Strong effects of predator chemical cues on prey are common in aquatic and marine ecosystems, but are thought to be rare in terrestrial systems and specifically for arthropods. For ants, herbivores are hypothesized to eavesdrop on ant chemical communication and thereby avoid predation or confrontation. Here I tested the effect of ant chemical cues on herbivore choice and herbivory. Using Margar...

BACKGROUND Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of anterior thalamic nuclei (ANT) is a novel promising therapeutic method for treating refractory epilepsy. Despite reports of subjective memory impairments and mood disturbances in patients with ANT-DBS, little is known of its effects on cognitive and affective processes. HYPOTHESIS The anterior thalamus has connections to prefrontal and limbic network...

Specialization in species interactions is of central importance for understanding the ecological structure and evolution of plant-animal mutualisms. Most plant-animal mutualisms are facultative and strongly asymmetric. In particular, myrmecochory (seed dispersal by ants) has been regarded as a very generalized interaction. Although some recent studies have suggested that only a few ant species ...

The problem of scheduling in permutation flowshops is considered with the objective of minimizing the makespan, followed by the consideration of minimization of total flowtime of jobs. Two ant-colony optimization algorithms are proposed and analyzed for solving the permutation flowshop scheduling problem. The first algorithm extends the ideas of the ant-colony algorithm by Stuetzle [Proceedings...

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms have been applied successfully to combinatorial optimization problems. More recently, Parpinelli et al have applied ACO to data mining classification problems, where they introduced a classification algorithm called Ant Miner. In this paper, we present a system that combines both the proposed Improved Quickreduct algorithm for data preprocessing and ant ...

The automaton known as ‘Langton’s ant’ exhibits a dynamical transition from a disordered phase to an ordered phase where the particle dynamics (the ant) produces a regular periodic pattern (called ‘highway’). Despite the simplicity of its basic algorithm, Langton’s ant has remained a puzzle in terms of analytical description. Here I show that the highway dynamics obeys a discrete equation where...

In this paper we first provide a thorough performance comparison of the three main Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) paradigms for the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), namely the Rank based Ant System, the Max-Min Ant System and the Ant Colony System. Based on the results of this comparison we then implement a parallelization strategy to increase computational efficiency and study the effects of incr...

· An "ant" is placed in a two-dimensional toroidal field 32×32 · Some cells contain “food” (apples), a total of 89 pieces · The ant can “see” if the next cell contains food (events F and !F) · There are 200 steps, on each step the ant can turn left, turn right or move forward, possibly “eating” a piece of food (actions L, R, M) · Goal: build an FSM controlling the ant so that it can eat all foo...

Ant colony optimization and artificial potential field were used respectively as global path planning and local path planning methods in this paper. Some modifications were made to accommodate ant colony optimization to path planning. Pheromone generated by ant colony optimization was also utilized to prevent artificial potential field from getting local minimum. Simulation results showed that ...

Search stagnation is a serious problem that all Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms suffer from regardless of their application domain. The framework of Interacted Multiple Ant Colonies Optimization (IMACO) is a recent proposition. It divides the ants’ population into several colonies and employs certain techniques to organize the work of these colonies. This paper proposes new effective e...