The overhead for the AI on a minecraft ant is so great that the mod creators limit the colonies to just 20 ants to prevent lag. Fine for gameplay 20 feels like a lot.
Interesting the kind of things they do: remember the location of their nest, find a path back, collect leaves etc. are so taxing.
In the real world a colony of 1000+ is typical. Some colonies have millions of ants. And real ants have much more to "process" Kind of gives you a sense of the scale of the intelligence of a colony.
I'd guess that the ants each have their own GPU running a copy of the AntOS right? I wonder whether we could learn something about biological computing/cooperation by taking one of those stupid Bitcoin mining machines, installing AntOS on each of the GPUs and pointing the collective at a problem to solve?
Ants as problem solvers are more robust and resilient to disturbances than they are efficient. What must get done, will get done, maybe not well, maybe not right away, maybe not efficiently, but the things that need to happen will happen.
@mycotropic@futurebird ant info processing is very different than human osses. probly REALLY tangled and enmeshed 'code' each routine using each other's subroutines... all running on HIGHLY parallel processing structure.
only a million highly interlocked neurons at most, but we don't know if counting neurons is the right way to look.
As a model for computing though, could it solve different types of problems using existing hardware? I've been told that those Bitcoin mining computers can't do much else but could you build an OS that's local to a GPU but mimics the logic that ants use in order to solve types of problems that aren't any related?
@futurebird@Woodswalked@mycotropic a whole ant mythology about wax and propolis. i think sometimes ants attack hives and i wouldnt' be surprised honeybees trap ants (dead, alive?) in propolis.
i wonder what the phylogeny of wax is! stingless honeybees make it too? when did it evolve? do other wasps make it?
@barrygoldman1@futurebird@Woodswalked@mycotropic honeybees are fastidious with housecleaning, if there were a dead ant in the hive, it would be hauled out. Around here, small hives leave when attacked by ants. Large hives pick up ants one by one and toss them out.
@futurebird@Woodswalked@mycotropic ok evolution of waxmaking in hymenoptera is confusing. all insects make 'waxes' (mix of hydrocarbons and esters) (ant cuticles use waxes) but i guess what we are looking for is 'combwax' is that a term?
how do i find evolution of combwax in apocrita? (bees wasps ants) @alexwild
@futurebird
in a way I'm kind of sad I only had a few chances to the play the old SimAnt game, back in the days before working in the industry destroyed my love of video games.
Add comment