Physicists use magnetism simulation software to model US presidential elections

Physicists use magnetism simulation software to model US presidential elections: A team of physicists working at IFISC in Palma de Mallorca, Spain has used a computer simulation originally designed to model the transition of iron between magnetized states to create a model to do something similar for voting patterns in the United States...

What is possible though is modeling human behavior as it relates to voter patterns. One such behavior is the tendency of voters to be impacted by the opinions of others, whether those of people that live near them, or those that commute to places where they work...

Doing so revealed previously unknown correlations between regions that actually existed in the real world of vote casting and graphically illustrated the influence that voters have on one another. One striking example was the county to county variability displayed, indicating the percentage of votes going to either party—showing that the national mean changes from election to election, but not the degree of fluctuation between counties.

Video: Robotic Ants Solve Riddles Without Math

Video: Robotic Ants Solve Riddles Without Math: Researchers used tiny, cube-shaped robots that were powered by watch motors and ran on dime-sized wheels. They gave the machines three rules: to walk randomly in a given direction, to turn away from obstacles they bump into, and to follow a trail of light left by other robots (as seen in the video)—similar to the way real ants use their antennae to sense chemicals left behind by other ants. These simple tenets were enough to allow the robots to copy ants' ability to find the shortest path home.

Bumblebees Sense Electric Fields in Flowers

Bumblebees Sense Electric Fields in Flowers: Finally, the team released bumblebees into an arena with artificial flowers, half of which were positively charged and carried a sucrose reward, and the other half of which were grounded and carried a bitter solution. Over time, the bees increasingly visited the rewarding charged flowers.

But when the researchers turned off the electrical charge on the flowers and re-released the trained bees, the insects visited rewarding flowers only about half of the time, as they would have by random chance.

‘Green Brain’ project to create an autonomous flying robot with a honey bee brain - News releases - News - The University of Sheffield

‘Green Brain’ project to create an autonomous flying robot with a honey bee brain - News releases - News - The University of Sheffield: The team will build models of the systems in the brain that govern a honey bee's vision and sense of smell. Using this information, the researchers aim to create the first flying robot able to sense and act as autonomously as a bee, rather than just carry out a pre-programmed set of instructions.

Flying Math: Bees Solve Traveling Salesman Problem

Flying Math: Bees Solve Traveling Salesman Problem: After trying about “20 of the 120 possible routes, the bees were able to select the most efficient path to visit the flowers,” Lihoreau says. “They did not need to compute all the possibilities.” A naïve bee traveled almost 2,000 meters on its first foraging bout among the pentagonal array; by her final trip, she’d reduced that distance to a mere 458 meters.

Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet'

Stanford researchers discover the 'anternet':  ...A forager won't return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.

Prabhakar wrote an ant algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount of food – i.e., bandwidth – available. Gordon's experiments manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in Gordon's experiments...

They also found that the ants followed two other phases of TCP. One phase is known as slow start, which describes how a source sends out a large wave of packets at the beginning of a transmission to gauge bandwidth; similarly, when the harvester ants begin foraging, they send out foragers to scope out food availability before scaling up or down the rate of outgoing foragers.

Another protocol, called time-out, occurs when a data transfer link breaks or is disrupted, and the source stops sending packets. Similarly, when foragers are prevented from returning to the nest for more than 20 minutes, no more foragers leave the nest.

Using ant-based swarm intelligence for materials handling

Using ant-based swarm intelligence for materials handling: The scientists have assembled a testing facility with a swarm of 50 autonomous devices. “In the future, transport systems should be able to perform all of these tasks autonomously, from removal from the shelf to delivery to a picking station...

“We rely on agent-based software and use ant-like algorithms based on the work of Marco Dorigo. These are methods of combinational optimization based on the behavior of real ants in their search for food.“

How to create an ant spiral of death

How to create an ant spiral of death: One can create an ant mill just by diverting a few ants and placing them into an enclosed space where they are likely to loop back on their own scent. Biologist and photographer Alex Wild remembers ants getting trapped in a vortex simply by walking onto dinner plates in his kitchen and exploring the plate until they found their own scent.

Starling Flocks Behave Like Flying Magnets | Wired Science | Wired.com

Starling Flocks Behave Like Flying Magnets | Wired Science | Wired.com: Rather than affecting every other flock member, orientation changes caused only a bird’s seven closest neighbors to alter their flight. That number stayed consistent regardless of flock density, making the equations “topological” rather than critical in nature.

“The orientations are not at a critical point,” said Giardina. Even without criticality, however, changes rippled quickly through flocks — from one starling to seven neighbors, each of which affected seven more neighbors, and so on.

The closest statistical fit for this behavior comes from the physics of magnetism, and describes how the electron spins of particles align with their neighbors as metals become magnetized.

Bee swarms behave just like neurons in the human brain

Bee swarms behave just like neurons in the human brain: "It appears that the stop signals in bee swarms serve the same purpose as the inhibitory connections in the brains of monkeys deciding how to move their eyes in response to visual input. In one case we have bees and in the other we have neurons that suppress the activity levels of units – dancing bees or nerve centers – that are representing different alternatives. Bee behavior can shed some light on general issues of decision making..."

This phenomenon, known as cross inhibition, serves precisely the same function with bees that it does in nervous systems. It's a way of avoiding decision-making deadlock when presented with a set of equally viable alternatives.

Honeybee anti-waggle song tells others to buzz off - life - 18 September 2011 - New Scientist

Honeybee anti-waggle song tells others to buzz off: By setting up good and bad nest sites, he found that scouts that favoured a particularly good site "beeped" other dancers, butting them and making high-pitched sounds. This made the other scouts dance less, and boosted the popularity of the preferred site,

RoboBee speaks honeybee dance language - tech - 19 August 2011 - New Scientist

RoboBee speaks honeybee dance language: In a field outside Berlin, Landgraf trained groups of honeybees to use a feeder, which he then closed. The bees stopped foraging and stayed in their hives. There they met RoboBee, which had been programmed with Landgraf's best guess at a waggle dance pointing to another feeder, which the bees had never visited.

The bees responded by leaving the hive, but returned to their old feeders. For now, it looks like RoboBee persuaded them to forage, but failed to communicate where to go. The team is confident RoboBee didn't just scare away the foragers, as honeybees respond to intruders by stinging, not fleeing.

[1104.3152] Polyethism in a colony of artificial ants

[1104.3152] Polyethism in a colony of artificial ants: We explore self-organizing strategies for role assignment in a foraging task carried out by a colony of artificial agents. Our strategies are inspired by various mechanisms of division of labor (polyethism) observed in eusocial insects like ants, termites, or bees. Specifically we instantiate models of caste polyethism and age or temporal polyethism to evaluated the benefits to foraging in a dynamic environment. Our experiment is directly related to the exploration/exploitation trade of in machine learning.

New Scientist TV: Fluid nature: Ants mimic liquids to stay afloat

New Scientist TV: Fluid nature: Ants mimic liquids to stay afloat

Complex mathematical problem solved by bees

Complex mathematical problem solved by bees: "In nature, bees have to link hundreds of flowers in a way that minimises travel distance, and then reliably find their way home - not a trivial feat if you have a brain the size of a pinhead! Indeed such travelling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving."

Technology Review: Blogs: Mims's Bits: Robots as Art: The Serene Beauty of LumiBots

Technology Review: Blogs: Mims's Bits: Robots as Art: The Serene Beauty of LumiBots: "Each 'bot is equipped with a tiny infrared light. As it drives itself across a glow-in-the-dark mat, this leaves a trail of visible phosphorescence. In the front of the bot, a light sensor helps the lumiBot follow any trail it encounters, its own or that of other lumiBots.

By both following an existing trail and reinforcing it by laying down a new one, or even refining it by taking shortcuts, just as real ants do, lumiBots, which have no memory, communicate elementary spatial information to one another and allow designs on the floor to arise by emergence, rather than the dictates of a pre-defined program."

Fireflies blink in synch to send a uniform message (w/ Video)

Fireflies blink in synch to send a uniform message (w/ Video): "For decades, scientists have speculated about why some fireflies exhibit synchronous flashing, in which large groups produce rhythmic, repeated flashes in unison - sometimes lighting up a whole forest at once."

Robotic fish school the rest - News - iTnews Mobile Edition

Robotic fish school the rest - News - iTnews Mobile Edition "The robotic fish was also able to cause fish in groups of up to ten to turn in the same direction as itself, although its influence diminished after the first 30 minutes the fish had spent in the new tank."