The ants go marching methodically | Hacker News Reader

The ants go marching methodically

news.arizona.edu

55 pointsshsachdev27 comments

Super cool! Yet another example showing that animals are more complex than we thought :-).

> The researchers also say that the ants' movement could someday be used to inform the design of autonomous swarms of robots that perform search and rescue missions in disaster areas or explore landscapes on other worlds.

Can we stop with the default "it could be useful for search and rescue in disaster areas"? That's the default "I don't see an application, let me just find an extreme case to justify my research".

There is no need to justify it: learning about ants is interesting on its own, and so is building a new robot.

They are just putting a kind face on it. Search and rescue isn't much different from search and destroy, which is the real goal and how they will sell it to military buyers.

Reading the cynical view that the real goal of x is military/harm/etc. is also pretty tiresome.

Not the cynical view, but realistic view. Reality isn't cynical even if it is tiresome. The impetus behind most major tech - satellites, planes, nuclear technology, etc was to provide the military a better way to kill people. Of course it was sold to the public in a more positive way.

Reality? The funding, results and motivations of the parties involved are complicated enough that dismissing it with this cynical view is so overly simplistic that it's not worth mentioning.

Even the notion that the military's aim is to "kill people" is ridiculous. It's aim is be able to kill people so that actually killing them isn't necessary in order to defend its own people.

> The funding, results and motivations of the parties involved are complicated enough that dismissing it with this cynical view is so overly simplistic that it's not worth mentioning.

People aren't that complicated. Especially at the top.

> Even the notion that the military's aim is to "kill people" is ridiculous.

Ridiculous? It's the basic core function of a military. Imagine a military that couldn't kill people. Now that would be ridiculous.

> It's aim is be able to kill people so that actually killing them isn't necessary in order to defend its own people.

By your logic, the russian military is defending russians by killing ukrainians in ukraine? The US military was defending americans by killing iraqis in iraq? How does that logic work?

I thought the military exists to spread democracy [ in oil rich countries ]?

They where/are defending the Economic interests of the ruling classes of those countries indeed

https://youtu.be/fS5ht9ZhxtM?t=125

(Friends: the one with GI Joe)

Any development, no matter how mundane, will eventually be turned to use by a military or paramilitary group somewhere at some point.

From this it can actually be argued anything developed is developed to eventually be used for warfare....

Or the converse, that the military and porn industry R&D lead to civilian products and usage like ecommerce via online credit card processing from the porn industry and GPS and jet engines to name a few from the military sector.

I don't think so. They are just trying to justify why they do that kind of research, in the fear that people won't understand "we do research in order to understand more".

>> There is no need to justify it: learning about ants is interesting on its own, and so is building a new robot.

That's how research gets funded. If you look at research funding applications there is usually a question about "impact" or "benefits" etc, that you have to answer, so you basically have to explain why you should be given (usually public) money to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Depending on the funding body you may need to have more or less obvious applications of your research (or none at all; obviously if you're in a purely theoretical field nobody expects you to propose practical applications! But then you have to explain why your research project is of interest to other purely theoretical folks).

If the applications are dead obvious, then that's even better for all involved and particularly so the reviewers of the application: they don't have to think about it too much. "Ants' search patterns? Oh, I get it, search and rescue. Check!" and then go to the next part of the application that really makes the heard hurt, like "We propose to study the difference between army ants' and fire ants' antenna use for pathfinding during a storm to determine the effect of species- and group-specific communication on colony search efficiency". Yikes.

Right, yeah I guess you're right. Feels a bit sad though, but that's how it is.

In the books Children of Time and the sequels (Children of Ruin and Children of Memory), when Dr Kern's human body is destroyed she ends up being existing as an artificial intelligence in multiple systems, one being traditional software and another as an ant swarm that can process information and carry data (her emulated self in this case).

The ants in the book are slightly "uplifted" as a species but are still just ants, a species subordinated to the uplifted spider-arachnid species.

The way the spiders domesticated them and turned them into logic gates was one of my favorite parts of the series.

Ant rafts are also very interesting.

Additionally, ants can show a sort of fluid motion.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016658108 [2011]

https://news.gatech.edu/news/2014/06/12/going-inside-ant-raf... [2014]

https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/Ants_as_Fluids.html [images and videos]

Ant mills are also interesting behaviour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill

yay, ants! A few thoughts:

- The overall idea passes the smell test. It makes sense that covering already explored ground is wasteful and walking in a way that minimizes that would be beneficial.

- Ants are known to store a vector from their current position to their nest so that they can walk a relatively straight path back home. I wonder if this vector is used to limit the chances of walking back onto a recent path, too?

- I learned a while ago that not all ants rely on pheromone trails to food discovered via exploration. For example, seed foraging ants do not rely on food pheromone trails. This is because there's a 1:1 between ant and seed and the location of fallen seeds is fairly randomized. So, a trail would only be misguiding. Modified walking behavior seems related to this - it's all about optimizing rate of food brought back to the nest.

Zooming out the ant colony is almost like a life form with individual ants as cells.

I sometimes wonder about whether humans are a cell-like life-form for our larger civilizations and whether any civilization has consciousness of some sort.

Yes, if you keep bees, you find that almost every action you take kills at least a few of them, and sometimes a few hundred for varroa mite sampling. It’s a bit less worrying if you think about them more as cells of a distributed organism. Also, they will instantly sacrifice themselves for their hives without hesitation.

The closest human analog would probably be more like a tribe.

> Until now, the widespread assumption was that free-searching animals are incapable of searching for new resources methodically,

It’s fascinating to me that we keep assuming that everything we don’t understand about nature is somehow random, coincidental and void of purpose, refinement and sophistication. Especially as every time we look closer we find exactly those things, in small as well as large animals, plants, fungi and so on. It’s a very strange null hypothesis.

It's the Unspoken Razor:

Never attribute to Design what may be attributed to Randomness.

Here's the PDF of the paper: https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(22)02189-7.pdf

Lot's of interesting stuff -- especially how they coordinate their searches (perhaps with the use of chemical trails). It would be nice to expand the data set and try to do some analysis to see how close to optimal the strategy is...

I would have been more surprised to learn that they do a truly random walk search.

They lay down pheromones to create trails, isn't that part of the answer to how they avoid crossing paths?

Now that stupid song is stuck in my head, thanks a lot...

The ants go marching methodically, hurrah, hurrah!

Avoid they do, to a large degree

Excessively creating entropy

Amazing ent-mol-ogy

As ants go marching methodically

I can't upvote you enough.

Which song? When the Saints Go Over There?

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