Science World Blog The Ants Go Driving
The Ants Go Driving
Last Updated (Monday, 29 September 2008 14:02) Written by Raymond Nakamura
As much as I try to walk and take public transit, I still do a lot of chauffeuring for my four-year-old. I'd love to have my own chauffeur, especially one like Kato on the Green Hornet, but failing that, a reliable vehicle that would drive itself. Perhaps, one day the Verdino , which has something to do with being green, will be the answer.
Engineers from the University of La Laguna in the Canary Islands have developed a vehicle that can steer itself by calculating routes according to something called Ant Colony Optimization. It's not just a clever idea, it's a whole field of study, based on the idea that ants find the shortest path to the food according to their evaporating pheromone trails, not to be confused with those deodorant commercials where all these women go crazy over some geeky guy because of a spray.
I've been trying to find out what they mean by a colony of artificial ants, but they mostly speak Spanish there. Mine is limited to the words I learned from Dora the Explorer which my daughter used to watch. I think it is about the way they make calculations with the visual information they input.
I wondered if they even had ants on the Canary Islands. Seems they do.
I remember reading something about the emergent properties of an ant colony in Godel Escher Bach. Or maybe it was in A Bug's Life. I'll bet E.O. Wilson must love this, with his fascination with ants and his contention in Consilience that all knowledge is one.
The vehicle is being tested at an experimental housing development. They say the results are encouraging, but before I get my hands on one, I imagine they must still have some bugs to work out.
