August 27, 2014 • 42 mins
Ants can ruin a picnic, sure, but they might also inspire some of the most interesting materials technology and computer science of tomorrow. Your hosts take a look at these swarming, six-legged collective geniuses in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking. The
podcast then looks at the future and says, I spend
my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren back Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. So, guys,
(00:26):
we we've tackled on this podcast some pretty heavy topics
in the past. Spiders was a big one. Bees, bees
another big one. Mosquitoes. You know, a lot of these
I was not present for. I think, I think, actually
were you present for any of them? But they're not
an insect, that's true, they're creepy crawley. Yeah, for a while,
(00:48):
every time you were out of the office, Jonathan, Lauren
and I would record a podcast about some insect. And
to be fair, you chose this topic when it looked
like I wasn't going to be in the office. Yes, uh,
And then for Chin smiled upon me, and it turns
out I am here to talk about ants. Yes, the
future of ants? Why, I mean, come on, guys, can
(01:12):
we talk about like, I don't know the future of
of of slow slow lorries or or the future the
future of Koalas or I'll do that episode. Well, I
guess we gotta get through this one. For next time,
we'll do a sloth tech. I'm a big fan of sloths.
I love slots. They are adorable, they're pretty creepy. My
(01:34):
favorite sloth is Extinct, the one that's like big bear. Yeah. Yeah,
terror comes for you slowly and just set creeping up. No,
we're gonna talk about ants. Ants are actually fascinating and
they may inspire some really interesting technologies of the future.
(01:54):
So first, let's just talk about ants in general. So
did you guys know that there are more than ten
thousand ant species already identified by us the human beings,
as in, there might be plenty more out there. Sure,
there could be species that we have had limited or
(02:14):
no contact with that we have yet to identify. In fact,
there's one ant we're gonna be talking about later in
this podcast that for a long time had been misidentified
and as a result, um the handling of that ant
never really went into action. But I'm getting ahead of
myself anyway. Yeah, there are a lot of different types
(02:35):
of ants out there, and in fact, they can be
found just about everywhere on Earth. There are a few
exceptions where there are no native species of ants. Antarctica,
for example, you don't get any snow ants up there,
or ice ants ants in Antarctica, And I know it's
it's anti Antarctica. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, Antarctica, ironically
(02:57):
is the is one of the places where you're not
gonna really old places, so near the North Pole you
probably don't. Yeah, Greenland, Iceland, they don't have native species
of ants. Uh. Parts of Polynesia do not have any
native species of ants. And there are a few remote
islands in say the Indian Ocean or that don't have
them either. But otherwise you can pretty much find them everywhere.
(03:19):
They're really prevalent in tropical regions and can make up
more than half of all the insects within a tropical forest.
For example, where where to ants fit in the sort
of the family tree of insects, They belong to the
same order as wasps and bees, so uh, they're very similar.
If you, by the way, are ever wondering if perhaps
(03:42):
a little insect you have encountered is either an ant
or a termite, look to see if they have a
very thin waste. Essentially is what you're you're looking between
the thorax and the abdomen. If they don't, it's a termite.
If they do, it's nand simple rule of thumb there. Uh.
Most pecs of ant live in permanent colonies that they
(04:04):
establish in some location. It might be tunnels under the ground,
it might be a mound that's on top of the ground,
could be in trees or would carpenter ants are famous
for being really destructive around houses. Most ants do live
in these colonies, these permanent colonies, but there are some exceptions.
Army ants, for example, do not have a permanent nest.
They migrate, so their colony actually will move from place
(04:27):
to place, and you will get these massive army ant
migrations which are the stuff of nightmares. Uh. Then you
also have the fact that ant colonies are centered around
a queen ant. So this sounds very familiar to anyone
who's studied bees, I mean queen bee ideas very similar. Um,
the queen ant lays eggs. Those eggs will develop into
(04:50):
either female ants, which are the worker ants. They do
all the hard work, including building the colonies, gathering food,
all that kind of stuff, taking care of the lar Yeah.
Then you know the male ants whose job it is. Yeah,
their their job is to knock up the queen. That's
all they do. That's it. And most, not most, but
in several ant species, lots of them. Uh. The males
(05:13):
will die after meeting with the queen. And that's pretty
much the you know, fairly standard, that's pretty much it. Yeah,
it's not not being terribly Uh, you're not really exaggerating there, Joe.
So normally, you know, ants communicate chemically with each other
through pheromones. Yeah, and a little bit by touch, I believe. Yeah. Yeah,
(05:36):
mainly it's through chemicals. Like most ant species, if they
are traveling someplace, they laid down a pheromone trail, So
this tells other ants that this is the pathway that
was taken to get to some location, usually like food.
This is actually interesting. You can disrupt the pheromone trail
with your finger. If you ever see ants moving along
(05:57):
the line, uh, and you just drag your finger across
the line of ants. Watch what happens. It totally breaks
their their concentration. The ones in in behind that are
about to move across where you've just dragged your finger,
they start acting confused. Where do I go? Yeah, yeah,
there's a several visual gags in a bug's life that
(06:20):
kind of play on that, except of course it's not
a pheromone trail. They do it where it's just like
a a sudden obstacle moves in the way and that
disrupts everything, which is a little simplification, but hey, it's
a Pixar movie and it's adorable. Uh. Then there are
specific the specific type of ant that we wanted to
refer to that are just kind of interesting that relate
(06:43):
to technology but not in a good way. No. Well,
so you've heard about the fire ant invasion of the
United States again, which are scary and painful and terrible. Yeah,
we got a new one now. Yeah, crazy ants, specifically
tawny crazy ants or raspberry crazy ants. Raspberry named after
the the UH fruit. No, not the fruit A lot
(07:06):
of people think that. No, it's actually named after the
UH exterminator who discovered these ants living in Texas. So
in two thousand and two, there was this this guy
who UH encountered these particular types of ants that people
were really kind of um getting perturbed over because one
the ants, the reason why they're called crazy ants is
(07:28):
when they are running around like on your kitchen floor
or something. They seem to be going every which way.
There's no apparent rhyme or reason to it. It's not
that ants go marching one by one kind of thing.
It's like they're just going all over the place. And yeah,
and their pathway is not like a straight line to
wherever they're going. They're going left, right everywhere. Also, they
(07:51):
seemed to be infesting electronics. Yeah. Really, the there was
a theory for a while that perhaps the ants were
attracted to either electric fields or magnetic fields. Science does
not seem to bear that out. Experiments have not beared
that out. What they what the current hypothesis is is
that they just love to find places to nest and
(08:13):
they will go anywhere that's kind of an enclosure to
nest in them. And if an ant, one of these
crazy ants, encounters something that harms it, like say electricity,
it gives off a pheromone that's an alarm pheromone, which
is essentially a signal to say, hey, I need some
help over here, and then other crazy ants will zoom
in and go straight to try and help them. Now,
(08:36):
in the case of electronics, those ants may in turn
get hurt and then they give off these pheromones and
then more and more ants come. So what you end
up with is a device that shorts out because the
ants short circuiting. Yeah. Yeah, that the ant bodies are
literally disrupting the circuit and frying themselves. Yeah. And so
you'll have stories about their stories about things like there
(08:59):
was a story about a guy who is using an iron,
the iron shorts out, uh sparks fly out and then
ants just pour out of the iron. Or someone is
watching television and the television ends up flickering and then
going out, and so they go and look at and
they remove the backpedal of the television and it's just
ants everywhere. And we're talking thousands upon thousands of these ants. Now,
(09:21):
when I told you earlier about the misidentification of ants,
this is the species I was talking about when scientists
were first looking at these ants. See See Raspberry was
trying to tell people, we need to figure out a
strategy to handle this now because this is a thing.
This is a thing that's happening, and it's going to
get worse before he gets better, because if we don't
(09:41):
address it, we're going to have a full on infestation
of like a plague level event here. And meanwhile you
had the government saying, well, you don't know anything about
these ants, so we can't We're not gonna give you
any money. And the science they're saying, well, without any money,
we can't learn anything about these ants, and it begin
this catch Twain too. Meanwhile, the scientists also misidentified, or
(10:02):
at least one entomologist um misidentified the ant as being
the same species as one that had become entrenched in
Florida in the nineteen fifties. But Raspberry said, hey, I
don't think so, because those ants in Florida we have
never heard of any problems like the ones we're experiencing
in Texas. And ultimately he ended up doing a lot
(10:24):
of research on his own, which there's a great article
about his research where its about crazy ants. It reveals
it reveals that he hates reading, he didn't go to college. Um,
he's not big on research, but he was obsessed with
this idea and so he really looked into it. And
then eventually they were able to identify the ant as
(10:46):
actually belonging to a species native to Brazil and Argentina,
not to Florida, and they suspect that bringing in soil
or perhaps building materials were what introduced the ants to
Texas and the cell eastern United States the Gulf States essentially,
so these things do end up clogging up a lot
(11:07):
of electronics. There were there were lots of reports. I
remember when this first started happening, when people started talking
about it, where everyone said, oh, they actually crave electricity,
But that's not what happening. Although they're they're interesting in
other ways as well. They're basically the xenomorphs of the
ant world. Yeah. So fire ants are also an invasive
(11:28):
species in the United States, specifically in the areas that
crazy ants tend to be found in, like Texas. Yeah,
and here in Georgia as well. Crazy ants are also
in Georgia. Guys, I don't know if you knew that
fire ants have a pretty nasty sting. They clamp onto
you with their jaws and then stab repeatedly with their stinger,
and it has a tough venom. Yeah. I react poorly
(11:50):
to fire ants stings. Um I get. I get nasty
little bumps everywhere where there was a sting, and I
used to encounter them quite a bit when I was
mowing my lawn. I now have someone else doing that
for me. But at any rate, you know, normally, fire ants,
as big of a nuisance as they are, don't cause
the kind of problems that crazy ants do. They don't.
(12:11):
They aren't as invasive into the human home as crazy
ants are. However, crazy ants have a couple of abilities
that really make them formidable opponents of the fire ant.
One is that they can coat themselves with chemicals that
counteract fire ant venom, which means they can fight longer
against the fire end. They also, instead of a stinger,
(12:31):
have a little appendage that allows them to spray acid
against other ants. Yeah, so xeno morph was pretty accurate.
They are able to spew acid on their opponents. And
I read a report where that said something along the
lines of in UH encounters between fire ants and crazy ants,
crazy ants when something like nine of the time, and
(12:55):
that even in an experiment where scientists covered up the
the the glands essentially that the ants were using to
cover themselves in the anti venom UH, they won fifty
three percent of the time. So wow, even when your
chief defense has been removed, you're still winning more. Who's
(13:16):
been arranging these scientific bug fights? There's there's an ant
thunderdome in Texas, UM, where they do these experiments. And yeah,
so the crazy ants are the master and the blaster
in this thunderdome world. So very interesting creatures. Um. Obviously
(13:37):
when we want we wanted to talk about specifically because
of their relationship with electronics and the misunderstanding that they
crave electricity. Also they're they're just really cool. But but right,
so so let us transition here by saying that ants
do more than just really mess up electronics. As it
turns out, they might inspire new electronics in the future. Yeah,
(13:57):
specifically things like computer algorithms and artificial intelligence algorithms. Uh.
So we wanted to talk about navigation specifically this idea.
You know, ants exhibit some interesting behaviors, including with certain species,
the ability to range out really far, like two meters
away from their nest, which when you're only like three
(14:19):
point five millimeters long, is not that that's a quite
a great distance. Uh. What's really interesting is not only
are they able to do that, but they can visit
various locations while foraging for food. When they find a
place that has food and they're ready to return to
the nest, they don't retrace their steps right, they don't.
(14:41):
Let's say they go to three different points and it's
not in a straight line. So they venture out from
the nest. They go to point one, then they maybe
take a left turn and go forward for a while,
and they visit point too, and they make another left turn,
and they visit point three. Well, once they found point
three and they said this is the place we want
to go, I need to go back to the nest.
They don't retrace their steps back two points two and
(15:01):
one and then go back home. They plot a course
that essentially goes in a straight line back to the nest,
as much of a straight line as they possibly can manage,
which raises the question, how do they do that thing?
That's odd? So when it comes down to navigation, scientists
have pretty much identified there being some combination of elements
(15:25):
going into effect here. One is path integration, one is
visual piloting or you know, seeing landmarks, and one is
called systematic search. And so here's how this breaks down. First,
you've got path integration. Now, this is that idea that
was just talking about the ability to visit multiple locations
and then find your way back home. So, as an
(15:46):
example I gave for the humans, because I think this
is helpful. If you're having trouble visualizing this, Imagine that
you have errands to run and you have to go
to multiple places to run these errands. And so you
leave your house. You have to go to the store
to pick up some non perishable stuff that you've just
gotta thrown into the car. So you go and you
store and you pick that up. Then you gotta go
and you gotta pick up some dry cleaning that you
(16:08):
had over at a totally different locations. So you drive
from the store to the dry cleaning pace. Then you decide, oh,
wait that I've also got my copy of the two
thousand six version of wicker Man starring Nicholas Cage uh,
and I need to return that to Video Drome, which
is in a totally different location from the dry cleaners.
Video Drome is a video store here in Atlanta. It's
(16:29):
a pretty fabulous one. It's pretty amazing. So anyway, you
go to video, You got to Video Drome and you
return the wicker Man um and they say thank you.
But at that point you're ready to go home. Now
you would not if you you know your way around,
you would not drive from Video Drome back to the
(16:49):
dry cleaners, and from the dry cleaners back to the store,
and from the store to your home. You would go
from video drume to your home. Same sort of thing
with animals, but they don't have the kind of of
pro sessing power that we have. Aunt brains are like
a milligram. I mean, we're talking super small. So how
can a creature this tiny, this with with this limited
(17:12):
number of neurological resources, be able to do something so
seemingly complex as plot a straight line path from a
distant destination rather than retracing steps to get back to
the starting point. And Uh, there's some disagreement or at
least some debate on what's going on. A lot of
(17:33):
it is just based upon the fact that we don't
definitively know um. But there's a specific type of desert
ant that really displays this behavior that's been under a
lot of scrutiny for years. In fact, if you look
up path integration and ants, you're going to see multiple
scientific papers written on the subject. So one of the
hypotheses about this is that it's all based on an
(17:57):
egocentric methodology rather than g e centric. Okay, so the
ant is sort of relating itself to its previous self
rather than itself to its surroundings. Yeah. Yeah, Essentially, it's
it's remembers its own position rather than having to look
and see where it is. Right, it's not making like
a mental map of its surroundings. It's thinking of where
(18:21):
it is in relation to its nest. But it's not
it's not mapping things out, thinking, oh, to the east
of me is a puddle and to the west of
you know, it's not like that. It's very very u
egocentrics centered upon the ant itself. It would be almost
like if you ran your errands by remembering how exactly
how far you drove and at what degree angles you
(18:43):
turned at each leg of the trip. That's part of it. Actually,
there's so ants have an odometer. It is not a
little dial tells it how far it went. Essentially, this
is information that relates to the distance and grade that
the ant has traveled. So whether it's a down slope,
up slope, whether it was to the left the right,
that kind of thing, how far it went. Generally speaking,
(19:05):
bees contract the same kind of information, and we talked
about that at length during our b episode. Right, So
this is all part of path integration, Right, you're being
able to integrate that information, but you integrate it with
something else, and in this case it's with polarized light,
which bees do as well. Yeah, so the ants are
able to sense polarized light. They use it as a
(19:25):
compass essentially, which is really nifty because the light of
the sun is polarized in such a way that that
if you can detect that polarization, you can navigate by
the sun even when it's cloudy. Right, Yeah, you just
through the polarization of the light itself. So essentially you're saying, oh,
the light is polarized in this way when I'm going
in this direction, so when I'm coming from this other direction,
(19:47):
it should look this other way. So that's part of it.
Then you've got the landmark navigation, which is just what
it sounds like that the ants identify specific geographic landmarks
and are able to relate that as a point along
their travels. It seems to be the major way that
I think humans navigate. Yeah, that's well, there's that in
(20:10):
Google maps. But yes, um so this in a I
would relate back to image processing being able to not
just uh detect an image, but to be able to
recognize it, particularly being able to recognize it from different angles. So, uh,
we talked about this a lot. Image processing is huge.
You know. It's not just that you're able to show
(20:31):
it a picture of let's say a coffee cup, and
then you show it a picture of that same coffee
cup in the same position and it says that's the
same thing. Well, what if you take the picture from
the opposite side, so that the handle is on the
opposite side of the coffee cup. Can it's still uh,
Can it's still identify that? What if you're closer so
the coffee cup is larger. These are all things that
(20:53):
have to be taken into account with artificial intelligence and
being able to build a system that's able to recognize
an object and understand or iritation distance, that kind of thing.
Then there's just systematic search. This is just that idea
of being able to go through an area and uh
and figure out where you are in relation to some
other point that you know, which is obviously useful for
(21:15):
artificial intelligence in lots of ways. Obviously, Yes, Uh, It's
it's also useful when searching for something to forage. So
if ant is looking for food sources, this would be
an appropriate method. But also sometimes ants will lose their
way when they're trying to come back, like they'll uh.
Some experiments have shown that ants can tend to underestimate
(21:37):
how far they have traveled, and so that can cause
some issues when they are coming back. They don't always
have like a comp I hate to use bline of
the term. They don't always they don't always have a
completely accurate return home. And sometimes they get to the
general area of where their nest is and they have
to do a systematic search in order to nail down Oh,
(21:57):
this is specifically the way I need to go. So yeah,
pretty cool stuff. Now, if you were to incorporate these
sort of strategies in AI, you could easily see the
benefits specifically for something like a robot. Right, you would
have this ability to have robots have a centralized headquarter
type location. They could travel outward from that explore, go
(22:19):
to multiple other locations, and then return back to headquarters
without retracing their steps and wasting energy. Yeah, you can
already see some of these types of search strategies that
we see in animals showing up in robots that are
very simple like maybe the room BA Sure if you
just think about the way a room BA navigates the room. Okay,
so it tries to vacuum all the different parts of
(22:41):
the floor in the room. How does it do that? Well,
it has to have a system. Uh, of course, that's
a very simple application, right. Think about a robot that
needs to navigate an area in a much more complex way,
like it needs to reach different nodes in a different order,
or do it with a different time frame or something
like that. In the ease cases, studying the way ants
(23:01):
and other swarming insects move can be really important in
coming up with the most efficient ways to tell a
robot how to navigate its surroundings, especially with limited computational
power like these insects have. Sure. Sure, the limited computational
power is important because that means that you need less
energy to operate the robot, and they can be smaller, right,
so these you know, less energy is good, especially if
(23:25):
you're talking about sending robots to really distant places like Mars. Yeah.
So in this case, we're looking more at ant colonies
than than individual ants. Yeah right, Well sorry, yeah, I
may have made the jump there. We were just talking
about an individual ant. But what about the swarm as
a whole. Sure, if you take this same sort of approach,
where you have the individual robot going out and doing
(23:46):
this kind of work, you can already see how that
would be beneficial in applications like establishing a colony. You know,
Mars one talks about having robots sent up to establish
all the hard work that would be required for the
colonists to be able to just sort of land on
Mars and then move in. This is the kind of
stuff that would be necessary for the robot to be
able to to go around an entire area autonomously, because
(24:11):
controlling a robot live is impossible. I mean, you're talking
about at least ten or twelve minute delay at the
best of times between Mars and Earth. So you would
want something that's at least semi autonomous. But then if
you add in the idea of an entire group of robots,
a swarm of robots, all using the sort of behavior
(24:33):
and all interconnected, you really see how a colony works,
and you see how it could be really beneficial for AI.
Of course, studying how ant colonies work might be good
for more than just actual movement. Sure, yeah, so specifically,
when you look at how ant colonies operate, and you
see how ants go out and forage for food. Ants
(24:56):
may go out, individual ants may go out in various directions.
You've got lots of different potential sources of food and
potential paths to get there exactly. And so then you
have ants returning to the nest and they may be
laying down a pheromone trail to say, this is the
pathway we need to take because food is back behind me,
and other ants when they encounter the pheromone trail no
(25:18):
to follow that trail, and then they will eventually get
to whatever the The first the exploratory aunt has found
well with the way these pheromone trails work, the longer ones,
they they evaporate over time, so the longer ones will
evaporate faster than the shorter ones. Like if it's long enough,
it might evaporate before another aunt is able to go
the entire length of it. And like you were saying, Joe,
(25:39):
when you get to the end of that pheromone trail
and there's nothing left, the ant doesn't know where else
to go, so essentially turns around and goes back. Shorter
pheromone trails are more likely to be followed by ants,
they tend to be established and made more permanent, and
so the ants really focus on the short path. Now,
short path for ants means less time and energy spent
(26:01):
trying to get food from a distant location back to
the nest. Now take all that that's very useful for
ants in the physical real world and turn that into
an abstraction. Just think about the abstract version of trying
to find something. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a
thing in a place. It could be a solution to
(26:21):
a problem. Sure, you could have a problem that could
have multiple potential solutions, like a mathematical problem for example,
and using an algorithm that is in effect aping the
behavior of an ant colony, you could end up having
a similar behavior where the algorithm directs the focus of
(26:42):
the computer. It's I'm using very vague terms here to
to kind of explain the point on whichever solution is
revealing itself first, so that way it does not waste
time and energy pursuing other potential solutions that are further off,
you know, in a figurative sense. So it is a
(27:04):
way of increasing efficiency, reducing the amount of energy consumption.
All these are obviously really important, uh, concepts. No matter
you're whether you're talking about like the distant Martian exploration
I was just mentioning, or you're talking about an application
here on Earth. Obviously, limiting the amount of energy that
you have to expend to get to an outcome is
(27:25):
a positive thing. So yeah, it's really kind of a
cool idea of adapting this behavior we find in nature
to a more abstract application within the computer world. Share. Okay,
but I want to talk about fire ants again. All right.
See Lauren has a jar here and Jonathan she wants
(27:47):
you to close your eyes. I'm already look we you know,
you guys got me with the blood episode when you
made me do that, so I'm not doing it again.
For ants. Forget it. We're just kidding. We would never
cover Jonathan and ants, especially not fire ants. No, thank you.
I appreciate maybe crazy ants, because that would be Cray
(28:08):
would be a little crazy. All right, Well what about
fire ants? Did you want to know? I mean, they
they're nasty, they bite, they staying, They're amazing at biting
and stinging, the very effective editiring the future of biting. Alright,
but no, they also do a lot of other really
interesting things. Their swarming behavior might teach us all kinds
of lessons that could be potentially applied to technology. One
(28:31):
of the things we want to talk about here is
some research about fire ant tunneling, yeahavior, and how that
might apply to technology. So, uh, fire ants when they
make their tunnels, they make these underground tunnels, they do
so in such a way where they are not going
to to fall down the tunnel. That would obviously be
(28:52):
a bad, uh, a bad way for them to evolve.
So they're really effective at making tunnels that allow them
to travel at full speed underground with very little chance
of them falling. And it's interesting because their tunnels are
actually built to a size that's essentially the width of
the tunnel is about the same as the length of
(29:15):
the ant It's also really interesting it does not matter
what kind of soil they're going through, whether it's really
finely powdered soil or large grains of soil, it's still
that same ratio, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. And
they texture their tunnels to provide natural footholds, so so
in case of emergency, they can use their entire bodies
(29:37):
basically antenna included, to stop themselves from falling yeah. The
antenna revelation was one that really surprised the researchers because
it was an adaptive use of antenna that they had
not expected. They just figured that the antenna was going
to be used to help sense the environment and communicate,
but not to actually help in the case of an
(29:57):
ant losing it's it's footing. They shook these ants like crazy.
By the way, it reminded me of yeah, yeah, sorry,
we should say the research is being done out of
the fire ant lab, so to speak, at Georgia Tech.
They've got a lot of interesting fire ant research going on.
They have robots and fire ants. I am terrified. Also,
I went to I went to the rival school to
(30:18):
Georgia Tech, so I'm sure it's only a matter of
time before robot fire ants chase me down. It's pretty likely.
I think they forgive and forget, unlike you. So, so
this research was published in It was called Climbing, falling
and jamming during ant look emotion in confined environments. And
the reason that it's being done at Georgia Tech is
(30:38):
that they're really hoping that it will transfer into research
about how to how to get robots to tunnel around
and maybe do search and rescue. Yeah, that would be
a big one. Like imagine, imagine a disaster, like a
mining disaster. We've seen lots of building, Yeah, anything anything
where people could potentially be trapped underground, and you need
(31:00):
to have the ability to quickly respond in a safe
way that's not going to compromise the area and also
will allow your responding team to be able to concentrate
on the areas they need to as quickly as possible. Sure,
I could also see just for exploration in general, for
having this kind of robot would would be very useful.
(31:21):
But in fourteen they published another paper out of the
same labs I believe, called fire ants actively control spacing
and orientation within self assemblages. Okay, so I love this.
Fire Ants it turns out can make things like rafts
and bridges out of what miss out of themselves as
(31:44):
incredible swarms of fire ants actually exhibit many of the
properties we imagine in future self assembling and self healing
robots and materials. Uh. You have a really great quote
in here from from one David who who is one
of the researchers he's working on this. Yeah, he's a
Georgia Tech researcher. He There are several great quotes I've
lifted from videos of him talking about his aunt research.
(32:06):
One of the things he says about fire ances you
can consider them as both a fluid and a solid. Yeah, okay,
so so like if you take this big old ball
of fire ants like they do, if you compress it,
it can bounce back to its original shape like an
elastic solid. But if you say, toss a stick through
the middle of this ball of ants, they'll flow around
(32:27):
it like a liquid. It's fascinating. They have to be stopped, No,
they don't know. They must be encouraged. Have you ever
stepped a pile of fire ants? I think this is amazing.
Another thing that David who said in a video about
his fire ant research was that answer opaque, you can't
see through them. That's accurate that he said. No, okay,
(32:48):
that makes it sound like he's crazy. No. The reason
he said that was he was explaining why you might
need to use something like computerized tomography scanning to understand
what's happening when these ants linked together and form these
sort of fluid or solid structures out of many of
their bodies. Why would you why would you even do that.
(33:09):
Why would you analyze ants with CT scanning. Oh well,
because we were hoping to figure out how exactly they
form these structures that are so interesting that can react
like a like a fluid or a solid. Yea. So
imagine you've got a kiddie pool getting there, and on
top of the water are ants, but not individual ants
(33:29):
and not sinking. Instead, you have a grafted together, floating
buoy of ants. This raft of ants is sort of
an arc of ants made by ants for ants out
of ants. You just never want me to stop screaming. Nope, okay,
uh no, this is amazing. And so what these researchers
(33:52):
at Georgie Tech we're looking into was how these ants
linked together. And what who said was that we might
have expected the ants to fall together sort of and parallel.
The thing he compares that to his like grains of rice.
But what did they do know? They did not link
together in parallel. Yeah, they linked together perpendicularly in these
these T junctions, which is a lot stronger of a configuration.
(34:14):
Um and and it's a lot of junctions in in
this one experiment, he flash froze and ant raft okay,
and scanned it with with this microscale computerized tomography or
CT scanner and observed that on average, each ant was
connected to four point eight of its neighbors, using an
average of fourteen connection points and up to twenty one
(34:37):
connection points in the case of bigger ants. This was
including their the claws on the edges of their legs
and also their mandibles. And he observed that of the
four hundred and forty ants that were scanned in within
this raft, of them had all of their legs connected
to their neighbors, so they were doing this really efficiently,
(34:57):
and and most of them, furthermore, had their legs outstretched
in order to increase the distance between each other ant
and thus improve the rafts buoyancy. Furthermore, smaller ants tended
to surround each larger ant to help kind of fill
in the gaps so that there wouldn't be too many
holes where water could get in. Uh So, in other words,
(35:18):
they're really good at doing this. They're like creepy, awesome
good at making this go. And furthermore, when they're you know,
like alive and not frozen, they're continually reacting to changes
in their environment and the reactions of their neighbors to
the environment that's moving around in the mass and forming
and reforming their little anti connections. Why would they Why
(35:40):
did we allow this to happen? Why what possible purpose?
Does it? Actually does provide a survival advantage? Yeah, yeah,
and in most of their native environments there's pretty frequent flooding,
and so you know, also individual at my drown yeah yeah.
And and furthermore, you know, when they're on the move,
they they're or don't need to find ways around obstacles,
(36:02):
and they can survive heavy rainfalls and get to safe
ground over a period of months if they have to,
by forming these little ant rafts. Yeah, months on the
ant months on the ant raft Yeah. Made out of ants,
by ants for ants. Yeah. Um. So so it's pretty cool,
um and not only really gross, but could lead to
(36:25):
maybe like self healing structures. Sure, yeah, they've talked about
that sort of like that if you imagine the tiny
robotics of the future, robotics that are so tiny there
they become sort of the constituents of a changeable piece
of matter. Yeah, a material that is self healing in
order to create infrastructure, which we've talked about before, or
(36:45):
even regular structures, you know, like like a self healing
car would be pretty cool. Yeah, for example, um or
you know, just for creating modular robots that are able
to to join up Vultron style without how to to
be you know, perfectly formed together, you know, less like
Tetris blocks and more like that. And then I can
(37:12):
easily see that being really important. Uh, you know, going
back to the Mars example, it's a it's an easy
one to make because that's an environment that we ourselves
are incapable of exploring right now for various reasons. And
if we were able to send a hive, like a
colony essentially of robots that had this sort of capability
and they were essentially traveling in a swarm, they would
(37:34):
be able to encounter multiple types of environments and be
able to adapt to whatever the needs were at the
time to be able to overcome them. So they came
up to like a small ledge, they might be able
to build a ladder out of themselves, and then enough
of them climb the ladder and then pull the rest
back up behind them, and then you've continue on. So
(37:55):
these ants actually do things like that. I mean they
not only build rafts out of themselves, they build bridges
out of themselves, so you can easily see that as
being an important thing for robotics as well. Oh yeah, yeah,
or you know, if they fall off of a ledge,
being able to recover from that kind of damage. I
still do not approve of this in ants, but I
(38:16):
do approve of it in robots. So I'm just making
a stand. What if they're biting stinging robots, Well, would
you create that show? I wouldn't create it. I'm loking
at this, this ball villain across the table. I'm the
one doesn't want to get eaten by ants. There's nothing villainous.
I'm saying, you'd create the ants to use against other people.
(38:39):
I totally do that, that's true. I mean I could
also see myself with a magnifying glass and these ants
are saying, no, Mr Aunt, I expect you to die.
But I would never do that. You know. I almost
made a pun when I was describing this episode about
how we're going to take a magnifying glass to the
subject of ant futures. But that's just too cruel. I
(39:00):
I honestly, as much as I've been grousing about ants,
I do find this kind of behavior to be absolutely fascinating.
It is a little unnerving to watch videos of it.
It's a little it just looks weird. I didn't watch
any of these videos on purpose because I was terrifically
creeped out by the concept. It's it's a little creepy
when they're they're pretty amazing to watch these ants building
(39:21):
physical structures out of their own bodies so that the
colony can continue on whatever course. It's on my favorite.
I don't think that you guys could probably hear it,
but I was just shaking my head really vigorously. We're done.
We're going to watch the video where they've got the
ant raft. They got the fire raft floating in the water,
and you just see a researcher poking it with four steps,
just dipping it under the water. They dip the raft
(39:44):
and it just bobs right back up to the top.
It has some hydrophobic qualities to the raft, which is
that it's actually repelling water off the surface of it,
which is pretty phenomenal. So, yeah, this there's not only
is it a fascinating behavior from a biological standpoint, but
like we said, it does in fact a service inspiration,
as so many elements of nature have served before for
(40:06):
people who are working in the field of robotics and
other fields as well in the world of technology. So
in the future we may very well have much more
technology that's based upon this this ant behavior and be
able to take advantage of it in ways we can't
even anticipate. Right now, this podcast has basically turned into
about a quarter of it is the bio mimicry Show. Yeah,
(40:28):
biomree is great. Animals are fascinating, and robots are pretty cool.
So so my plan is next time, when I'm not
feeling well and you guys have planned yet another episode
about some form of creepy crawley, I will continue to
stay out until you have recorded it. Um No, I
I really as much as I'm putting on an act here,
(40:50):
I really do think it's pretty pretty awesome. I still
don't like fire ants, but that's for because I get
stung by them and I don't like that. But um yeah,
neat stuff. If you guys out there have any suggestions
for topics that we can tackles or anything, or about
anything else, yes, if you have anything mostly about insects,
(41:11):
you have any cute cuddly animals that you want us
to talk about, let us know, or insects, or anything
else about the future you are curious about. Let us know.
You can send us I'm fine with snakes. You can
send us a message with going to Twitter or Facebook
or Google Plus or handle at all. Three is FW thinking.
(41:32):
We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
from us again really soon. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,
(41:55):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking. The
podcast then looks at the future and says, I spend
my cash on looking flash and grabbing your attention. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren back Obama, and I'm Joe McCormick. So, guys,
(00:26):
we we've tackled on this podcast some pretty heavy topics
in the past. Spiders was a big one. Bees, bees
another big one. Mosquitoes. You know, a lot of these
I was not present for. I think, I think, actually
were you present for any of them? But they're not
an insect, that's true, they're creepy crawley. Yeah, for a while,
(00:48):
every time you were out of the office, Jonathan, Lauren
and I would record a podcast about some insect. And
to be fair, you chose this topic when it looked
like I wasn't going to be in the office. Yes, uh,
And then for Chin smiled upon me, and it turns
out I am here to talk about ants. Yes, the
future of ants? Why, I mean, come on, guys, can
(01:12):
we talk about like, I don't know the future of
of of slow slow lorries or or the future the
future of Koalas or I'll do that episode. Well, I
guess we gotta get through this one. For next time,
we'll do a sloth tech. I'm a big fan of sloths.
I love slots. They are adorable, they're pretty creepy. My
(01:34):
favorite sloth is Extinct, the one that's like big bear. Yeah. Yeah,
terror comes for you slowly and just set creeping up. No,
we're gonna talk about ants. Ants are actually fascinating and
they may inspire some really interesting technologies of the future.
(01:54):
So first, let's just talk about ants in general. So
did you guys know that there are more than ten
thousand ant species already identified by us the human beings,
as in, there might be plenty more out there. Sure,
there could be species that we have had limited or
(02:14):
no contact with that we have yet to identify. In fact,
there's one ant we're gonna be talking about later in
this podcast that for a long time had been misidentified
and as a result, um the handling of that ant
never really went into action. But I'm getting ahead of
myself anyway. Yeah, there are a lot of different types
(02:35):
of ants out there, and in fact, they can be
found just about everywhere on Earth. There are a few
exceptions where there are no native species of ants. Antarctica,
for example, you don't get any snow ants up there,
or ice ants ants in Antarctica, And I know it's
it's anti Antarctica. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, Antarctica, ironically
(02:57):
is the is one of the places where you're not
gonna really old places, so near the North Pole you
probably don't. Yeah, Greenland, Iceland, they don't have native species
of ants. Uh. Parts of Polynesia do not have any
native species of ants. And there are a few remote
islands in say the Indian Ocean or that don't have
them either. But otherwise you can pretty much find them everywhere.
(03:19):
They're really prevalent in tropical regions and can make up
more than half of all the insects within a tropical forest.
For example, where where to ants fit in the sort
of the family tree of insects, They belong to the
same order as wasps and bees, so uh, they're very similar.
If you, by the way, are ever wondering if perhaps
(03:42):
a little insect you have encountered is either an ant
or a termite, look to see if they have a
very thin waste. Essentially is what you're you're looking between
the thorax and the abdomen. If they don't, it's a termite.
If they do, it's nand simple rule of thumb there. Uh.
Most pecs of ant live in permanent colonies that they
(04:04):
establish in some location. It might be tunnels under the ground,
it might be a mound that's on top of the ground,
could be in trees or would carpenter ants are famous
for being really destructive around houses. Most ants do live
in these colonies, these permanent colonies, but there are some exceptions.
Army ants, for example, do not have a permanent nest.
They migrate, so their colony actually will move from place
(04:27):
to place, and you will get these massive army ant
migrations which are the stuff of nightmares. Uh. Then you
also have the fact that ant colonies are centered around
a queen ant. So this sounds very familiar to anyone
who's studied bees, I mean queen bee ideas very similar. Um,
the queen ant lays eggs. Those eggs will develop into
(04:50):
either female ants, which are the worker ants. They do
all the hard work, including building the colonies, gathering food,
all that kind of stuff, taking care of the lar Yeah.
Then you know the male ants whose job it is. Yeah,
their their job is to knock up the queen. That's
all they do. That's it. And most, not most, but
in several ant species, lots of them. Uh. The males
(05:13):
will die after meeting with the queen. And that's pretty
much the you know, fairly standard, that's pretty much it. Yeah,
it's not not being terribly Uh, you're not really exaggerating there, Joe.
So normally, you know, ants communicate chemically with each other
through pheromones. Yeah, and a little bit by touch, I believe. Yeah. Yeah,
(05:36):
mainly it's through chemicals. Like most ant species, if they
are traveling someplace, they laid down a pheromone trail, So
this tells other ants that this is the pathway that
was taken to get to some location, usually like food.
This is actually interesting. You can disrupt the pheromone trail
with your finger. If you ever see ants moving along
(05:57):
the line, uh, and you just drag your finger across
the line of ants. Watch what happens. It totally breaks
their their concentration. The ones in in behind that are
about to move across where you've just dragged your finger,
they start acting confused. Where do I go? Yeah, yeah,
there's a several visual gags in a bug's life that
(06:20):
kind of play on that, except of course it's not
a pheromone trail. They do it where it's just like
a a sudden obstacle moves in the way and that
disrupts everything, which is a little simplification, but hey, it's
a Pixar movie and it's adorable. Uh. Then there are
specific the specific type of ant that we wanted to
refer to that are just kind of interesting that relate
(06:43):
to technology but not in a good way. No. Well,
so you've heard about the fire ant invasion of the
United States again, which are scary and painful and terrible. Yeah,
we got a new one now. Yeah, crazy ants, specifically
tawny crazy ants or raspberry crazy ants. Raspberry named after
the the UH fruit. No, not the fruit A lot
(07:06):
of people think that. No, it's actually named after the
UH exterminator who discovered these ants living in Texas. So
in two thousand and two, there was this this guy
who UH encountered these particular types of ants that people
were really kind of um getting perturbed over because one
the ants, the reason why they're called crazy ants is
(07:28):
when they are running around like on your kitchen floor
or something. They seem to be going every which way.
There's no apparent rhyme or reason to it. It's not
that ants go marching one by one kind of thing.
It's like they're just going all over the place. And yeah,
and their pathway is not like a straight line to
wherever they're going. They're going left, right everywhere. Also, they
(07:51):
seemed to be infesting electronics. Yeah. Really, the there was
a theory for a while that perhaps the ants were
attracted to either electric fields or magnetic fields. Science does
not seem to bear that out. Experiments have not beared
that out. What they what the current hypothesis is is
that they just love to find places to nest and
(08:13):
they will go anywhere that's kind of an enclosure to
nest in them. And if an ant, one of these
crazy ants, encounters something that harms it, like say electricity,
it gives off a pheromone that's an alarm pheromone, which
is essentially a signal to say, hey, I need some
help over here, and then other crazy ants will zoom
in and go straight to try and help them. Now,
(08:36):
in the case of electronics, those ants may in turn
get hurt and then they give off these pheromones and
then more and more ants come. So what you end
up with is a device that shorts out because the
ants short circuiting. Yeah. Yeah, that the ant bodies are
literally disrupting the circuit and frying themselves. Yeah. And so
you'll have stories about their stories about things like there
(08:59):
was a story about a guy who is using an iron,
the iron shorts out, uh sparks fly out and then
ants just pour out of the iron. Or someone is
watching television and the television ends up flickering and then
going out, and so they go and look at and
they remove the backpedal of the television and it's just
ants everywhere. And we're talking thousands upon thousands of these ants. Now,
(09:21):
when I told you earlier about the misidentification of ants,
this is the species I was talking about when scientists
were first looking at these ants. See See Raspberry was
trying to tell people, we need to figure out a
strategy to handle this now because this is a thing.
This is a thing that's happening, and it's going to
get worse before he gets better, because if we don't
(09:41):
address it, we're going to have a full on infestation
of like a plague level event here. And meanwhile you
had the government saying, well, you don't know anything about
these ants, so we can't We're not gonna give you
any money. And the science they're saying, well, without any money,
we can't learn anything about these ants, and it begin
this catch Twain too. Meanwhile, the scientists also misidentified, or
(10:02):
at least one entomologist um misidentified the ant as being
the same species as one that had become entrenched in
Florida in the nineteen fifties. But Raspberry said, hey, I
don't think so, because those ants in Florida we have
never heard of any problems like the ones we're experiencing
in Texas. And ultimately he ended up doing a lot
(10:24):
of research on his own, which there's a great article
about his research where its about crazy ants. It reveals
it reveals that he hates reading, he didn't go to college. Um,
he's not big on research, but he was obsessed with
this idea and so he really looked into it. And
then eventually they were able to identify the ant as
(10:46):
actually belonging to a species native to Brazil and Argentina,
not to Florida, and they suspect that bringing in soil
or perhaps building materials were what introduced the ants to
Texas and the cell eastern United States the Gulf States essentially,
so these things do end up clogging up a lot
(11:07):
of electronics. There were there were lots of reports. I
remember when this first started happening, when people started talking
about it, where everyone said, oh, they actually crave electricity,
But that's not what happening. Although they're they're interesting in
other ways as well. They're basically the xenomorphs of the
ant world. Yeah. So fire ants are also an invasive
(11:28):
species in the United States, specifically in the areas that
crazy ants tend to be found in, like Texas. Yeah,
and here in Georgia as well. Crazy ants are also
in Georgia. Guys, I don't know if you knew that
fire ants have a pretty nasty sting. They clamp onto
you with their jaws and then stab repeatedly with their stinger,
and it has a tough venom. Yeah. I react poorly
(11:50):
to fire ants stings. Um I get. I get nasty
little bumps everywhere where there was a sting, and I
used to encounter them quite a bit when I was
mowing my lawn. I now have someone else doing that
for me. But at any rate, you know, normally, fire ants,
as big of a nuisance as they are, don't cause
the kind of problems that crazy ants do. They don't.
(12:11):
They aren't as invasive into the human home as crazy
ants are. However, crazy ants have a couple of abilities
that really make them formidable opponents of the fire ant.
One is that they can coat themselves with chemicals that
counteract fire ant venom, which means they can fight longer
against the fire end. They also, instead of a stinger,
(12:31):
have a little appendage that allows them to spray acid
against other ants. Yeah, so xeno morph was pretty accurate.
They are able to spew acid on their opponents. And
I read a report where that said something along the
lines of in UH encounters between fire ants and crazy ants,
crazy ants when something like nine of the time, and
(12:55):
that even in an experiment where scientists covered up the
the the glands essentially that the ants were using to
cover themselves in the anti venom UH, they won fifty
three percent of the time. So wow, even when your
chief defense has been removed, you're still winning more. Who's
(13:16):
been arranging these scientific bug fights? There's there's an ant
thunderdome in Texas, UM, where they do these experiments. And yeah,
so the crazy ants are the master and the blaster
in this thunderdome world. So very interesting creatures. Um. Obviously
(13:37):
when we want we wanted to talk about specifically because
of their relationship with electronics and the misunderstanding that they
crave electricity. Also they're they're just really cool. But but right,
so so let us transition here by saying that ants
do more than just really mess up electronics. As it
turns out, they might inspire new electronics in the future. Yeah,
(13:57):
specifically things like computer algorithms and artificial intelligence algorithms. Uh.
So we wanted to talk about navigation specifically this idea.
You know, ants exhibit some interesting behaviors, including with certain species,
the ability to range out really far, like two meters
away from their nest, which when you're only like three
(14:19):
point five millimeters long, is not that that's a quite
a great distance. Uh. What's really interesting is not only
are they able to do that, but they can visit
various locations while foraging for food. When they find a
place that has food and they're ready to return to
the nest, they don't retrace their steps right, they don't.
(14:41):
Let's say they go to three different points and it's
not in a straight line. So they venture out from
the nest. They go to point one, then they maybe
take a left turn and go forward for a while,
and they visit point too, and they make another left turn,
and they visit point three. Well, once they found point
three and they said this is the place we want
to go, I need to go back to the nest.
They don't retrace their steps back two points two and
(15:01):
one and then go back home. They plot a course
that essentially goes in a straight line back to the nest,
as much of a straight line as they possibly can manage,
which raises the question, how do they do that thing?
That's odd? So when it comes down to navigation, scientists
have pretty much identified there being some combination of elements
(15:25):
going into effect here. One is path integration, one is
visual piloting or you know, seeing landmarks, and one is
called systematic search. And so here's how this breaks down. First,
you've got path integration. Now, this is that idea that
was just talking about the ability to visit multiple locations
and then find your way back home. So, as an
(15:46):
example I gave for the humans, because I think this
is helpful. If you're having trouble visualizing this, Imagine that
you have errands to run and you have to go
to multiple places to run these errands. And so you
leave your house. You have to go to the store
to pick up some non perishable stuff that you've just
gotta thrown into the car. So you go and you
store and you pick that up. Then you gotta go
and you gotta pick up some dry cleaning that you
(16:08):
had over at a totally different locations. So you drive
from the store to the dry cleaning pace. Then you decide, oh,
wait that I've also got my copy of the two
thousand six version of wicker Man starring Nicholas Cage uh,
and I need to return that to Video Drome, which
is in a totally different location from the dry cleaners.
Video Drome is a video store here in Atlanta. It's
(16:29):
a pretty fabulous one. It's pretty amazing. So anyway, you
go to video, You got to Video Drome and you
return the wicker Man um and they say thank you.
But at that point you're ready to go home. Now
you would not if you you know your way around,
you would not drive from Video Drome back to the
(16:49):
dry cleaners, and from the dry cleaners back to the store,
and from the store to your home. You would go
from video drume to your home. Same sort of thing
with animals, but they don't have the kind of of
pro sessing power that we have. Aunt brains are like
a milligram. I mean, we're talking super small. So how
can a creature this tiny, this with with this limited
(17:12):
number of neurological resources, be able to do something so
seemingly complex as plot a straight line path from a
distant destination rather than retracing steps to get back to
the starting point. And Uh, there's some disagreement or at
least some debate on what's going on. A lot of
(17:33):
it is just based upon the fact that we don't
definitively know um. But there's a specific type of desert
ant that really displays this behavior that's been under a
lot of scrutiny for years. In fact, if you look
up path integration and ants, you're going to see multiple
scientific papers written on the subject. So one of the
hypotheses about this is that it's all based on an
(17:57):
egocentric methodology rather than g e centric. Okay, so the
ant is sort of relating itself to its previous self
rather than itself to its surroundings. Yeah. Yeah, Essentially, it's
it's remembers its own position rather than having to look
and see where it is. Right, it's not making like
a mental map of its surroundings. It's thinking of where
(18:21):
it is in relation to its nest. But it's not
it's not mapping things out, thinking, oh, to the east
of me is a puddle and to the west of
you know, it's not like that. It's very very u
egocentrics centered upon the ant itself. It would be almost
like if you ran your errands by remembering how exactly
how far you drove and at what degree angles you
(18:43):
turned at each leg of the trip. That's part of it. Actually,
there's so ants have an odometer. It is not a
little dial tells it how far it went. Essentially, this
is information that relates to the distance and grade that
the ant has traveled. So whether it's a down slope,
up slope, whether it was to the left the right,
that kind of thing, how far it went. Generally speaking,
(19:05):
bees contract the same kind of information, and we talked
about that at length during our b episode. Right, So
this is all part of path integration, Right, you're being
able to integrate that information, but you integrate it with
something else, and in this case it's with polarized light,
which bees do as well. Yeah, so the ants are
able to sense polarized light. They use it as a
(19:25):
compass essentially, which is really nifty because the light of
the sun is polarized in such a way that that
if you can detect that polarization, you can navigate by
the sun even when it's cloudy. Right, Yeah, you just
through the polarization of the light itself. So essentially you're saying, oh,
the light is polarized in this way when I'm going
in this direction, so when I'm coming from this other direction,
(19:47):
it should look this other way. So that's part of it.
Then you've got the landmark navigation, which is just what
it sounds like that the ants identify specific geographic landmarks
and are able to relate that as a point along
their travels. It seems to be the major way that
I think humans navigate. Yeah, that's well, there's that in
(20:10):
Google maps. But yes, um so this in a I
would relate back to image processing being able to not
just uh detect an image, but to be able to
recognize it, particularly being able to recognize it from different angles. So, uh,
we talked about this a lot. Image processing is huge.
You know. It's not just that you're able to show
(20:31):
it a picture of let's say a coffee cup, and
then you show it a picture of that same coffee
cup in the same position and it says that's the
same thing. Well, what if you take the picture from
the opposite side, so that the handle is on the
opposite side of the coffee cup. Can it's still uh,
Can it's still identify that? What if you're closer so
the coffee cup is larger. These are all things that
(20:53):
have to be taken into account with artificial intelligence and
being able to build a system that's able to recognize
an object and understand or iritation distance, that kind of thing.
Then there's just systematic search. This is just that idea
of being able to go through an area and uh
and figure out where you are in relation to some
other point that you know, which is obviously useful for
(21:15):
artificial intelligence in lots of ways. Obviously, Yes, Uh, It's
it's also useful when searching for something to forage. So
if ant is looking for food sources, this would be
an appropriate method. But also sometimes ants will lose their
way when they're trying to come back, like they'll uh.
Some experiments have shown that ants can tend to underestimate
(21:37):
how far they have traveled, and so that can cause
some issues when they are coming back. They don't always
have like a comp I hate to use bline of
the term. They don't always they don't always have a
completely accurate return home. And sometimes they get to the
general area of where their nest is and they have
to do a systematic search in order to nail down Oh,
(21:57):
this is specifically the way I need to go. So yeah,
pretty cool stuff. Now, if you were to incorporate these
sort of strategies in AI, you could easily see the
benefits specifically for something like a robot. Right, you would
have this ability to have robots have a centralized headquarter
type location. They could travel outward from that explore, go
(22:19):
to multiple other locations, and then return back to headquarters
without retracing their steps and wasting energy. Yeah, you can
already see some of these types of search strategies that
we see in animals showing up in robots that are
very simple like maybe the room BA Sure if you
just think about the way a room BA navigates the room. Okay,
so it tries to vacuum all the different parts of
(22:41):
the floor in the room. How does it do that? Well,
it has to have a system. Uh, of course, that's
a very simple application, right. Think about a robot that
needs to navigate an area in a much more complex way,
like it needs to reach different nodes in a different order,
or do it with a different time frame or something
like that. In the ease cases, studying the way ants
(23:01):
and other swarming insects move can be really important in
coming up with the most efficient ways to tell a
robot how to navigate its surroundings, especially with limited computational
power like these insects have. Sure. Sure, the limited computational
power is important because that means that you need less
energy to operate the robot, and they can be smaller, right,
so these you know, less energy is good, especially if
(23:25):
you're talking about sending robots to really distant places like Mars. Yeah.
So in this case, we're looking more at ant colonies
than than individual ants. Yeah right, Well sorry, yeah, I
may have made the jump there. We were just talking
about an individual ant. But what about the swarm as
a whole. Sure, if you take this same sort of approach,
where you have the individual robot going out and doing
(23:46):
this kind of work, you can already see how that
would be beneficial in applications like establishing a colony. You know,
Mars one talks about having robots sent up to establish
all the hard work that would be required for the
colonists to be able to just sort of land on
Mars and then move in. This is the kind of
stuff that would be necessary for the robot to be
able to to go around an entire area autonomously, because
(24:11):
controlling a robot live is impossible. I mean, you're talking
about at least ten or twelve minute delay at the
best of times between Mars and Earth. So you would
want something that's at least semi autonomous. But then if
you add in the idea of an entire group of robots,
a swarm of robots, all using the sort of behavior
(24:33):
and all interconnected, you really see how a colony works,
and you see how it could be really beneficial for AI.
Of course, studying how ant colonies work might be good
for more than just actual movement. Sure, yeah, so specifically,
when you look at how ant colonies operate, and you
see how ants go out and forage for food. Ants
(24:56):
may go out, individual ants may go out in various directions.
You've got lots of different potential sources of food and
potential paths to get there exactly. And so then you
have ants returning to the nest and they may be
laying down a pheromone trail to say, this is the
pathway we need to take because food is back behind me,
and other ants when they encounter the pheromone trail no
(25:18):
to follow that trail, and then they will eventually get
to whatever the The first the exploratory aunt has found
well with the way these pheromone trails work, the longer ones,
they they evaporate over time, so the longer ones will
evaporate faster than the shorter ones. Like if it's long enough,
it might evaporate before another aunt is able to go
the entire length of it. And like you were saying, Joe,
(25:39):
when you get to the end of that pheromone trail
and there's nothing left, the ant doesn't know where else
to go, so essentially turns around and goes back. Shorter
pheromone trails are more likely to be followed by ants,
they tend to be established and made more permanent, and
so the ants really focus on the short path. Now,
short path for ants means less time and energy spent
(26:01):
trying to get food from a distant location back to
the nest. Now take all that that's very useful for
ants in the physical real world and turn that into
an abstraction. Just think about the abstract version of trying
to find something. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a
thing in a place. It could be a solution to
(26:21):
a problem. Sure, you could have a problem that could
have multiple potential solutions, like a mathematical problem for example,
and using an algorithm that is in effect aping the
behavior of an ant colony, you could end up having
a similar behavior where the algorithm directs the focus of
(26:42):
the computer. It's I'm using very vague terms here to
to kind of explain the point on whichever solution is
revealing itself first, so that way it does not waste
time and energy pursuing other potential solutions that are further off,
you know, in a figurative sense. So it is a
(27:04):
way of increasing efficiency, reducing the amount of energy consumption.
All these are obviously really important, uh, concepts. No matter
you're whether you're talking about like the distant Martian exploration
I was just mentioning, or you're talking about an application
here on Earth. Obviously, limiting the amount of energy that
you have to expend to get to an outcome is
(27:25):
a positive thing. So yeah, it's really kind of a
cool idea of adapting this behavior we find in nature
to a more abstract application within the computer world. Share. Okay,
but I want to talk about fire ants again. All right.
See Lauren has a jar here and Jonathan she wants
(27:47):
you to close your eyes. I'm already look we you know,
you guys got me with the blood episode when you
made me do that, so I'm not doing it again.
For ants. Forget it. We're just kidding. We would never
cover Jonathan and ants, especially not fire ants. No, thank you.
I appreciate maybe crazy ants, because that would be Cray
(28:08):
would be a little crazy. All right, Well what about
fire ants? Did you want to know? I mean, they
they're nasty, they bite, they staying, They're amazing at biting
and stinging, the very effective editiring the future of biting. Alright,
but no, they also do a lot of other really
interesting things. Their swarming behavior might teach us all kinds
of lessons that could be potentially applied to technology. One
(28:31):
of the things we want to talk about here is
some research about fire ant tunneling, yeahavior, and how that
might apply to technology. So, uh, fire ants when they
make their tunnels, they make these underground tunnels, they do
so in such a way where they are not going
to to fall down the tunnel. That would obviously be
(28:52):
a bad, uh, a bad way for them to evolve.
So they're really effective at making tunnels that allow them
to travel at full speed underground with very little chance
of them falling. And it's interesting because their tunnels are
actually built to a size that's essentially the width of
the tunnel is about the same as the length of
(29:15):
the ant It's also really interesting it does not matter
what kind of soil they're going through, whether it's really
finely powdered soil or large grains of soil, it's still
that same ratio, which is kind of interesting. Yeah. And
they texture their tunnels to provide natural footholds, so so
in case of emergency, they can use their entire bodies
(29:37):
basically antenna included, to stop themselves from falling yeah. The
antenna revelation was one that really surprised the researchers because
it was an adaptive use of antenna that they had
not expected. They just figured that the antenna was going
to be used to help sense the environment and communicate,
but not to actually help in the case of an
(29:57):
ant losing it's it's footing. They shook these ants like crazy.
By the way, it reminded me of yeah, yeah, sorry,
we should say the research is being done out of
the fire ant lab, so to speak, at Georgia Tech.
They've got a lot of interesting fire ant research going on.
They have robots and fire ants. I am terrified. Also,
I went to I went to the rival school to
(30:18):
Georgia Tech, so I'm sure it's only a matter of
time before robot fire ants chase me down. It's pretty likely.
I think they forgive and forget, unlike you. So, so
this research was published in It was called Climbing, falling
and jamming during ant look emotion in confined environments. And
the reason that it's being done at Georgia Tech is
(30:38):
that they're really hoping that it will transfer into research
about how to how to get robots to tunnel around
and maybe do search and rescue. Yeah, that would be
a big one. Like imagine, imagine a disaster, like a
mining disaster. We've seen lots of building, Yeah, anything anything
where people could potentially be trapped underground, and you need
(31:00):
to have the ability to quickly respond in a safe
way that's not going to compromise the area and also
will allow your responding team to be able to concentrate
on the areas they need to as quickly as possible. Sure,
I could also see just for exploration in general, for
having this kind of robot would would be very useful.
(31:21):
But in fourteen they published another paper out of the
same labs I believe, called fire ants actively control spacing
and orientation within self assemblages. Okay, so I love this.
Fire Ants it turns out can make things like rafts
and bridges out of what miss out of themselves as
(31:44):
incredible swarms of fire ants actually exhibit many of the
properties we imagine in future self assembling and self healing
robots and materials. Uh. You have a really great quote
in here from from one David who who is one
of the researchers he's working on this. Yeah, he's a
Georgia Tech researcher. He There are several great quotes I've
lifted from videos of him talking about his aunt research.
(32:06):
One of the things he says about fire ances you
can consider them as both a fluid and a solid. Yeah, okay,
so so like if you take this big old ball
of fire ants like they do, if you compress it,
it can bounce back to its original shape like an
elastic solid. But if you say, toss a stick through
the middle of this ball of ants, they'll flow around
(32:27):
it like a liquid. It's fascinating. They have to be stopped, No,
they don't know. They must be encouraged. Have you ever
stepped a pile of fire ants? I think this is amazing.
Another thing that David who said in a video about
his fire ant research was that answer opaque, you can't
see through them. That's accurate that he said. No, okay,
(32:48):
that makes it sound like he's crazy. No. The reason
he said that was he was explaining why you might
need to use something like computerized tomography scanning to understand
what's happening when these ants linked together and form these
sort of fluid or solid structures out of many of
their bodies. Why would you why would you even do that.
(33:09):
Why would you analyze ants with CT scanning. Oh well,
because we were hoping to figure out how exactly they
form these structures that are so interesting that can react
like a like a fluid or a solid. Yea. So
imagine you've got a kiddie pool getting there, and on
top of the water are ants, but not individual ants
(33:29):
and not sinking. Instead, you have a grafted together, floating
buoy of ants. This raft of ants is sort of
an arc of ants made by ants for ants out
of ants. You just never want me to stop screaming. Nope, okay,
uh no, this is amazing. And so what these researchers
(33:52):
at Georgie Tech we're looking into was how these ants
linked together. And what who said was that we might
have expected the ants to fall together sort of and parallel.
The thing he compares that to his like grains of rice.
But what did they do know? They did not link
together in parallel. Yeah, they linked together perpendicularly in these
these T junctions, which is a lot stronger of a configuration.
(34:14):
Um and and it's a lot of junctions in in
this one experiment, he flash froze and ant raft okay,
and scanned it with with this microscale computerized tomography or
CT scanner and observed that on average, each ant was
connected to four point eight of its neighbors, using an
average of fourteen connection points and up to twenty one
(34:37):
connection points in the case of bigger ants. This was
including their the claws on the edges of their legs
and also their mandibles. And he observed that of the
four hundred and forty ants that were scanned in within
this raft, of them had all of their legs connected
to their neighbors, so they were doing this really efficiently,
(34:57):
and and most of them, furthermore, had their legs outstretched
in order to increase the distance between each other ant
and thus improve the rafts buoyancy. Furthermore, smaller ants tended
to surround each larger ant to help kind of fill
in the gaps so that there wouldn't be too many
holes where water could get in. Uh So, in other words,
(35:18):
they're really good at doing this. They're like creepy, awesome
good at making this go. And furthermore, when they're you know,
like alive and not frozen, they're continually reacting to changes
in their environment and the reactions of their neighbors to
the environment that's moving around in the mass and forming
and reforming their little anti connections. Why would they Why
(35:40):
did we allow this to happen? Why what possible purpose?
Does it? Actually does provide a survival advantage? Yeah, yeah,
and in most of their native environments there's pretty frequent flooding,
and so you know, also individual at my drown yeah yeah.
And and furthermore, you know, when they're on the move,
they they're or don't need to find ways around obstacles,
(36:02):
and they can survive heavy rainfalls and get to safe
ground over a period of months if they have to,
by forming these little ant rafts. Yeah, months on the
ant months on the ant raft Yeah. Made out of ants,
by ants for ants. Yeah. Um. So so it's pretty cool,
um and not only really gross, but could lead to
(36:25):
maybe like self healing structures. Sure, yeah, they've talked about
that sort of like that if you imagine the tiny
robotics of the future, robotics that are so tiny there
they become sort of the constituents of a changeable piece
of matter. Yeah, a material that is self healing in
order to create infrastructure, which we've talked about before, or
(36:45):
even regular structures, you know, like like a self healing
car would be pretty cool. Yeah, for example, um or
you know, just for creating modular robots that are able
to to join up Vultron style without how to to
be you know, perfectly formed together, you know, less like
Tetris blocks and more like that. And then I can
(37:12):
easily see that being really important. Uh, you know, going
back to the Mars example, it's a it's an easy
one to make because that's an environment that we ourselves
are incapable of exploring right now for various reasons. And
if we were able to send a hive, like a
colony essentially of robots that had this sort of capability
and they were essentially traveling in a swarm, they would
(37:34):
be able to encounter multiple types of environments and be
able to adapt to whatever the needs were at the
time to be able to overcome them. So they came
up to like a small ledge, they might be able
to build a ladder out of themselves, and then enough
of them climb the ladder and then pull the rest
back up behind them, and then you've continue on. So
(37:55):
these ants actually do things like that. I mean they
not only build rafts out of themselves, they build bridges
out of themselves, so you can easily see that as
being an important thing for robotics as well. Oh yeah, yeah,
or you know, if they fall off of a ledge,
being able to recover from that kind of damage. I
still do not approve of this in ants, but I
(38:16):
do approve of it in robots. So I'm just making
a stand. What if they're biting stinging robots, Well, would
you create that show? I wouldn't create it. I'm loking
at this, this ball villain across the table. I'm the
one doesn't want to get eaten by ants. There's nothing villainous.
I'm saying, you'd create the ants to use against other people.
(38:39):
I totally do that, that's true. I mean I could
also see myself with a magnifying glass and these ants
are saying, no, Mr Aunt, I expect you to die.
But I would never do that. You know. I almost
made a pun when I was describing this episode about
how we're going to take a magnifying glass to the
subject of ant futures. But that's just too cruel. I
(39:00):
I honestly, as much as I've been grousing about ants,
I do find this kind of behavior to be absolutely fascinating.
It is a little unnerving to watch videos of it.
It's a little it just looks weird. I didn't watch
any of these videos on purpose because I was terrifically
creeped out by the concept. It's it's a little creepy
when they're they're pretty amazing to watch these ants building
(39:21):
physical structures out of their own bodies so that the
colony can continue on whatever course. It's on my favorite.
I don't think that you guys could probably hear it,
but I was just shaking my head really vigorously. We're done.
We're going to watch the video where they've got the
ant raft. They got the fire raft floating in the water,
and you just see a researcher poking it with four steps,
just dipping it under the water. They dip the raft
(39:44):
and it just bobs right back up to the top.
It has some hydrophobic qualities to the raft, which is
that it's actually repelling water off the surface of it,
which is pretty phenomenal. So, yeah, this there's not only
is it a fascinating behavior from a biological standpoint, but
like we said, it does in fact a service inspiration,
as so many elements of nature have served before for
(40:06):
people who are working in the field of robotics and
other fields as well in the world of technology. So
in the future we may very well have much more
technology that's based upon this this ant behavior and be
able to take advantage of it in ways we can't
even anticipate. Right now, this podcast has basically turned into
about a quarter of it is the bio mimicry Show. Yeah,
(40:28):
biomree is great. Animals are fascinating, and robots are pretty cool.
So so my plan is next time, when I'm not
feeling well and you guys have planned yet another episode
about some form of creepy crawley, I will continue to
stay out until you have recorded it. Um No, I
I really as much as I'm putting on an act here,
(40:50):
I really do think it's pretty pretty awesome. I still
don't like fire ants, but that's for because I get
stung by them and I don't like that. But um yeah,
neat stuff. If you guys out there have any suggestions
for topics that we can tackles or anything, or about
anything else, yes, if you have anything mostly about insects,
(41:11):
you have any cute cuddly animals that you want us
to talk about, let us know, or insects, or anything
else about the future you are curious about. Let us know.
You can send us I'm fine with snakes. You can
send us a message with going to Twitter or Facebook
or Google Plus or handle at all. Three is FW thinking.
(41:32):
We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
from us again really soon. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,
(41:55):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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