Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

I was working through my rss feed on robots the other day and ran across this short story. It’s worth a read, just some light reading for the holiday.

So, for months, I’ve been seeing this “stock robot” trading machine ad, all over the net. From time to time, it would pop up on my blog too; so I bought one.The “stock trading robot” was delivered in a metal box, about half the size of a coffin. I’m sure my neighbors thought “The Fly” was having dead monkey’s delivered to his house. Very nice. . . . [ read more The important matter of stock trading robots]

If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.

Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible. [ read more From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm (NYT)]

One of the more interesting things discovered is that swarm behavior can change rapidly to with one individual’s change. Many of the rules discovered by I Couzin are common to many species and resemble laws of the physical universe.

See also:
Particle Swarms
Ant Algorithms

More information:
Slashdot, The rules of the swarm
Iain Couzin home page
Collective memory and spatial sorting in animal groups
Self organization and collective behavior in vertebrates

Several companies are working on intelligent agents to help you in your computer interactions, ( see Lua created assistant ) and here is yet another one, Magitti.

Magitti is different in that it is taking advantage of some of the phones unique advantages: portability, gps and that it travels with you all day.

It is also different in that there is a built in revenue stream. Magitti recommends local restaurants and shopping at appropriate times and locations.

There are few details to be found at PARC yet. More will be forthcoming I’m sure. There are papers available for a fee at IEEE search for ‘PARC and mobile’.

See also:

Agents, bots and spiders