Re: New pheromone demo

po 19. 6. 2023 v 13:14 odesílatel Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> napsal:

> Swarms can be used as a model for how web agents can work together to
> achieve common goals.
>
> I’ve developed a new demo that shows ants scuttling about looking for food
> guided by the pheromones they collectively deposit:
>
> https://www.w3.org/Data/demos/foraging/
>
> The demo shows the food pheromone in aquamarine and the nest pheromone in
> plum. The user interface allows you to inspect the pheromone gradients,
> along with optional obstacle and food scent (in yellow).
>
> Ants only pay attention to the scent of a food source  when it is nearby,
> and prefer to follow the pheromones where possible. I haven’t bothered with
> the scent of the nest since the ants very rapidly map the area near to the
> nest, so there would be little benefit.
>
> The pheromones map out gradient fields. Ants decide whether to deposit
> pheromone, and how much, based upon their internal notion of how much time
> it has been since they left the nest/food source. They likewise update
> their internal notion as needed.
>
> In this demo ants pay no attention to each other. In other kinds of
> swarms, the swarm agents are sensitive to their immediate neighbours, e.g.
> shoals of fish and flocks of birds. Further challenges arise if agents can
> learn from interacting with each other. How can agents learn and apply
> cognitive norms for accepted behaviour in a group? How can we design agents
> for social intelligence? Further demos will explore some of these
> challenges along with richer models of cognition for more human like
> behaviour.
>

I really like this!  I've been thinking about web scale agents like these
ants.

What I was wondering about is giving each ant a URI.  Or perhaps giving the
ant class a URI which could then be run to instantiate an ant.

You could then have them roaming the internet to find food, bring it back
to the nest, leave trails for the other ants.  Maybe the ants also have
energy and will die without some share of the food.


>
> p.s. the ants seem to prefer to walk on the left, i.e. like cars on
> British roads, I have yet to figure out why!
>
> Best regards,
>
> Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>
>
>
>
>