Ants resort to majority concession to reach democratic consensus in the presence of a persistent minority

Rajendran, Harikrishnan; Haluts, Amir; Gov, Nir S.; Feinerman, Ofer

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.12.013

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 76 publications

(123 reference statements)

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“…Given that tandem followers often become leaders in due course, their trail laying while following the robotic leader may simply be a case of producing their own safety lines sooner rather than later. This would be a further fascinating example of fail-safe mechanisms in these ants in particular, and social insects and many other organisms in general ( Berdahl et al, 2018 ; Camazine et al, 2001 ; Franks et al, 2015 ; Oster and Wilson, 1978 ; Rajendran et al, 2022 ; Robinson et al, 2014 ; Stuttard et al, 2016 ; White and Diedrichsen, 2010 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Robotic communication with ants

Franks

Podesta

Jarvis

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Biology

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We used a robotic gantry to test the hypothesis that tandem running in the ant Temnothorax albipennis can be successful in the absence of trail laying by the leader. Pheromone glands were placed on a pin attached to a gantry. This set-up substituted for the leader of a tandem run. Neither the pin nor the glands touched the substrate and thus the ant following the robot was tracking a plume of airborne pheromones. The robot led individual workers from their current nest to a potential new one. The robotic gantry was programmed to allow for human intervention along its path to permit the following ant to stop and survey its surroundings and then catch up with its mechanical leader. The gantry then automatically tracked the precise route taken by each ant from the new nest back to the old one. Ants led by the robot were significantly more successful at finding their way home than those we carried to the new nest that had no opportunity to learn landmarks. The robot was programmed to take either a straight or a sinusoidal path to the new nest. However, we found no significant difference in the abilities of ants that had been led on such direct or sinuous paths to find their way home. Here, the robot laid no trail but our findings suggest that, under such circumstances, the following ant may lay a trail to substitute for the missing one.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Robotic communication with ants

Franks

Podesta

Jarvis

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Biology

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“…This paper shows that such a strategy can also have a collective benefit that traces back to basic aspects of collective decision-making, suggesting the possibility that it may have evolved via group-selection. With this in mind, it would be interesting to empirically check whether such a strategy exists also in other animal groups, e.g., fish schools [39] or ants [37].…”

Section: Discussion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, in many natural settings the group must converge on a particular consensus value that is a function of the environment. Moreover, agents have different levels of knowledge regarding the desired value, and the system must utilize the information held by the more knowledgeable individuals [9,35,37,39]. As explained in more detail below, when communication is restricted, and the system is prone to faults, this task can become challenging.…”

Section: Other Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early adapting to trends: self-stabilizing information spread using passive communication

Korman,

Vacus

2024

Distrib. Comput.

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How to efficiently and reliably spread information in a system is one of the most fundamental problems in distributed computing. Recently, inspired by biological scenarios, several works focused on identifying the minimal communication resources necessary to spread information under faulty conditions. Here we study the self-stabilizing bit-dissemination problem, introduced by Boczkowski, Korman, and Natale in [SODA 2017]. The problem considers a fully-connected network of nagents, with a binary world of opinions, one of which is called correct. At any given time, each agent holds an opinion bit as its public output. The population contains a source agent which knows which opinion is correct. This agent adopts the correct opinion and remains with it throughout the execution. We consider the basic $$\mathcal {PULL}$$ PULL model of communication, in which each agent observes relatively few randomly chosen agents in each round. The goal of the non-source agents is to quickly converge on the correct opinion, despite having an arbitrary initial configuration, i.e., in a self-stabilizing manner. Once the population converges on the correct opinion, it should remain with it forever. Motivated by biological scenarios in which animals observe and react to the behavior of others, we focus on the extremely constrained model of passive communication, which assumes that when observing another agent the only information that can be extracted is the opinion bit of that agent. We prove that this problem can be solved in a poly-logarithmic in n number of rounds with high probability, while sampling a logarithmic number of agents at each round. Previous works solved this problem faster and using fewer samples, but they did that by decoupling the messages sent by agents from their output opinion, and hence do not fit the framework of passive communication. Moreover, these works use complex recursive algorithms with refined clocks that are unlikely to be used by biological entities. In contrast, our proposed algorithm has a natural appeal as it is based on letting agents estimate the current tendency direction of the dynamics, and then adapt to the emerging trend.

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“…This paper shows that such a strategy can also have a collective benefit that traces back to basic aspects of collective decision-making, suggesting the possibility that it may have evolved via groupselection. With this in mind, it would be interesting to empirically check whether such a strategy exists also in other animal groups, e.g., fish schools Sumpter et al (2008) or ants Rajendran et al (2022).…”

Section: Discussion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In many natural settings, however, the group must converge on a particular consensus value that is a function of the environment. Moreover, agents have different levels of knowledge regarding the desired value, and the system must utilize the information held by the more knowledgeable individuals Sumpter et al (2008); Ayalon et al (2021); Korman et al (2014); Rajendran et al (2022). As explained in more detail below, when communication is restricted, and the system is prone to faults, this task can become challenging.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Adapting to Trends: Self-Stabilizing Information Spread using Passive Communication

Korman,

Vacus

2022

Preprint

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How to efficiently and reliably spread information in a system is one of the most fundamental problems in distributed computing. Recently, inspired by biological scenarios, several works focused on identifying the minimal communication resources necessary to spread information under faulty conditions. Here we study the self-stabilizing bit-dissemination problem, introduced by Boczkowski, Korman, and Natale in [SODA 2017]. The problem considers a fully-connected network of n agents, with a binary world of opinions, one of which is called correct. At any given time, each agent holds an opinion bit as its public output. The population contains a source agent which knows which opinion is correct. This agent adopts the correct opinion and remains with it throughout the execution. We consider the basic PULL model of communication, in which each agent observes relatively few randomly chosen agents in each round. The goal of the non-source agents is to quickly converge on the correct opinion, despite having an arbitrary initial configuration, i.e., in a self-stabilizing manner. Once the population converges on the correct opinion, it should remain with it forever. Motivated by biological scenarios in which animals observe and react to the behavior of others, we focus on the extremely constrained model of passive communication, which assumes that when observing another agent the only information that can be extracted is the opinion bit of that agent. We prove that this problem can be solved in a poly-logarithmic in n number of rounds with high probability, while sampling a logarithmic number of agents at each round. Previous works solved this problem faster and using fewer samples, but they did that by decoupling the messages sent by agents from their output opinion, and hence do not fit the framework of passive communication. Moreover, these works use complex recursive algorithms with refined clocks that are unlikely to be used by biological entities. In contrast, our proposed algorithm has a natural appeal as it is based on letting agents estimate the current tendency direction of the dynamics, and then adapt to the emerging trend.

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Ants resort to majority concession to reach democratic consensus in the presence of a persistent minority

Cited by 4 publications

References 76 publications

Robotic communication with ants

Robotic communication with ants

Early adapting to trends: self-stabilizing information spread using passive communication

Early Adapting to Trends: Self-Stabilizing Information Spread using Passive Communication

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