A MODEL AND ANALYSIS OF HOUSE-HUNTING IN ANT COLONIES

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.