Monday, August 19, 2013

stigmergy: follow the leader

WARNING: This is an attempt to be a little bit technical.

We now describe the stigmergy among ants, and we present three models: A, B, and C.  The first model, model A, is a set of equations.  This model is considered scientific while models B and C are non-scientific (not sure if B and C fall under the "artistic" category though).

A:
Model A is an abstraction of the foraging behavior of the ants called the ant system.  Imagine that there is an undirected graph G = (V,E) such that V is a set of vertices or points and E is a set of edges.  The state transition rule is given by the following equation:

Equation 1 is the probability that the ant chooses to move to point s given its current position at point r. Note that r and s are elements of V with (r,s) is an element of E.
Through these equations, there is an indirect form of communication through the amount of pheromone on a particular trail, a form of memory not locally stored within the individual ants, and this communication is called stigmergy.

B:

C:
Instrumental track: "The Odd Dawdler" (03:40), 2013
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