2008 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Noise-Induced Adaptive Decision-Making in Ant-Foraging
Authors : Bernd Meyer, Madeleine Beekman, Audrey Dussutour
Published in: From Animals to Animats 10
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Ant foraging is a paradigmatic example of self-organized behavior. We give new experimental evidence for previously unobserved short-term adaptiveness in ant foraging and show that current mathematical foraging models cannot predict this behavior. As a true extension, we develop Itô diffusion models that explain the newly discovered behavior qualitatively and quantitatively. The theoretical analysis is supported by individual-based simulations. Our work shows that randomness is a key factor in allowing self-organizing systems to be adaptive. Implications for technical applications of Swarm Intelligence are discussed.