February 9, 2009
everyone knows an ant can’t get stuck in traffic
Dussutour, whose earlier work showed that leafcutter ants organize themselves into separate and tightly-regulated streams of load-carrying and unburdened individuals when traveling in opposite directions on wide paths, was curious about their dynamics on narrow paths such as the tip of a treebranch — the ant equivalent of a one-lane road.
In the latest findings, published in the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dussutour’s team found that ants leaving the colony automatically gave right-of-way to those returning with food. Of the returning ants, some were empty-mandibled — but rather than passing their leaf-carrying, slow-moving brethren, they gathered in clusters and moved behind them.
“Leafcutters paths in particular look very much like car traffic,” said Dussutour. “There’s a lot of times on the highway when you’re stuck behind a truck, and sometimes overtaking it is not optimal.”
The difference between ants and humans.
“One dominating factor in human traffic is egoism,” said University of Zoln traffic flow theorist Andreas Schadschneider. “Drivers optimize their own travel time, without taking much care about others. This leads to phantom traffic jams which occur without any obvious reason. Ants, on the other hand, are not egoistic.”
How the ant model might be applied.
An experimental navigational system called Inter-Vehicle Communication tries to emulate this, with on-board navigation computers exchanging data as they pass each other and roadside base stations. It’s yet to be deployed in real-world conditions, though, reflecting the difficulty in replacing a culture and infrastructure of solitary driving.
A compromise, said Schadschneider, may be systems that improve communication between drivers and cars. “This has already been achieved by new devices which transmit information about abrupt velocity decreases to the following cars, which then start to brake automatically, before the driver even realizes the need to brake,” he said.
Beshers is optimistic about the potential of driverless cars running on ant traffic algorithms, but cautious about the timeline of their acceptance. Embracing such a system, he said, “assumes that humans could agree on an upper speed limit, which has never yet happened.”
The image at the top of the post is from Dussutour’s web site.
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Some friends of mine had a problem with ants colonizing their cats’ food bowl. I suggested a moat, made out of a partially filled pie pan. Vigorous discussion ensued, and we spent the better part of the next hour watching their attempts to cross the watery barrier, wagering on the likelihood of their success. “Look, he’s stretching out with his feelers! And…no, no he can’t do it! I TOLD you!”