ANT FARM

Alert E.O. Wilson: Tectonic Nabob has created a new species of ants programmed to seek out and find food, and what's more, to recruit other ants to gather and return it to the nest.  His marvelous narrated video shows how: Tectonic's ants leave a pheromone trail in their random wanderings, and once they locate food, go into a Recruit mode, and search for nearby ants, so they can be set onto the food finder's successful pheromone path.  (To prevent all the crisscrossing trails from causing a pile-up of legs and antennae, Tectonic has programmed the pheromones to decay in potency over time.)

"This project was inspired by a class I'm taking on Simulation of Biology," Tectonic tells me, "which should really be called Artificial Life."  They join Surina's clown fish as a new SL species, and they were so, well, ant-ish, I asked him to show me his creation in person.  Were they already exhibiting emergent behavior?

Tectonic lords over the ants

"The behavior is arguably emergent," says Tectonic Nabob, "because the ants only interact locally and follow local state-based rules, yet they end up working together to harvest food. In general, emergence is when complex global behavior arises from simple, local rules, and this simulation has some of those properties."

In their search for food, his ants also chew up enormous server resources, so he can't leave them running when he's offline.  However, he's left several related simulations running.

"You can also teleport to Elon University [island] (direct portal at this link), where I did most of this work, and test out two demos that I have. One demo shows clustering, which is a computer science algorithm that detects groups of things, and the other demo shows emergent synchronization, in which a bunch of entities start out flashing at random phases and end up synchronizing. This is much like what some species of fireflies do: there are firefly species in Africa that synchronize their flashing such that entire trees end up flashing in sync. I imagine it's quite spectacular." 

He's even transformed that technology into commercial weaponry.  "One of my other inventions, which I sell, is called PODS: Plasma Orb Defense System, and is a system of networked orbs that orbit the user and defend them," he says.  "The PODS communicate, but nowhere near at [the ants'] complexity. The PODS coordinate to cage an enemy: the cage broadcasts when someone escapes, and the PODS then attempt to re-cage. It's pretty primitive, but works OK."

As for the evolution of his ants, their development may have to wait better genetics, i.e. faster algorithms.  "I may try to integrate this simulation with some of the work going on by the Ecosystem Working Group," Tectonic tells me. "It may be too CPU intensive, though, without significant improvement and optimization."

Comments

[Alex]

Haha...that was quite the confusing conversation just now!!

Love the ants by the way...

[need a defense]

ok quick question. what is the PODS used for? It says defense but defense against whom and in what situation and which environment. more info puh-lease.

thanks,

fancy

[Tectonic Nabob]

The PODs are a defensive / offensive weapon system that I made a while ago. They're really only tangentially related to the ants.

[jbotz]

The caption reads "Yes, _he_ looks like...". That should be "she". All ant workers are female, the males only live a few hours. Sorry to be pedantic, but as a true myrmicophile I feel strongly about this.

[antman]

so can we go on this place with the ants in seond life? Can we teleport to this island if we have second life account and see the ants?