The Design and Role of Synthetic Creative Traits in Artificial Ant Colonies

Previous and current research on ant colonies have focused on the emergence of complex and sophisticated group-behaviors that are characteristic of the whole colony, starting from simple rules characterizing each individual ant. Examples of emergent behaviors include foraging and nest building. While social scientists, biologists, and physicists have focused on observing and analyzing the behavior of actual ants, researchers in computer science have investigated through modeling and simulation of synthetic ants on the computer, the emergent behavior in a collection of simple robots, simulated evolution of computer programs, and the formation of pheromone patterns during foraging under unlimited food supply. This paper has two objectives. First, it presents a systematic study, through behavior modeling and simulation, of the influence of the presence or absence of pheromone, the duration interval of pheromone, the extent of the food supply at the food sources, the size of the colony, and the search strategy employed during foraging, for a given geometry and a finite number of food sources, on the performance of the ant colony. The second and most important objective of this paper is to scientifically study the nature of creativity by modeling synthetic creativity in an ant colony, simulating it on a computer system, and measuring its impact on performance through innovative metric design. The study is motivated by leading thinkers, throughout time, who have strongly emphasized the importance of creativity over intelligence. While an exact and universal definition of creativity is elusive, the important characteristics include originality, intuition, and imagination. Creativity is best understood through its manifestations as novel and radically different ideas that transcend current knowledge and reasoning. In this study, two synthetic creativity traits are introduced into select individual ants of a colony by imparting to them a foraging behavior that is radically different from the normal behavior. Under the first trait, the creative ants choose to ignore the existing pheromone trails and search for food sources. Under the second trait, a creative ant shares its knowledge of food source location, after discovery, with all other creative ants, so that together they can focus solely on discovering new food sources. Analysis of the simulation results reveal that a creative trait coupled with the underlying parameters of the ant colony may cause the foraging completion time metric, i.e. the time to collect food from all sources, to be marginally better or weaker than the normal colony. Contrary to intuition, the completion time metric worsens when, in a fixed sized colony, the number of creative ants, relative to normal ants, becomes excessive. Furthermore, for a given finite geometry, finite food supply, and a fixed ratio of the number of creative to normal ants, the impact of creativity on the foraging performance is dependent on the underlying parameters, and may either continue to improve, remain unchanged, or decrease, as the size of the colony increases. Finally, while the creative ants expend, on an average, two to three times more energy than the normal ants, the ant colony with the creative ants discovers more food sources, in less time and, under certain circumstances, a creative colony discovers all food sources which a normal colony can never achieve.