Expert Assessment of Stigmergy: a Report for the Department of National Defence
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Relatedness, Parentage, and Philopatry Within a Natterer's Bat
Population Ecology (2018) 60:361–370 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10144-018-0632-7 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Relatedness, parentage, and philopatry within a Natterer’s bat (Myotis nattereri) maternity colony David Daniel Scott1 · Emma S. M. Boston2 · Mathieu G. Lundy1 · Daniel J. Buckley2 · Yann Gager1 · Callum J. Chaplain1 · Emma C. Teeling2 · William Ian Montgomery1 · Paulo A. Prodöhl1 Received: 20 April 2017 / Accepted: 26 September 2018 / Published online: 10 October 2018 © The Author(s) 2018 Abstract Given their cryptic behaviour, it is often difficult to establish kinship within microchiropteran maternity colonies. This limits understanding of group formation within this highly social group. Following a concerted effort to comprehensively sample a Natterer’s bat (Myotis nattereri) maternity colony over two consecutive summers, we employed microsatellite DNA profiling to examine genetic relatedness among individuals. Resulting data were used to ascertain female kinship, parentage, mating strategies, and philopatry. Overall, despite evidence of female philopatry, relatedness was low both for adult females and juveniles of both sexes. The majority of individuals within the colony were found to be unrelated or distantly related. How- ever, parentage analysis indicates the existence of a number of maternal lineages (e.g., grandmother, mother, or daughter). There was no evidence suggesting that males born within the colony are mating with females of the same colony. Thus, in this species, males appear to be the dispersive sex. In the Natterer’s bat, colony formation is likely to be based on the benefits of group living, rather than kin selection. Keywords Chiroptera · Kinship · Natal philopatry · Parentage assignment Introduction of the environment (Schober 1984). -
Intelligent Agents
Intelligent Agents Authors: Dr. Gerhard Weiss, SCCH GmbH, Austria Dr. Lars Braubach, University of Hamburg, Germany Dr. Paolo Giorgini, University of Trento, Italy Outline Abstract ..................................................................................................................2 Key Words ..............................................................................................................2 1 Foundations of Intelligent Agents.......................................................................... 3 2 The Intelligent Agents Perspective on Engineering .............................................. 5 2.1 Key Attributes of Agent-Oriented Engineering .................................................. 5 2.2 Summary and Challenges................................................................................ 8 3 Architectures for Intelligent Agents ...................................................................... 9 3.1 Internal Agent Architectures .......................................................................... 10 3.2 Social Agent Architectures............................................................................. 11 3.3 Summary & Challenges ................................................................................. 12 4 Development Methodologies................................................................................ 13 4.1 Overall Characterization ................................................................................ 13 4.2 Selected AO Methodologies.......................................................................... -
Swarming (Bulletin #404) (PDF)
Swarming Apiculture Bulletin #404 Updated: 10/15 Swarming is a natural method of honeybee colonies to reproduce, resulting in the creation of a new honeybee colony in addition to the established colony. Contributing factors to swarming • Crowding - too many bees, food stores and no cell space for the queen to lay eggs in. • Poor air circulation • April-May is swarming season and healthy colonies develop strong swarm impulse. • Inclement weather - crowded bees confined by cold, wet weather will build queen cells and swarm out on the first sunny, warm day. All colonies in similar condition will swarm as soon as weather becomes favorable. • Large amount of drone brood in early spring is a precursor to strong swarm impulse. Catching the swarm A swarm generally emerges from the hive between 11:00AM and 1:00PM and settles close to the apiary for several hours. Allow the swarm to cluster for at least 30 minutes before placing the swarm in a single super with frames, bottom board and hive cover. Leave the hive for the remainder of the day to allow all the bees to enter, before moving to a permanent location. Examine the new colony after a week and then every two weeks from mid May to late June. Look for disease, brood abundance, brood pattern and overall condition of the colony. Add room where necessary, cut queen cells, or divide, to prevent other swarms to develop. Hived swarms have no stored food reserves and may go hungry when there is little forage. When feeding sugar syrup, add antibiotics as a precautionary measure. -
Intelligent Agents - Catholijn M
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – Intelligent Agents - Catholijn M. Jonker and Jan Treur INTELLIGENT AGENTS Catholijn M. Jonker and Jan Treur Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Keywords: Intelligent agent, Website, Electronic Commerce Contents 1. Introduction 2. Agent Notions 2.1 Weak Notion of Agent 2.2 Other Notions of Agent 3. Primitive Agent Concepts 3.1 External primitive concepts 3.2 Internal primitive concepts 3.3. An Example Analysis 4. Business Websites 5. A Generic Multi-Agent Architecture for Intelligent Websites 6. Requirements for the Website Agents 6.1 Characteristics and Requirements for the Website Agents 6.2 Characteristics and Requirements for the Personal Assistants 7. The Internal Design of the Information Broker Agents 7.1 A Generic Information Broker Agent Architecture 7.2 The Website Agent: Internal Design 7.3 The Personal Assistant: Internal Design Glossary Bibliography Biographical Sketches Summary In this article first an introduction to the basic concepts of intelligent agents is presented. The notion of weak agent is briefly described, and a number of external and internal primitive agent concepts are introduced. Next, as an illustration, application of intelligent agents to business Websites is addressed. An agent-based architecture for intelligentUNESCO Websites is introduced. Requirements – EOLSS of the agents that play a role in this architecture are discussed. Moreover, their internal design is discussed. 1. IntroductionSAMPLE CHAPTERS The term agent has become popular, and has been used for a wide variety of applications, ranging from simple batch jobs and simple email filters, to mobile applications, to intelligent assistants, and to large, open, complex, mission critical systems (such as systems for air traffic control). -
Flocks and Crowds
Flocks and Crowds Flocks and crowds are other essential concepts we'll be exploring in this book. amount of realism to your simulation in just a few lines of code. Crowds can be a bit more complex, but we'll be exploring some of the powerful tools that come bundled with Unity to get the job done. In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics: Learning the history of flocks and herds Understanding the concepts behind flocks Flocking using the Unity concepts Flocking using the traditional algorithm Using realistic crowds the technology being the swarm of bats in Batman Returns in 1992, for which he won an and accurate, the algorithm is also very simple to understand and implement. [ 115 ] Understanding the concepts behind As with them to the real-life behaviors they model. As simple as it sounds, these concepts birds exhibit in nature, where a group of birds follow one another toward a common on the group. We've explored how singular agents can move and make decisions large groups of agents moving in unison while modeling unique movement in each Island. This demo came with Unity in Version 2.0, but has been removed since Unity 3.0. For our project. the way, you'll notice some differences and similarities, but there are three basic the algorithm's introduction in the 80s: Separation: This means to maintain a distance with other neighbors in the flock to avoid collision. The following diagram illustrates this concept: Here, the middle boid is shown moving in a direction away from the rest of the boids, without changing its heading [ 116 ] Alignment: This means to move in the same direction as the flock, and with the same velocity. -
Evolving Behaviour Trees for Supervisory Control of Robot Swarms
Evolving Behaviour Trees for Supervisory Control of Robot Swarms Elliott Hogg1y, Sabine Hauert1, David Harvey, Arthur Richards1 1Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of Bristol, UK. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Abstract: Supervisory control of swarms is essential to their deployment in real world scenarios to both monitor their operation and provide guidance. We explore mechanisms by which humans might provide supervisory control to swarms and improve their performance. Rather than have humans guess the correct form of supervisory control, we use artificial evolution to learn effective human-readable strategies to help human operators understanding and performance when con- trolling swarms. These strategies can be thoroughly tested and can provide knowledge to be used in the future in a variety of scenarios. Behaviour trees are applied to represent human readable decision strategies which are produced through evolution. We investigate a simulated set of scenarios where a swarm of robots have to explore varying environments and reach sets of objectives. Effective supervisory control strategies are evolved to explore each environment using different local swarm behaviours. The evolved behaviour trees are animated alongside swarm simulations to enable clear under- standing of the supervisory strategies. We conclude by identifying the strengths in accelerated testing and the benefits of this approach for scenario exploration and training of human operators. Keywords: Human Swarm Interaction; Swarm; Artificial Evolution; Supervisory Control; Behaviour Trees 1. INTRODUCTION • Parametric: Adjusting the characteristics of an emer- gent behaviour [6, 12]. Growing interest in the use of swarm systems has led • Environmental: The operator highlights points of inter- to new questions regarding effective design for real-world est within an environment [8, 26]. -
Global Participatory Acts and the State
STRENGTHENING THE STATE THROUGH DISSENT: GLOBAL PARTICIPATORY ACTS AND THE STATE By Patricia Camilien, université Quisqueya INTRODUCTION In Alvin Toffler‟s Future Shock (1970), three types of men coexist on the planet. Men of the present, living in the here and now as they are carried away by the waves and currents of the world; they are rather vulnerable to "future shock". Men of the past, who have remained in a past time long gone, are living in the twentieth century but are still in the twelfth. Men of the future, informed, insightful and perceptive, who are already surfing on the major trends of tomorrow. In today's world, these men of the future are part of a transnational and nomadic elite helped by the increasing liberalization of trade and the disappearance of borders – at the least for them. Transnational companies like oil brokerage firm Trafigura i – made globally (in) famous in 2010 by a journalist‟s tweet about a file hosted on WikiLeaks – exemplify this (future) global world. They enjoy the best of corporate law around the world and diversify their operations accordingly. This use of different national laws according to the benefits they offer is not limited to transnational corporations and their owners, but now extends to individuals who, while they are not billionaires in dollars, are so in reticular connections. Using global participatory acts (heretofore participactions), they seem to be the ones to help the people move from the present to the future. Moral and social entrepreneurs, they are the vanguard of the future changes in society they are trying to drive through networked actions as relayed by mass self- communication. -
Inference of Causal Information Flow in Collective Animal Behavior Warren M
IEEE TMBMC SPECIAL ISSUE 1 Inference of Causal Information Flow in Collective Animal Behavior Warren M. Lord, Jie Sun, Nicholas T. Ouellette, and Erik M. Bollt Abstract—Understanding and even defining what constitutes study how the microscopic interactions scale up to give rise animal interactions remains a challenging problem. Correlational to the macroscopic properties [26]. tools may be inappropriate for detecting communication be- The third of these goals—how the microscopic individual- tween a set of many agents exhibiting nonlinear behavior. A different approach is to define coordinated motions in terms of to-individual interactions determine the macroscopic group an information theoretic channel of direct causal information behavior—has arguably received the most scientific attention flow. In this work, we present an application of the optimal to date, due to the availability of simple models of collective causation entropy (oCSE) principle to identify such channels behavior that are easy to simulate on computers, such as the between insects engaged in a type of collective motion called classic Reynolds [27], Vicsek [26], and Couzin [28] models. swarming. The oCSE algorithm infers channels of direct causal inference between insects from time series describing spatial From these kinds of studies, a significant amount is known movements. The time series are discovered by an experimental about the nature of the emergence of macroscopic patterns protocol of optical tracking. The collection of channels infered and ordering in active, collective systems [29]. But in argu- by oCSE describes a network of information flow within the ing that such simple models accurately describe real animal swarm. We find that information channels with a long spatial behavior, one must implicitly make the assumption that the range are more common than expected under the assumption that causal information flows should be spatially localized. -
Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence Leen-Kiat Soh Computer Science & Engineering University of Nebraska Lincoln, NE 68588-0115 [email protected] http://www.cse.unl.edu/agents Introduction • Swarm intelligence was originally used in the context of cellular robotic systems to describe the self-organization of simple mechanical agents through nearest-neighbor interaction • It was later extended to include “any attempt to design algorithms or distributed problem-solving devices inspired by the collective behavior of social insect colonies and other animal societies” • This includes the behaviors of certain ants, honeybees, wasps, cockroaches, beetles, caterpillars, and termites Introduction 2 • Many aspects of the collective activities of social insects, such as ants, are self-organizing • Complex group behavior emerges from the interactions of individuals who exhibit simple behaviors by themselves: finding food and building a nest • Self-organization come about from interactions based entirely on local information • Local decisions, global coherence • Emergent behaviors, self-organization Videos • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDsmbwOrHJs • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbUPfMXXQIY • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M028vafB0l8 Why Not Centralized Approach? • Requires that each agent interacts with every other agent • Do not possess (environmental) obstacle avoidance capabilities • Lead to irregular fragmentation and/or collapse • Unbounded (externally predetermined) forces are used for collision avoidance • Do not possess distributed tracking (or migration) -
Minding the Body Interacting Socially Through Embodied Action
Linköping Studies in Science and Technology Dissertation No. 1112 Minding the Body Interacting socially through embodied action by Jessica Lindblom Department of Computer and Information Science Linköpings universitet SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden Linköping 2007 © Jessica Lindblom 2007 Cover designed by Christine Olsson ISBN 978-91-85831-48-7 ISSN 0345-7524 Printed by UniTryck, Linköping 2007 Abstract This dissertation clarifies the role and relevance of the body in social interaction and cognition from an embodied cognitive science perspective. Theories of embodied cognition have during the past two decades offered a radical shift in explanations of the human mind, from traditional computationalism which considers cognition in terms of internal symbolic representations and computational processes, to emphasizing the way cognition is shaped by the body and its sensorimotor interaction with the surrounding social and material world. This thesis develops a framework for the embodied nature of social interaction and cognition, which is based on an interdisciplinary approach that ranges historically in time and across different disciplines. It includes work in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, phenomenology, ethology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, social psychology, linguistics, communication, and gesture studies. The theoretical framework presents a thorough and integrated understanding that supports and explains the embodied nature of social interaction and cognition. It is argued that embodiment is the part and parcel of social interaction and cognition in the most general and specific ways, in which dynamically embodied actions themselves have meaning and agency. The framework is illustrated by empirical work that provides some detailed observational fieldwork on embodied actions captured in three different episodes of spontaneous social interaction in situ. -
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: an Overview∗
Delft University of Technology Delft Center for Systems and Control Technical report 10-003 Multi-agent reinforcement learning: An overview∗ L. Bus¸oniu, R. Babuska,ˇ and B. De Schutter If you want to cite this report, please use the following reference instead: L. Bus¸oniu, R. Babuska,ˇ and B. De Schutter, “Multi-agent reinforcement learning: An overview,” Chapter 7 in Innovations in Multi-Agent Systems and Applications – 1 (D. Srinivasan and L.C. Jain, eds.), vol. 310 of Studies in Computational Intelligence, Berlin, Germany: Springer, pp. 183–221, 2010. Delft Center for Systems and Control Delft University of Technology Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft The Netherlands phone: +31-15-278.24.73 (secretary) URL: https://www.dcsc.tudelft.nl ∗This report can also be downloaded via https://pub.deschutter.info/abs/10_003.html Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: An Overview Lucian Bus¸oniu1, Robert Babuskaˇ 2, and Bart De Schutter3 Abstract Multi-agent systems can be used to address problems in a variety of do- mains, including robotics, distributed control, telecommunications, and economics. The complexity of many tasks arising in these domains makes them difficult to solve with preprogrammed agent behaviors. The agents must instead discover a solution on their own, using learning. A significant part of the research on multi-agent learn- ing concerns reinforcement learning techniques. This chapter reviews a representa- tive selection of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms for fully cooperative, fully competitive, and more general (neither cooperative nor competi- tive) tasks. The benefits and challenges of MARL are described. A central challenge in the field is the formal statement of a multi-agent learning goal; this chapter re- views the learning goals proposed in the literature. -
Markets Not Capitalism Explores the Gap Between Radically Freed Markets and the Capitalist-Controlled Markets That Prevail Today
individualist anarchism against bosses, inequality, corporate power, and structural poverty Edited by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson Individualist anarchists believe in mutual exchange, not economic privilege. They believe in freed markets, not capitalism. They defend a distinctive response to the challenges of ending global capitalism and achieving social justice: eliminate the political privileges that prop up capitalists. Massive concentrations of wealth, rigid economic hierarchies, and unsustainable modes of production are not the results of the market form, but of markets deformed and rigged by a network of state-secured controls and privileges to the business class. Markets Not Capitalism explores the gap between radically freed markets and the capitalist-controlled markets that prevail today. It explains how liberating market exchange from state capitalist privilege can abolish structural poverty, help working people take control over the conditions of their labor, and redistribute wealth and social power. Featuring discussions of socialism, capitalism, markets, ownership, labor struggle, grassroots privatization, intellectual property, health care, racism, sexism, and environmental issues, this unique collection brings together classic essays by Cleyre, and such contemporary innovators as Kevin Carson and Roderick Long. It introduces an eye-opening approach to radical social thought, rooted equally in libertarian socialism and market anarchism. “We on the left need a good shake to get us thinking, and these arguments for market anarchism do the job in lively and thoughtful fashion.” – Alexander Cockburn, editor and publisher, Counterpunch “Anarchy is not chaos; nor is it violence. This rich and provocative gathering of essays by anarchists past and present imagines society unburdened by state, markets un-warped by capitalism.