[HN Gopher] Ant mill
___________________________________________________________________
Ant mill
Author : anthropodie
Score : 143 points
Date : 2022-01-22 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| csours wrote:
| Ants are dumb. I would never get caught in something like this.
|
| _Checks HN_
|
| _Checks YouTube_
|
| _Checks Insta_
| praptak wrote:
| _buys NFT because other humans did_
| lukifer wrote:
| It's any interesting question whether or not it's rational to
| invest in a speculative bubble, solely on the basis of
| everyone else also investing in that same bubble. On a per-
| transaction basis, each step can be individually rational,
| even as it contributes to an eventual net loss systemically.
| Steering clear of such "Keynesian beauty contests" [0] is a
| curious sort of collective action problem.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
| crdrost wrote:
| And of course, the question of orders of analysis and their
| peril was immortalized brilliantly in the death of Vizzini.
|
| https://youtu.be/U_eZmEiyTo0
| H8crilA wrote:
| Before asking such questions one has to define "rational".
|
| It's obviously very profitable to the few that excell at
| that (Soros is the best known example) and creates losses
| for the others, sometimes substantial losses.
| lukifer wrote:
| Fair, "rational" is a thorny term in general. I suppose
| it's easier to invert the proposition, that it is not
| obviously _irrational_ : one can have complete
| information, and be of sound mind, and yet still choose
| to buy into a tulip bubble, knowing that that individual
| transaction's externality might only contribute 0.00...1%
| to the inevitable crash (or wealth extraction, if one
| wants to frame it that way).
| H8crilA wrote:
| You seem to be mixing externalities with personal gain
| here.
|
| It is obviously "rational" (as in you'll be better off)
| to add fuel to the fire if you know reasonably well when
| to pull back and book profits, then move on to the next
| thing. It just happens at the expense of others. Hence my
| question - define "rational", then we can decide what is
| and isn't "rational".
|
| The moral/legal concensus of the current era is that
| "everything is allowed by default, unless it gets so
| obviously bad that we ban it" (blacklisting). This wasn't
| always the case (though it usually was the case), for
| example the Soviet countries had a list of all possible
| agreements, and you couldn't make anything outside of
| this list (whitelisting).
| praptak wrote:
| There was an interview with a fund manager, after the toxic
| asset crash. The person said they had known the bubble
| would burst but the (short term, on-paper) profits were so
| high that they bought anyway in fear of customers moving
| their money to other funds if they didn't.
|
| Sort of a collective chicken race towards a hard wall.
| agumonkey wrote:
| just yesterday biking back i ran into a fleet of birds
| eating bread, as i got close to the first one, he flew
| away, then the others etc etc
|
| I realized that it's probably just a safe heuristic to do
| what others do. It can lead to lemmings falling off a
| metaphorical cliff, but I'd bet 10$ our social nature is a
| direct descendant of that. Even mirroring desires that
| cause so much troubles in human lives.
| dinvlad wrote:
| I find this is both a blessing and a curse of a society
| (no matter in which animal kingdom). Provides safety when
| it's needed, and the opposite of safety when followed
| blindly.
| saint_angels wrote:
| in both cases reward function needs some tweaking
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| People do this quite literally in low visibility conditions.
| Common way to die when lost in the snow, unfortunately.
| [deleted]
| praptak wrote:
| To me it looks like attempts to axiomatize natural numbers with
| first order logic.
|
| You can assure there's a "zero" and an infinite chain of
| successors starting from it but you cannot assure there are no
| cycles disconnected from the chain.
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| This is incorrect. You cannot assure that there are no bi-
| infinite chains disconnected from the starting chain, but you
| can assure that there no cycles disconnected from the chain. To
| see this, note that Peano proves that, given x and y, if there
| exist z and w such that x+z=y and y+w=x, then x=y.
|
| Really, introducing natural numbers -- with addition and
| multiplication -- is overcomplicating this. There's absolutely
| no multiplication involved here; you could think of this as a
| purely additive thing, I suppose, but really directed graphs
| with outdegree 1 (i.e., functions on a set) are a better fit
| (if you want a simple model like that).
| praptak wrote:
| I meant naturals with zero and successor only.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this / provide further reading?
| praptak wrote:
| Wikipedia page on Peano axioms maybe.
|
| Edit/elaborate: First order rules like "no element X has
| successor(X)=0" and "two distinct elements have two distinct
| successors" assure there is a chain of successors that starts
| with zero and does not cycle into itself.
|
| This however does not mean that every model is isomorphic to
| the natural numbers because a cycle of elements separate from
| this chain does not falsify any of the rules(axioms).
|
| So you need an additional rule to stipulate that every
| element of the set is reachable from zero. To express this
| you have to go outside first order logic.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| You see this in incident response. Trying to prove a negative
| can't be done to sociopaths standard but if one is in a
| leadership demands it then analysts go and do it. This leads to a
| feedback loop. Then entropy kicks over time and the importance of
| proving the negative dwindles to the point it gets closed. People
| wonder why all that time was wasted. AARs get written and usually
| ignored. Time marches on.
| mojomark wrote:
| So, the. followers" enter a do-loop because they somehow got
| sepearated from the leading foraging group. To me, the
| interesting question is - how are foraging leaders differentiated
| from the followers. Seems like the former would have a much more
| complex set of rules to follow to explore and navigate the
| uncertaintaies of the world ahead of them.
| gumby wrote:
| I'm a big fan of decentralizing my code (even within a single
| process) so that as much as possible a function works on
| localized state.
|
| This ant situation is a good example of the value of a few global
| variables.
| gumby wrote:
| By the way I was hoping this article would be either a device
| for milling ants into something useful (food? Varnish?) or a
| whimsical name for something that stamped out a huge number of
| small objects.
|
| The actual definition turns out to be even more interesting.
| cleansingfire wrote:
| I was hoping that the ants were somehow milling food, perhaps
| using small rocks and sand (or a mutualistic relationship)
| over time to break it down. If a valuable food source was
| locked up and could only be accessed this way, I can
| certainly imagine an ant colony evolving to mill it somehow.
| They already farm fungus and aphids. I predict a new kind of
| ant mill will be discovered!
| gumby wrote:
| That would be super cool!
|
| Given that we are busy killing off all the vertebrates,
| perhaps in a few million years their technology will be as
| advanced as ours. Then the ant archeologists will wonder if
| these strange giant quadrupedal creatures could have been
| intelligent, perhaps even enough to have a civilization.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Can this be generalized as what happens when a feedback loop
| finds a local maxima? We see these all over, in software and
| society.
|
| What makes this particular phenomena fascinating to me, is that
| it can be right under our nose, going on around us (because the
| circles can be big), and we don't realize it. Our regularly
| observed behavior and model of ants isn't this, and when we see
| one wandering, we don't realize there might be a bigger thing
| going on. And then we zoom out and there's this "aha" reveal
| moment, where we discover a model other than what we thought was
| going on.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| Is it a local maxima, or is it a metastable solution? Or are
| those the same thing, at their root?
|
| (this is a legitimate question; I have a very limited math
| background, and would love to understand the distinctions
| better, or what variable is being locally maximized, if that's
| what this is)
| envp wrote:
| Metastability and local maximums are the same.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability
| pkdpic wrote:
| Assuming the ants are unaware when they are in an ant mill,
| wouldn't it be naive to assume that we would be able to recognize
| if/when we were in an equivalent phenomena as humans?
|
| I would say no, unless there were similar phenomena documented in
| a statistical majority of known species and also maybe only if a
| statistical majority of ants experienced this. It sounds like its
| super rare.
|
| Still, human mill, culture mill, economic mill etc. Brain
| exploding slack emoji. Favorite HN post of the week.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Hence the saying, "those who do not learn from history are
| doomed to repeat it"
| zeckalpha wrote:
| It may be uncommon across species but common amongst eusocial
| animals.
|
| Much of the pandemic behavior we have seen can be described as
| two different human mills, one clockwise and one counter-
| clockwise.
| [deleted]
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Ah yes, once upon a time, I was a freshmen in university,
| entering a unknown building in search of the right room for a
| course.
|
| Luckily I encountered some other fellow IT students, who were
| heading to the same room, so I joined them.
|
| And so we went through the building.
|
| And on.
|
| And on.
|
| So after I while I got curious and asked loudly: "Does anyone
| actually know, where the room is?"
|
| _embarrassed insecure looks at each other_
|
| No one did. Everyone was just following each other in the
| assumption the others surely know.
| syvolt wrote:
| An ant mill seems similar to events that have occurred to
| humans in the past.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
| alisonkisk wrote:
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I would argue that a majority of humans are in a human mill,
| blindly following the next person, who follows the next person,
| ad infinitum, and are blind to it. I say this not scornfully,
| but rather as an outside observer, who having been flicked off
| the trail by a series of accidents, now observes the same
| humans passing by, over and over. Or perhaps they're different
| humans, but are functionally indistinguishable. Same wants,
| same needs, same counterproductive and counterintuitive but
| "normal" decisions and behaviours.
|
| A fundamental feature of behaviour in the animal kingdom is
| mimicry, memetics, whatever you want to call it - and the
| behaviours which propagate are usually favourable to the
| gestalt, rather than the individual.
| halpert wrote:
| What does it mean the follow another human in this context? I
| went to the store today. I believe I did so by my own free
| will. I wasn't aware of anyone else going to the store.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Study hard, get a good job, work hard, aspire to own
| things, buy things, work hard, get a promotion, aspire to
| more things, buy more things, work hard, buy things, die.
| It's absolutely a mill and is absolutely possible to leave
| - but most will deny that it's a mill, that they are on a
| unique and special journey. Sure, this ant wears a party
| hat, that ant has clogs on, but they're still all walking
| in a circle.
|
| Most existences are functionally indistinguishable. Not
| all, by any means, but most.
| halpert wrote:
| Where do you get your food? What are you reading HN on?
| You're making "working hard for a promotion" seem like a
| futile endeavor, and yet you likely sustain yourself and
| entertain yourself with the fruits of those working the
| jobs you deride.
|
| This article is about an ant mill, which occurs when a
| group of ant's start following a circular track of
| pheromones The ants think they're heading towards the
| colony, but they're not. What you describe as a "mill" is
| really just society, i.e. the ant colony. To me, it seems
| like you're on the mill, following an idea that
| ultimately leads nowhere.
| spidersouris wrote:
| Not OP, but I'd interpret it in a broader sense, that is,
| not focusing on specific and daily activities, but rather
| on general, social trends. Anthropologically, humans (but
| also animals) tend to mimic others so that they can
| integrate into a social group, and thus have better chances
| at surviving. Even if people are unaware of it, they're
| constantly influenced, directly or indirectly, in the
| modern world, whether it be through ads, fashion, music
| trends, hobbies... Generally, people try to conform to
| other people's tastes lest they'll be rejected and
| isolated. I mean, the prime example of that is high school,
| where you have the popular groups on the one side, the
| members of which all like the same type of stuff, and who
| reject those they call the "weirdos" because they're not
| into the same things.
| Gigachad wrote:
| If you take it quite literally as running around in a circle,
| then probably not. The ants are unable to know their position
| in the world or know very much at all. They don't have memory
| to remember they have been at a location before or probably
| even the brainpower to work out what is going on.
|
| These days with GPS it would not happen but even pre gps we
| have always had the stars, compasses, the sun, etc to know
| where we are and where we are going. If you take it as a more
| abstract concept about going in circles, than idk, maybe?
| xwdv wrote:
| Human mills are social in nature. I think I've seen evidence of
| them in the stock market.
| oceliker wrote:
| > An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who
| observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference. It took each
| ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.
|
| I'm pretty sure I could also get stuck in a loop in a forest if
| the circular trail is 370m in circumference, let alone the human-
| sized equivalent of it (which, assuming a human walks at 3 mph,
| would be 7.5 miles or 12 kilometers)
| panarky wrote:
| To travel 370 meters in 2.5 hours, an ant would have to travel
| 41 millimeters per second. That seems like a very fast ant.
| bnegreve wrote:
| 41 mm/s is not fast, according to this website a black ant
| runs at 80mm/s: https://idswater.com/2019/12/13/how-fast-is-
| an-ant-in-mph/
| mathattack wrote:
| I had to convert. That equals an inch and a half. I'm pretty
| sure I've seen ants scurrying around that fast. May depend on
| which type of ants.
|
| Alternatively - could an ant run a meter in 25 seconds? Seems
| reasonable.
|
| A quick Google search shows some can go upwards of 800mm/sec
| but they're outliers. https://www.sciencealert.com/world-s-
| fastest-ants-clock-855-...
|
| Btw - I appreciate that you took the time to check the
| numbers yourself. Very few people do the math on their own
| first.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I just wonder who marked an individual ant in presumably
| rough forest terrain, and then watched it for 2.5 hours...
| alisonkisk wrote:
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| The more one looks at the animal kingdom, the more one wonders
| where the clear demarcators of individuality are. Emergent
| behaviors like this suggest to me that maybe the ant colony
| itself is more of an independent organism than any individual
| ant.
|
| Isn't this true of humans too when we rely on entire supply
| chains for our food, water, and electricity?
| platistocrates wrote:
| One wonders if individuality is just an anthropocentric social
| structure.
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| Similar to a fractal, the difference between an organism and a
| superorganism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism)
| depends on how close you zoom in. It's easy to think about an
| ant colony as a superorganism, and from there to think about
| human civilization as a superorganism, and then the entire
| Earth's biosphere as a single superorganism. Then you can go
| the other way and think about how every human body is its own
| superorganism; your body is composed of approximately as many
| human cells as non-human cells
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome). You are an
| entire ecosystem.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The human body and the ant colony are units of reproduction;
| an individual ant, like an individual cell, cannot reproduce.
| Only the colony or the human can do that.
|
| Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to
| reproduce on their own. It is a mistake to generalize from
| the ant colony to human society, much less to the entire
| world.
| pphysch wrote:
| > Human societies aren't like that; the humans are free to
| reproduce on their own.
|
| It's not nearly that simple. If you take away "society"
| (running water, sewage, electricity, traffic lights,
| medical treatment, fresh diverse food, security, etc) most
| people would die off and the few survivors would find
| childrearing very burdensome.
|
| The study of how human organizations can reproduce
| themselves and maintain vitality, rather than dying off
| when a leader or generation dies off, is critically
| important. Classical biology doesn't have a monopoly on
| "reproduction".
| picture wrote:
| Would human reproduction to human societies be similar to
| mitosis to cells? Or does the unit of reproduction require
| mixing genes
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Or does the unit of reproduction require mixing
| genes[?]
|
| No, there are clonal organisms.
|
| > Would human reproduction to human societies be similar
| to mitosis to cells?
|
| No; all the cells in a body divide on the terms the body
| sets and they die when the body does. (Or earlier, when
| so directed.) The only way for them to reproduce is
| indirectly, through the production of gametes. They do
| not and generally cannot have an independent existence.
| Human reproduction within human societies is the analogue
| of a cell within the body becoming cancerous. At that
| point, the cancer's uncontrolled mitosis is a form of
| independent reproduction, though it tends not to work out
| for the cancer because they almost never develop a way to
| leave the body, and end up killing themselves.
|
| There are some exceptions, such as HeLa and the cancer
| that lives in Tasmanian devils.
| kibwen wrote:
| I don't agree that societies don't reproduce. A society
| grows as its population of humans increases, and eventually
| the population grows large enough that it splits into
| multiple societies, e.g. the depletion of local resources
| via overpopulation leads to diasporas setting up new
| societies elsewhere, and these new societies tend imitate
| the familiar structures of the original society. IMO,
| that's reproduction.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I don't agree that societies don't reproduce.
|
| You'll notice that what I said was that humans _do_
| reproduce.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> an individual ant, like an individual cell, cannot
| reproduce. Only the colony or the human can do that.
| Human societies aren 't like that_
| FredPret wrote:
| Maybe civilization is an organism - with it's DNA written in
| culture, that will hopefully reach out across the universe one
| day.
| panarky wrote:
| That's the original definition of "meme".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
| duxup wrote:
| Even beyond physical needs, humans are very social too.
| fipar wrote:
| > Emergent behaviors like this suggest to me that maybe the ant
| colony itself is more of an independent organism than any
| individual ant.
|
| That's Aunt Hillary from Godel, Escher, Bach :)
|
| I forget the specific line, but at some point Achilles asks the
| Anteater if it hurts the Colony when he eats some ants, and the
| response is along the lines of "Does it hurt Achilles when he
| gets a haircut?"
| bnegreve wrote:
| Found it:)
|
| _Anteater:_ [...] I am on the best of terms with ant
| colonies. It 's just ANTS that I eat, not colonies--and that
| is good for both parties: me, and the colony.
|
| _Achilles:_ How is it possible that--
|
| _Tortoise:_ How is it possible that--
|
| _Achilles:_ --having its ants eaten can do an ant colony any
| good?
|
| _Crab:_ How is it possible that--
|
| _Tortoise:_ --having a forest fire can do a forest any good?
|
| _Anteater:_ How is it possible that--
|
| _Crab:_ --having its branches pruned can do a tree any good?
|
| _Anteater:_ --having a haircut can do Achilles any good?
| redcalx wrote:
| Reminds me of the turkey's circling a dead cat video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns5MA69MXuE
| perihelions wrote:
| How would you modify ant logic to fix this bug?
| maxbond wrote:
| I would wager that, if you get a large ant mill going, the
| level of pheromone signal would become enormous and be
| sustained for as long as the mill is going and the ants are
| alive. So, a sustained, very high level of pheromones might
| trigger some kind of break-glass response where they invert
| their logic and seek _low_ levels of pheromone, seek if get
| _off_ of their track. Or perhaps they begin to erase the
| pheromone trail (if they can).
|
| Which breaks the ant mill, but now you have to get back to
| having a functioning colony. Don't know how that would work.
| saint_angels wrote:
| respect for arriving at a local maxima and calling it a day
| perihelions wrote:
| Idea: spend one neuron to track how often the ant thinks it's
| turning right (left). The input could be differential motion
| between sets of legs, or an internal accelerometer (if it
| exists). It takes very little storage to track an exponential
| moving average (just one persistent variable),
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average#Exponential_mov...
|
| If the average "winding number" goes very high over a period of
| some minutes, then you're probably moving in circles.
|
| But then there's this failure mode: figure-8 loops...
| mFixman wrote:
| What if an ant is trying to go up a steep mound in a spiral?
| perihelions wrote:
| Then it's being an idiot. Ants can easily climb vertical
| walls (and trees).
| maxbond wrote:
| I have seen figure-8 ant mills on YouTube, fwiw. It involved
| a "going underground" step, eg, go through a tunnel, pop out,
| turn and walk over the tunnel, turn and go back into the
| tunnel. I'll see if I can find it again.
| donkarma wrote:
| i would probably try to attack the root cause
| ummwhat wrote:
| How can you fix bugs and still have ants?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You are fixing the bugs, not eliminating them.
| neogodless wrote:
| You don't squash the bugs... you just get the bugs to result
| in the desired behavior.
| lultimouomo wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection
|
| The tortoise and hare algorithm seems well suited!
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| Make a random ant take a random deviation from the phermone
| trail every few hours
| avianlyric wrote:
| Wouldn't be enough to form pheromone trail strong enough to
| cause other ants to follow.
|
| At best it would just cause ant mills to slowly bleed ants
| into their surroundings where individuals are at a high risk
| of predation or simply becoming lost and starving anyway. At
| worst they follow a random path back into the ant mill.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| If it's truly a "death spiral" aren't they all going to die
| anyway? The off chance that one breaks the loop and finds
| it back to the colony seems better than just infinitely
| going in a loop. But I'm no ant entomologist haha
| saint_angels wrote:
| following unrewarding pheromone trail for too long could
| trigger a timeout and walk in the random direction. Then search
| for a new trail. Even better if an ant could just return to the
| last visited anthill on timeout
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'm sure you will get enough problems with the definition of
| "unrewarding" and time control to make the change a net loss.
| How stable is the travel speed of ants anyway? Because trails
| do change form all the time.
| nescioquid wrote:
| It's not a bug, it's an hymenoptera!
|
| As a comic in all seriousness, though, I would imagine any
| search strategy that avoids a local maximum could be useful,
| such as other siblings have pointed out.
|
| But I wonder if the ants even have a way of detecting they are
| trapped in a local maximum. If the signal detection is simply
| based on the strength of the signal, I don't know how they
| could detect the trap. If the pheromones of each ant were
| somewhat different, and if ants have memory -- maybe that's
| what would be required.
|
| Otherwise if all ants just take random walks deviating from the
| signal, would you expect them to become isolated, or simply
| form a more elaborate ant mill whose position changes until the
| path to the nest is found or they become exhausted?
| jason_pomerleau wrote:
| I've often used this phenomenon to illustrate that activity is
| not the same as accomplishment. Movement doesn't necessarily mean
| achievement.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| I feel attacked here.
| failrate wrote:
| Ants are both hardware and software.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It seems surprising these can happen in nature... There is an
| efficient no-communication no-memory-required way out of such a
| cycle...
|
| If the feet of every ant slightly smell of 'ant was here', then
| when that smell gets too strong the ants should stop following
| one another and walk towards that scent being less strong.
|
| Such an 'algorithm' could easily evolve. It uses the same scent
| and pheromone communication used by ants for lots of other tasks,
| and there is a strong evolutionary push towards colonies who can
| escape such spirals.
| cleansingfire wrote:
| I'm curious how often this leads to mass death. I suspect that
| there is some escape from this, or else conditions leading to an
| ant mill are extremely rare, because it seems evolutionarily
| expensive. On the other hand nature is profligate with life, and
| especially bugs. For example perhaps once exhausted to a certain
| point, the pheromone scent changes to one that signals not to
| follow.
| ricksunny wrote:
| Cue projections of the ant mill metaphor onto human society.
| mistermann wrote:
| The "See also" section has some similar phenomena.
| divbzero wrote:
| Are there analogs of this behavior in other species? Or in
| humans?
| chiph wrote:
| 90's anti-drug PSA:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGAVTwhsyOs
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| It seems analogous to the "cargo cult" phenomenon that is often
| mentioned here...
| [deleted]
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| _Involution_ is one word sometimes used for this kind of thing,
| e.g.:
|
| https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006391/how-one-obscure-word-...
| itronitron wrote:
| 'Self licking ice cream cone' as I first heard it described is
| similar, although the currently available definitions have
| unfortunately oversimplified it.
| iqanq wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGukAoiGhZU
| 88j88 wrote:
| humans exhibit this behavior in the corporate setting while
| following the agile processes but losing the scent of value
| dinvlad wrote:
| underrated comment!
| jlengrand wrote:
| Not what you're searching for but this one is weird as hell :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS45_L8fLLc
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Damn. Comments are turned off. I was really looking forward
| to reading those.
| sitkack wrote:
| Download the video, repost it with comments on, enjoy your
| bounty.
| anthropodie wrote:
| Found this video on reddit[0] and found out that it's a real
| phenomenon.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/s8mogr/ants_se...
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