Paper Info
Title
The relationship between emergence of the shortest path and information value using ant-like agents
Abstract
Ant-like agents forage between two points. These agents' probabilistic movements are based on the use of two pheromones; one marking trails towards the goal and another marking trails back to the starting point. Path selection decisions are influenced by the relative levels of attractive and repulsive pheromone in each agent's local environment. Our work in [5] evaluates three pheromone perception strategies, investigating path formation speed, quality, directionality, robustness and adaptability under different parameter settings(degree of randomness, pheromone evaporation rate and pheromone diffusion rate). We re-evaluate two of these strategies in terms of the amount of information they provide using Shannon's formulation [3, 4, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17]. We determine information as the difference between uncertainty before and after path selection decisions. Our focus in this paper is on investigating relationships between the emergence of the shortest path and the amount of stigmergic information that exists in the form of pheromone. Agents are deployed centrally and emergence measures are determined using the worst, reference and best cases observed in [5]. Additionally, the amount of local and global information that is available to agents in each movement step is evaluated. Furthermore, Pearson's correlation coefficients between measures of emergence and the amount of information are calculated. The significance of these correlation coefficients is tested using a 2 tailed test at 1% level of significance. Consequently the relationship between the amount of information and emergent behaviour is established. Significant relationships between information and the emergence of the shortest path exist when strong emergent behaviour is present.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1456659.1456663
SAICSIT Conf.
Keywords
Field
DocType
global information,ant-like agent,repulsive pheromone,path formation speed,pheromone evaporation rate,path selection decision,pheromone diffusion rate,shortest path,pheromone perception strategy,stigmergic information,information value,correlation coefficient,information,correlation,entropy,significance level,distance,emergence,similarity,uncertainty
Adaptability,Mathematical optimization,Shortest path problem,Computer science,Knowledge management,Robustness (computer science),Correlation,Artificial intelligence,Probabilistic logic,Perception,Information value,Randomness
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
5
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Colin Chibaya151.55
Shaun Bangay29717.72