Super cool! Yet another example showing that animals are more complex than we thought :-).<p>> The researchers also say that the ants' movement could someday be used to inform the design of autonomous swarms of robots that perform search and rescue missions in disaster areas or explore landscapes on other worlds.<p>Can we stop with the default "it could be useful for search and rescue in disaster areas"? That's the default "I don't see an application, let me just find an extreme case to justify my research".<p>There is no need to justify it: learning about ants is interesting on its own, and so is building a new robot.
In the books Children of Time and the sequels (Children of Ruin and Children of Memory), when Dr Kern's human body is destroyed she ends up being existing as an artificial intelligence in multiple systems, one being traditional software and another as an ant swarm that can process information and carry data (her emulated self in this case).<p>The ants in the book are slightly "uplifted" as a species but are still just ants, a species subordinated to the uplifted spider-arachnid species.
Ant rafts are also very interesting.<p>Additionally, ants can show a sort of fluid motion.<p><a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016658108" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016658108</a> [2011]<p><a href="https://news.gatech.edu/news/2014/06/12/going-inside-ant-raft" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://news.gatech.edu/news/2014/06/12/going-inside-ant-raf...</a> [2014]<p><a href="https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/Ants_as_Fluids.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://antlab.gatech.edu/antlab/Ants_as_Fluids.html</a> [images and videos]<p>Ant mills are also interesting behaviour.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill</a>
yay, ants! A few thoughts:<p>- The overall idea passes the smell test. It makes sense that covering already explored ground is wasteful and walking in a way that minimizes that would be beneficial.<p>- Ants are known to store a vector from their current position to their nest so that they can walk a relatively straight path back home. I wonder if this vector is used to limit the chances of walking back onto a recent path, too?<p>- I learned a while ago that not all ants rely on pheromone trails to food discovered via exploration. For example, seed foraging ants do not rely on food pheromone trails. This is because there's a 1:1 between ant and seed and the location of fallen seeds is fairly randomized. So, a trail would only be misguiding. Modified walking behavior seems related to this - it's all about optimizing rate of food brought back to the nest.
Zooming out the ant colony is almost like a life form with individual ants as cells.<p>I sometimes wonder about whether humans are a cell-like life-form for our larger civilizations and whether any civilization has consciousness of some sort.
> Until now, the widespread assumption was that free-searching animals are incapable of searching for new resources methodically,<p>It’s fascinating to me that we keep assuming that everything we don’t understand about nature is somehow random, coincidental and void of purpose, refinement and sophistication. Especially as every time we look closer we find exactly those things, in small as well as large animals, plants, fungi and so on. It’s a very strange null hypothesis.
Here's the PDF of the paper: <a href="https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(22)02189-7.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cell.com/iscience/pdf/S2589-0042(22)02189-7.pdf</a><p>Lot's of interesting stuff -- especially how they coordinate their searches (perhaps with the use of chemical trails). It would be nice to expand the data set and try to do some analysis to see how close to optimal the strategy is...
I would have been more surprised to learn that they do a truly random walk search.<p>They lay down pheromones to create trails, isn't that part of the answer to how they avoid crossing paths?