Ant Colony IT

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June 18, 2001 (Computerworld) -- "Go to the ant . . . consider her ways, and be wise."
- Proverbs 6:6

Computer scientists are doing just that, and they say the humble insect heralds a revolution in software design.
Rather than relying on complex, centralized logic, systems that mimic ant behavior use many small, autonomous software agents. Each acting on the simplest of rules, these agents together can solve problems that are enormously complex when viewed as a whole. Higher-level, or "swarm," intelligence emerges from those rudimentary rules in ways that would be difficult to program into conventional software.
Such autonomous systems have no single point of failure. Like ants that repair their nest if it's disturbed and columns of ants that route around obstructions, these systems adapt to unanticipated problems in a way that ordinary centralized systems can't.
Today, such systems are typically used for optimization applications such as factory scheduling and vehicle routing. For example, General Motors Corp.'s Saturn subsidiary uses distributed systems to control the flow of part assemblies. Instead of having each factory machine's actions preprogrammed and unvarying, Saturn's machines can sense the type and state of a part and adapt their actions on the fly.
Other applications draw on different ant behaviors. For example, researchers are working on a way to analyze financial transactions based on the way ants sort and cluster their brood and their dead.
The technology is a decade old, but it's just beginning to blossom, says Doug Currie, president of Flavors Technology Inc., a Londonderry, N.H.-based company that sells agent-based systems. "It's a great way to leverage technology, because of the surprise factor - it does things you don't expect, but in a way that's natural," Currie says.
He adds that antlike systems will increasingly be used to design production lines, not just to control them. He predicts they could also have a use in medicine, where antlike agents could mimic the interactions of simple chemicals in the body and in drugs.
Individually, ants have primitive brains, yet collectively they run surprisingly sophisticated and efficient operations.

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