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Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Crichton's "Prey"
From: |
James Marshall |
Subject: |
Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Crichton's "Prey" |
Date: |
Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:47:29 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (X11/20050317) |
Steve,
you may find the following interesting, although I believe whether
associations between individuals changes over time is something my
colleagues are only just starting to look at.
Regards,
James
Langridge EA, Franks NR, Sendova-Franks AB
Improvement in collective performance with experience in ants
BEHAV ECOL SOCIOBIOL 56 (6): 523-529 OCT 2004
Steve Railsback wrote:
Someone just gave me Michael Crichton's 2002 book "Prey". (I would bet a
lot of money that he wanted to name it "Swarm" but his lawyers told him
not to...too bad, could have been a nice fund-raiser for us.)
Am I nuts, or is a central assumption of the book nonsense? He has a
swarm of independent, persistent, artificial organisms; and the swarm
could learn very rapidly. Our brains can learn rapidly, but the
connections are all hardwired; a population of simple organisms can
"learn" but only via evolution, which requires birth and death and
selection... Is there any way a collection of independent agents,
interacting locally with a changing set of neighbors, can "learn"
without evolution?
Steve
--
Dr James A. R. Marshall
Department of Computer Science
University of Bristol
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/home/marshall