Re[2]: the spark of creativity

From: Matt Gingell (mjg223@is7.nyu.edu)
Date: Sat Feb 26 2000 - 11:19:23 MST


> Not so much perfection, as a system highly tolerant of imperfection.
> [Get it? tolerANT]

Heh heh. Recently I've been getting into this ant stuff - I wrote a
little simulator for Linux/OpenGL and called it emergAnt... It works
somewhat, but there are an enormous number of very sensitive
parameters: pheromone decay rate, sniff angle and distance, how random
a walk off a path is, etc. It's a very simple idea, but getting good
results turns out to be much trickier than I imagined. Using some
evolutionary model to find the ideal configuration seems like it would
work pretty well - each nest produces a queen when it stacks up enough
food, who then goes off and founds a colony with slightly wobbled
numbers. The search space isn't that big and I'd guess it's pretty
susceptible to that kind of hill climbing. I'd also like to model
warrior ants - they would attack workers from rival colonies,
releasing clouds of war scent to attract their friends, etc. It would
make a terrific screen saver.

Alas, my attention span is short and I started fiddling with something
else.

-matt



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