No insult intended to human teachers, but a research team in England says that the first clear demonstration of true teaching among other animals comes from a species without much of a brain—an ant.It's a little strange, and much unexpected, but ants teach other ants. If you think about this a little more, beyond what is in the article (linked above) it really shows something of where complexity and cellular automata research may go. Presently, these areas look at how local rules bring out emergent behavior and what kinds of patterns these local rules give. Yet, I've not seen work done where the agents (think ants!) are modeled to teach each other how to behave and maximize their "opitimization function." This could be a whole new area of study. It's (pardon the pun, vis-a-vis the ants) food for thought.
1 comment:
Very cool! Hadn't seen that one! You are quite right to say that little if no work has been done in the cellular automata community; at least in the way that has been observed with these ants. Lots of work has been done of course on global optimization (whioch is a form of learning), and even global optimization that depends on local rules, but not quite from the conceptual standpoint implied by this work: i.e., local optimization learned purely for local /selfish needs. What is *really* needed is a graceful fusion of local and global where each component part respects the fact that it is both a part of something bigger than itself and depends of lower/smaller entities for its own existence. Something no one has yet demonstrated, convincingly, is how natural hierarchies form. We know theyt do, and can mimic what happens when they do, but where do they fundamentally come from? This work cited here is a hint.
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