> Not so much perfection, as a system highly tolerant of imperfection.
> [Get it? tolerANT]
Heh heh. Recently I've been getting into this ant stuff - I wrote a
little simulator for Linux/OpenGL and called it emergAnt... It works
somewhat, but there are an enormous number of very sensitive
parameters: pheromone decay rate, sniff angle and distance, how random
a walk off a path is, etc. It's a very simple idea, but getting good
results turns out to be much trickier than I imagined. Using some
evolutionary model to find the ideal configuration seems like it would
work pretty well - each nest produces a queen when it stacks up enough
food, who then goes off and founds a colony with slightly wobbled
numbers. The search space isn't that big and I'd guess it's pretty
susceptible to that kind of hill climbing. I'd also like to model
warrior ants - they would attack workers from rival colonies,
releasing clouds of war scent to attract their friends, etc. It would
make a terrific screen saver.
Alas, my attention span is short and I started fiddling with something
else.
-matt
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:13 MDT