[computer-go] Decision-making methods in a distributed "swarm" of "light-weight" processors.

[Chris Fant]

I wouldn't say a bee is light in processing power.  Are you able to
find a near-optimal bee nesting site?


On 5/24/06, Aidan Karley <aidan_karley at mail.ru> wrote:
>         I tried to make the "Subject:" relevant to the article, but also to raise
> the interest of Go programmers, particularly those using parallelised systems.
>
> Article at www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/50768 and in
> the over-the-counter editions where I saw it.
> Abstract :
> > Group Decision Making in Honey Bee Swarms
> > When 10,000 bees go house hunting, how do they cooperatively choose their
> > new nesting site?
> > Thomas D. Seeley, P. Kirk Visscher, Kevin M. Passino
> > One of the turning points in the life of a honey bee colony is when  a
> > queen bee bequeaths her hive to her daughter queen, takes half the worker
> > bees and goes off to start a new nest. The departing bees' process of
> > deciding on a new home seems to take some time. With careful research,
> > Thomas Seeley and his colleagues have uncovered how a swarm comes to
> > a decision. It's not a democracy, exactly, but rather a matter of reaching
> > a threshold as bees endorse a particular site using their "waggle dancing."
> > For a group of about 10,000 bees, several hundred scout out nest sites, but
> > it takes the build-up of just 10 to 20 bees at a site before the swarm
> > starts to move to that location. Through experiments and mathematical
> > modeling, Seeley's group has shown that the bees' method is best at
> > balancing the need to find a home quickly and choosing an ideal nesting
> > site.
> >
>        I don't have a subscription to get the electronic full text, but I'd
> suspect that at least a few other people on the list would have met Am.Sci.
> before and be able to vouch for the quality of it's articles.
>
>        What interested me is the way that a number of lightweight (in processing
> power, and literally!) evaluating units (bees) could quickly and effectively come
> to an opinion as to the optimal move to make in their area of exploitation.
> Further, the method that appears to be used involves repeated sessions where a
> particular processing unit (bee) re-visits a site being evaluated, where the bee
> re-assesses it's opinion of the quality of the site.
>        This strikes me as somewhat similar to the way that I play - coming up
> with a list of possible locations to play, then repeatedly looking at possible
> moves on from each possible move, discarding some moves and re-iterating until I
> have just one move which I've followed on most deeply as being my best choice.
>
>        Well it strikes me as having some relevance in an AI sort of way to Go
> programming. Whether it's something that could be an effective evaluating
> algorithm for pruning move selections down to "the move", I don't know. But I
> think it's at least worth a look.
>
> --
>  Aidan Karley,
>  Aberdeen,  Scotland
>
>
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