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A MODEL AND ANALYSIS OF HOUSE-HUNTING IN ANT COLONIES

Author(s)
Nancy Lynch
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Abstract
We study the problem of house-hunting in ant colonies, where ants reach consensus on a new nest and relocate their colony to that nest, from a distributed computing perspective. We propose a househunting algorithm that is biologically inspired by Temnothorax ants. Each ant is modelled as a probabilistic agent with limited power, and there is no central control governing the ants. We show a (log n) lower bound on the running time of our proposed house-hunting algorithm, where n is the number of ants. Further, we show a matching upper bound of expected O(log n) rounds for environments with only one candidate nest for the ants to move to. Our work provides insights into the house-hunting process, giving a perspective on how environmental factors such as nest qualities or a quorum rule can a ect the emigration process. In particular, we nd that a quorum threshold that is high enough causes transports to the inferior nest to cease to happen after O(log n) rounds when there are two nests in the environment.
Date issued
2021
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144435
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Journal
8th Workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA)
Citation
2021. "A MODEL AND ANALYSIS OF HOUSE-HUNTING IN ANT COLONIES." 8th Workshop on Biological Distributed Algorithms (BDA).
Version: Author's final manuscript

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