06 March 2006

DCS RESEARCH IN THE ROYAL SOCIETY SUMMER EXHIBITION: MODELLING THE BEHAVIOUR OF ANTS

This Summer's Royal Society Exhibition will feature research
conducted by our interdisciplinary team at Sheffield University,
investigating how ant colonies organize their foraging trail networks.

The proposal "Go to the ant and be wise" was one of the 24 chosen for an exhbit.

Ants and humans face many similar challenges. One such challenge is how to
organize efficient transport networks using effective communication. Ant
colonies produce pheromone trail networks to efficiently direct foragers
to food sites. Although this problem is simple to state it is not easy
to solve. In fact, it is a type of problem,  dynamic optimization ,
increasingly of interest to engineers and computer scientists. We will
show how Computer Science is learning how to solve problems by looking
at how natural systems solve their problems.

Computers become more and more powerful, but the ability of computer
operators to make use of the massively complicated and ever-changing
data sets the computers produce is lagging behind. The solution is to
develop software systems containing many individual programs or  agents 
that can work together to solve these problems, which emulate the
success of the most numerous animals on Earth, the ants.