Hawaii 5.0

Dan decreed Wednesday 16 August 2006 as Hawaiian Shirt Day, and after some judicious Op Shop shopping several of us procured shirts of varying degrees of brightness and... er... taste. From left to right: me, Dan, Nigel and Jason.

Nigel's hair was unrelated to the theme of the day, and luckily didn't clash at all *cough cough* with his shirt. Nice cup btw, too.

The start of a new tradition? Time will tell.

P.S. I will eventually post something about research (like the ANTS2006 conference coming up), just as soon as deal with all the work I've got. *sigh*

Ant Inspired Computation in 1988

Late last year I chanced upon the title of a 1988 paper by Moyson and Manderick: The Collective Behaviour of Ants: An Example of Self-Organization in Massive Parallelism. Recently I was able to get an electronic copy.

The paper presents an argument for the use of biological ant colonies as an inspiration for parallel problem solving. The paper discusses the importance of randomness in decision making in conjunction with a chemical trail (pheromone) to direct the ants towards a food source or a nest. The emergent effect of trail formation between food and nest which results from simple local interactions is shown to be of great importance since it can be shown to occur without the specific requirement for a path between food and nest, i.e. there is no reward or cost function associated with forming a trail, it just occurs through the definition of four behaviours (rules).

Each artificial ‘ant’ moves about a grid according to four simple rules. Each ant first checks whether it has found food. If so it reverses direction and starts laying pheromone, looking for more pheromone. If no food has been found the ant checks for the nest and if it is encountered the ant reverses direction and looks for pheromone. If the ant found neither food nor pheromone nor nest it travels in a random way, left, forward or right. If a pheromone is encountered its new direction is determined by this pheromone in any of the three directions: left, forward or right.

The researchers found that these simple rules were enough to allow the ants to create paths between multiple food sources and the nest without an inbuilt requirement for the ants to build a path between a nest and food.

The paper introduces several key concepts taken from biology and replicated in an artificial simulation:

• Self-organisation without the requirement for centralised control.
• Use of randomness in conjunction with directedness in the form of an artificial pheromone to guide decision making.
• Emergent effects (path linking) occurring in the absence of a cost function.
• The requirement for a critical mass of artificial ants before emergent effects are observed.

So what? Well the paper was published in early 1988, and references Probabilistic Behaviour of Ants: A Strategy of Errors. The same paper referenced by the seminal work of Dorigo, Maniezzo and Colorni on Ant System, three years later. Whereas the later paper has been referenced by almost every major work in the field to date (57 according to citeseer), Moyson and Manderick’s paper has received only one citation by Koza in a non-ant-inspired computation paper. As Prof. Julius Sumner Miller would say “Why is it so?”

Sartorial Sarcasm at the CITR Research Briefing Day

Universities seem to like combining water with oil, chalk with cheese, comedy with Adam Sandler. At the start of this year our Faculty formed a super research Centre combining seven different research groups and last week they decided it was time we all got together to find out what we all do, and how we can work together to produce bigger and better research "outcomes" (OK, so maybe they didn't use that word, but they were thinking it!).

What could be more boring than a full-day "briefing" on what other people who research very different things to yourself do? What indeed... well, to make things a bit more interesting, Tim and I undertook a mutual dare to smarten things up a little by wearing (real) bow ties. (btw, mine is actually dark green, not black, which stayed in the wardrobe at home.)

Anyway, this little bit of sartorial silliness has now spawned themed days, which we'll try to get as many involved in as possible. The next one is Hawaiian Shirt Day, in case you were wondering (thanks Dan).

James.

Why model evolution as search

There is a good layman's explanation on Good Math, Bad Math as to why to model evolution as a search process.

Imagining the 10th Dimension

I came across this awesome flash thing that explains the ten dimensions of string theory. It's for the layman, and goes for a few minutes. Totally worth watching. The 9th dimension is totally lame :)

Hello world, from Jason

Hey, what a great idea Dan! Can't wait to start spamming this thing with AI stuff.

Don't forget to check my personal PhD blog called Pensive Pondering, I have a new post up there about collaborative drawing systems. Also, don't forget to check my awesome personal homepage for heaps of cool applets and information on my research.

If you want something random and geeky to read, check out Topological Quantum Computation. There is some course notes on it here if you want more.

- Jason

Welcome

The Complex Intelligent Systems (CIS) Group was until recently called the Centre for Intelligent Systems and Complex Processes (CISCP). The group was founded in 1992 and has been involved primarily with research in the fields of artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, collective intelligence algorithms, data visualization, brain dynamics and brain modelling.

We are located within the Centre for Information Technology Research, Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia. (So many Technologies!)

As a group we attend most major conferences in these fields and also contribute to world leading journals in the above research areas. The group's size varies and at time of writing we comprise about 10-15 researchers and affiliates.

In the near future this blog will contain a variety of material including interesting research, research reviews, group social events, conference reviews, plus more...