Re: New pheromone demo

> po 19. 6. 2023 v 13:14 odesílatel Dave Raggett < [ mailto:dsr@w3.org |
> 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/ |
>> 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.

I took a similar position in one of my early papers at the time using XSLT for reactive agents above XML: 

"The diversity of resources and information in real infospheres calls for artificial ecosystems with a diversity of interacting agents ranging from reactive to deliberative paradigms and maintaining the information ecology. After discussing the notion of infosphere and some interests of the XML family for such a world, this paper provides examples showing the interest of such hybrid systems." 

Fabien Gandon. Combining reactive and deliberative agents for complete ecosystems in infospheres . IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT), Oct 2003, Halifax, Canada. 
[ https://inria.hal.science/hal-01146436/ | https://inria.hal.science/hal-01146436/ ] 

Fabien Gandon, [ https://team.inria.fr/wimmics/ | Wimmics ] (Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, I3S, France) 
[ https://twitter.com/fabien_gandon | @fabien_gandon ] - [ http://fabien.info/ | http://fabien.info ]