Wonder How?

This dispatch was dated 11/15/93 . Wonder what happened since then on this research...

STANFORD - An individual ant is not very bright, but ants in a colony, operating as a collective, do remarkable things.

A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant.

That resemblance is why Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford University assistant professor of biological sciences, studies ants.

"I'm interested in the kind of system where simple units together do behave in complicated ways," she said.

No one gives orders in an ant colony, yet each ant decides what to do next.

For instance, an ant may have several job descriptions. When the colony discovers a new source of food, an ant doing housekeeping duty may suddenly become a forager. Or if the colony's territory size expands or contracts, patroller ants change the shape of their reconnaissance pattern to conform to the new realities. Since no one is in charge of an ant colony - including the misnamed "queen," which is simply a breeder - how does each ant decide what to do?

This kind of undirected behavior is not unique to ants, Gordon said. How do birds flying in a flock know when to make a collective right turn? All anchovies and other schooling fish seem to turn in unison, yet no one fish is the leader.

Gordon studies harvester ants in Arizona and, both in the field and in her lab, the so-called Argentine ants that are ubiquitous to coastal California.

Argentine ants came to Louisiana in a sugar shipment in 1908. They were driven out of the Gulf states by the fire ant and invaded California, where they have displaced most of the native ant species. One of the things Gordon is studying is how they did so. No one has ever seen an ant war involving the Argentine species and the native species, so it's not clear whether they are quietly aggressive or just find ways of taking over food resources and territory.

The Argentine ants in her lab also are being studied to help her understand how they change behavior as the size of the space they are exploring varies.

"The ants are good at finding new places to live in and good at finding food," Gordon said. "We're interested in finding out how they do it."

Her ants are confined by Plexiglas walls and a nasty glue-like substance along the tops of the boards that keeps the ants inside. She moves the walls in and out to change the arena and videotapes the ants' movements. A computer tracks each ant from its image on the tape and reads its position so she has a diagram of the ants' activities.

The motions of the ants confirm the existence of a collective.

"A colony is analogous to a brain where there are lots of neurons, each of which can only do something very simple, but together the whole brain can think. None of the neurons can think ant, but the brain can think ant, though nothing in the brain told that neuron to think ant."

For instance, ants scout for food in a precise pattern. What happens when that pattern no longer fits the circumstances, such as when Gordon moves the walls?

"Ants communicate by chemicals," she said. "That's how they mostly perceive the world; they don't see very well. They use their antennae to smell. So to smell something, they have to get very close to it.

"The best possible way for ants to find everything - if you think of the colony as an individual that is trying to do this - is to have an ant everywhere all the time, because if it doesn't happen close to an ant, they're not going to know about it. Of course, there are not enough ants in the colony to do that, so somehow the ants have to move around in a pattern that allows them to cover space efficiently."

Keeping in mind that no one is in charge of a colony and that there is no central plan, how do the ants adjust their reconnaissance if their territory expands or shrinks?

"No ant told them, 'OK, guys, if the arena is 20 by 20. . . .' Somehow there has to be some rule that individual ants use in deciding to change the shape of their paths so they cover the areas effectively. I think that that rule is the rate in which they bump into each other."

The more crowded they are, the more often each ant will bump into another ant. If the area of their territory is expanded, the frequency of contact decreases. Perhaps, Gordon thinks, each ant has a threshold for normality and adjusts its path shape depending on how often the number of encounters exceeds or falls short of that threshold.

If the territory shrinks, the number of contacts increases and the ant alters its search pattern. If it expands, contact decreases and it alters the pattern a different way.

In the Arizona harvester ants, Gordon studies tasks besides patrolling. Each ant has a job.

"I divide the tasks into four: foraging, nest maintenance, midden [piling refuse, including husks of seeds] and patrolling - patrollers are the ones that come out first in the morning and look for food. The foragers go where the patrollers find food.

"The colony has about eight different foraging paths. Every day it uses several of them. The patrollers go out first on the trails and they attract each other when they find food. By the end of an hour's patrolling, most patrollers are on just a few trails. . . . All the foragers have to do is go where there are the most patrollers."

Each ant has its prescribed task, but the ants can switch tasks if the collective needs it. An ant on housekeeping duty will decide to forage. No one told it to do so and Gordon and other entomologists don't know how that happens.

"No ant can possibly know how much food everybody is collecting, how many foragers are needed," she said. "An ant has to have very simple rules that tell it, 'OK, switch and start foraging.' But an ant can't assess globally how much food the colony needs.

"I've done perturbation experiments in which I marked ants according to what task they're doing on a given day. The ants that were foraging for food were green, those that were cleaning the nest were blue and so on. Then I created some new situation in the environment; for example, I create a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up or I'll put out extra food that attracts more foragers.

"It turns out that ants that were marked doing a certain task one day switch to do a different task when conditions change."

Of about 8,000 species of ants, only about 10 percent have been studied thus far.

"It's hard to generalize anything about the behavior of ants," Gordon said. "Most of what we know about ants is true of a very, very small number of species compared to the number of species out there."

Yay! Yipee! Yay!

I am thoroughly excited and looking forward to the weekend as I am off this conference where most of my cherished role models speak. Cant wait for April 19 to be with these folks flesh and blood and live listening to them..

Call me Fishmeal

I regularly read this blog and today there's a very candid piece which I would like to preserve in my notebook. Its very simple but simple is beauitful in my world.

The happiest and saddest part, I think, of liking someone of the opposite sex... really liking, as in, really admiring the person, thinking that she is, in fact, a really good person, a decent person, a person whose morals and smarts and sense of humor and accomplishments you actually think are amazing -- not just, like, "Damn, she got pretty tummy," which latter sentiment I have also fallen prey to -- the happiest and saddest part is that you become someone different when you feel this way.

I don't want to, and won't, use the stupid cliché from the stupid movie. But it's true. You make yourself into a better person, not to trick them into liking you, but because _they deserve it_, and _you want to be a person that deserves them_. The difference is everything.

It's the saddest part because when you lose the hope, the dream, the focus -- well, you want to hold on to that you, that better you, that you that you liked so much, the you that you were with her. It's inside you. Were you faking? No. You have it. Just continue being it. Just don't stop. Be more patient with people you see. Smile at them. Let tiny things go, ignore any little slight, be generous with praise. Be that person. You can still do it. Hold on to him.

The Great Indian Rope Trick

I occasionally stop by while walking when I see what I call as a "picture moment". It can be a girl waiting in a crowded restaurant looking at her watch with a bright light on her face, a wife who is about to snap the thread after sewing a button on her husband's shirt (as seen through an apartment window at noon), a beautiful flowervase on the window sill with just enough light in the darkness of the night, a silhoutte of someone in moonlight, and ad hominem. One such occasion, someone told me "Take a Picture, It'll last longer"

I laughed it away.Now, I understand . Imagine this experiment: An observer is at a temporal (that is instead of space, watch it in time) vantage point shooting his subject and lets say he overexposes the film. (By overexpose, I mean keep the shutter open for a long while..really long while in this case like some centuries). Just as Keynes said "In the long run, we are all dead", similarly in a sufficiently longer run of time our hypothetical photographer with his shutter open watching a given subject will ultimately see his subject disappear or become transparent.

I wonder how that negative looks for such a "patient" snap...

A Small Revolution

Imagine this blog or any other blog which is hosted on the blogspot. Each of us have our own content to put up on the web and blogspot makes it easy for us to publish content to our end users using google infrastructure.

Now,imagine the same concept for people writing web applications (i.e like blogger, flickr,etc) where you have an application you wrote and instead of adding resources for yourself let Google do the hosting and management for you. This is truly important as you shall see a large flock of application developers coming up with their own applications on appspot.com

Crayon Physics

A Small Treasure..

..was found when I stumbled upon this trove (which will take you a while to read). As usual culling out some gems (cannot help laughing at some):

The Internet is full. Go away.

-- http://www.disobey.com/devilshat/ds011101.htm

All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.

-- IBM maintenance manual, 1925

Fools ignore complexity.
Pragmatists suffer it.
Some can avoid it.
Geniuses remove it.

-- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least
expect it. -- spaf (1992)

Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make the additional features appear necessary.

-- Revised(5) Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme

Structure is _nothing_ if it is all you got. Skeletons _spook_ people if they try to walk around on their own. I really wonder why XML does not.
-- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp


A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).


Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.
-- Eddy Peters


A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.
-- William James

It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.
-- G. H. Hardy

I don't have any special knowledge of all this. In fact, I made all the above up, in the hope that it corresponds to reality.
-- Mark Carroll, ucam.chat

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
-- Jef Raskin

The word "Fascism" has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable'.
-- George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language"


If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
-- Jack Handey


Indeed, when I design my killer language, the identifiers "foo" and "bar" will be reserved words, never used, and not even mentioned in the reference manual. Any program using one will simply dump core without comment. Multitudes will rejoice.
-- Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998

As it seems to me, in Perl you have to be an expert to correctly make a nested data structure like, say, a list of hashes of instances. In Python, you have to be an idiot not to be able to do it, because you just write it down.
-- Peter Norvig, comp.lang.functional

Slashdot karma, unfortunately, is not real karma, because it doesn't involve the death of the people who have it
-- from Twisted.Quotes

People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work if it just results in what I consider to be a better
system.
-- Linus Torvalds

Our Constitution never promised us a good or efficient government, just a representative one. And that's what we got.

If Unicode is a horde of zombies with flaming dung sticks, the hideous intricacies of JIS, Chinese Big-5, Chinese Traditional, KOI-8, et cetera are at least an army of ogres with salt and flensing knives.
-- Eric S. Raymond, python-dev

The code definitely is not portable - it will produce incorrect results if run from the surface of Mars.
-- James Bonfield, http://www.ioccc.org/2000/rince.hint


The source passes lint without any complaint (if invoked with >/dev/null). -- Daniel Fischer, http://www.ioccc.org/1998/df.hint

I can't see a conspicuous evolutionary advantage in being good at higher mathematics
-- James Riden, asr

Paper, Eggs, Tomatoes and Stones

Sometimes I feel like going back to an Indian village to watch puppet shows,orchestra, harikatha or something. Anyone outside from a village can understand that the typical villager is fairly demanding in his time and if the so called "show" really sucks then they dont hesitate to let their expectation be known and expect improvement. Despite such a hint, if things dont improve, expect rotten eggs and tomatoes (wonder who stores them and distributes to the locals?) thrown in your face.

If an third world village has such stringent demands, what about first world web developers? At a recent conference they waited 50 minutes before launching their revolt and taking over the interview. I would have raised that question within the first 15 minutes (C'mon, how can someone tolerate the host who simple seems to be suited for something else..I amlost broke my screen in frsutration...) Here is it for your viewing pleasure (I like the Viddler site as it allows you to tag videos precisely at certain points and you can see comments as the host flirts with the interviewer..). Watch it for first 10 and last 10 minutes only (if you watch the rest you will be traumatised, I assure you)




(..just wished they threw pens/notepads or something like that but then civility demands a line drawn somewhere..)

Happy Pi Day!

Today is celebrated as Pi Day. We celebrate by eating a pie. Then also, we have come a full circle of our integration into a new group. Also, it is the birthday of Albert E. This was also the day Sutro Bath was inaugurated.

Coming to Pi, you should watch Arnofsky's movie by the same name and lastly the book called " History of Pi" by Petr Beckmann. whats amazing about the book is not only the history and math but the critical analysis of how history is written. For example, the resounding theme is that Roman fellows always subsumed cultures far more sophisticated as their own (yet call them barbarians). The key point of the story was that an enemy is someone "whose stories you do not understand.."

Here's a quick mnemonic to remember Pi : "May I have a large container of coffee". The number of letters in each word when written down as digits yields 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 which gives you the 7 digit decimal expansion of Pi...

Thought du Jour

The length of the "true" longing for a particular thing is directly proportional to the depth of the satisfaction when you get it. If it isnt, then you werent longing for it :)