Swarm Intelligence

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Swarm Intelligence

• James Hobson
• Andrew Forth
• Josh Griffin

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For Your Information

• Swarm Intelligence is a branch of AI
• SI is study of simple agents doing intelligent
  things
• Ants are the most common examples of SI
• Useful for the traveling salesman problem

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ANTS!!!
Ants are really good at
gathering food
building bridges
building and protecting large nests
cooperating in carrying large items
finding the shortest path to a food source using
pheromones
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Programming Challenges

• making a world
• making ants that move around without walking in
  circles
• getting the ants to harvest food

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The Ant Simulation World

• 10 to 20 ants created in the beginning.
• Ants are spawned based on food collected.

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The World cont.

• There is presently no time limit for the ants.
• Ants have life and will starve when food is gone

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Top Secret Ant Mission

• When ants are born, they search around until they
  find something to interact with, ie food.
• When they find food

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Back to the nest!!
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Howdya Do That?
? Ants have a sense of smell
Ants have sight?
?Ants have instinct
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By The Numbers

• 1000
• 5
• 8
• 1

Number of lines of code in the program Number of
classes used. 1 for ant, 1 for colony, 1 for
food, and 2 for window Weeks to complete the
project Number of people programming java code
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Timeline
Decide on project, divide up work
Make an environment for the ants using pacman code
Make an ant that moves around randomly
Make the ant with sight and smell
Make multiple ants
Ants follow pheromone trail
Fix bugs
Turn it in
week 1 week 2 week 3 week 4 week 5
week 6 week 7 week 8