ruleset.

“Ground-penetrating radar has been used to nondestructively map an ant colony for the first time.

The results have been digitised and fed into an interactive visualisation system so that the colony can be explored virtually.”

A nice 25 minute podcast from Alife XI, with interviews with Seth Bullock, Jason Noble and Richard Watson.

“A bizarre experiment that involved putting ants on stilts has demonstrated that they count paces to measure distances.” - via Mathematics Under The Microscope.

A small number of A-lifey simulation Jave applets.

(via reddit.com)

“Small robots working in swarms have finally moved out of the laboratory and into the real world. That was the most significant feature of the Ministry of Defence’s Grand Challenge competition, held over the weekend. It’s an idea that is also being pursued by the US military.”

“The Grand Challenge demonstrated what swarms of small, low-cost units can already achieve. “The UK defence industry now has a new capability that can be taken to the front line,” says Crampton. “In just over five years, the swarms of robots in the British armed forces will outnumber the soldiers.”

Oh great…

“This indicates that they do learn from each other, which is not a surprise really, but it does also seem that they exhibit elements of what in humans we would call ‘cultural’ behaviour”

“These are things that groups develop and are passed between individuals and that come to define those groups, such as language or dancing; and it would seem that among the Port River dolphins we may have an incipient tail-walking culture.”

An article about kite-based power generation — it quotes Allister Furey from University of Sussex, although doesn’t mention at all how the computer models were created.  (By evolving neural networks, if I remember right?)

A little bit of news from the Alife XI conference, regarding swarm robotics.