Ants should be behind the wheel of our cars

by William Atkins

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! A German study found that ants are much better at keeping traffic flowing without congestion than us human drivers. We might be much better off with driving advice from our little friends. The authors—Karsten Peters, Anders Johansson, Audrey Dussutour, and Dirk Helbing—have published their results at arXiv.org (Physics): arXiv:0810.4583v1. Their October 25, 2008 paper “Analytical and Numerical Investigation of Ant Behavior Under Crowded Conditions” describes why ants are better at traffic control than humans. They state in their abstract, “Swarm intelligence is widely recognized as a powerful paradigm of self-organized optimization, with numerous examples of successful applications in distributed artificial intelligence. However, the role of physical interactions in the organization of traffic flows in ants under crowded conditions has only been studied very recently.” Swarm intelligence (SI) is described as an artificial intelligence that is based on the larger group behavior of smaller self-organized and decentralized groups. The larger group is essentially controlled by simple rules used by smaller groups, which are communicated throughout the groups. In other words, the researchers studied how ants individually move around in their colony and how the ant group itself is controlled by these individual actions. The team, headed by Dirk Helbing, from the Dresden University of Technology (Germany) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Techology (Zurich, Switzerland), arranged routes of different widths that ran between the ants’ nest and a supply of sugar syrup. Page two discusses the experimental results the Helbing team discovered from the actions of the ants. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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