A Fuller View

I just couldn’t resist a blog post title with ants and algorithms in it… Anyway, over on Edge.org there is an interesting interview (both text and video) with a biologist — “ANTS HAVE ALGORITHMS - A Talk with Iain Couzin” — about ants and about thier behavour. Worth watching if you have time, even on a Friday evening. I found the quote below interesting on traffic jams, I am also sure we can use ants to help buold models on socail networking…

The reason these ants don’t have traffic jams the way humans would is that they’re related. As I say in every talk, I always refer to these ants as ’she’ and as ‘her’. That is because almost every ant most people see is female, and so they’re related by a genetic determinism called haplodiploidy, which means they’re more related to each other than to their own kin, so of course they function together as colonies.

When we look at the optimization of an ant trail, we can look at what optimizes the benefit for all of the individuals. We also model human crowds, and when we model human crowds, we use a different algorithm entirely; we have a game theoretic algorithm where individuals may minimize their own travel times, but may do so at the expense of others because they don’t necessarily care whether they cause congestion for other individuals.