The idea is inspired by chemotactic models of tracking trail formation widely found in insects, bacteria, [and] slime molds," said Frank Schweitzer, an associate professor at Humboldt University and a research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligence Systems in Germany.
The work could eventually be used for self-assembling circuits, groups of coordinated robots and adaptive cancer treatments, according to Schweitzer.
Insect, bacteria and slime mold communities coordinate growth processes based on interactions among chemical trails left behind by individuals. The researchers set up a similar network using a computer simulation of electronic agents moving randomly across a grid containing unconnected network nodes.
Rather than determine the structure of a network in a top-down approach of hierarchical planning, agents found nodes and created connections in a bottom-up process of self-organization.
When an agent happened on a node, it began to produce one of two simulated chemical trails at a rate that decreased in time. The strength of the chemical trail also faded as time went by. The key to the self-assembling network is that the agents are drawn to the chemical trails laid down by other agents.
(Thanks, Zed!)
