Fall Leaf Jumping
Watched TED Video on Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria communicate.
They apparently use a method known as Quorum Sensing .
Each bacteria give of a small amount of a chemical and they also sense this chemical in their surroundings. By sensing the chemical they can tell when they are in the presence of other similar bacteria. When the level gets over a trigger threshold amount they all almost simultaneously release a much larger quantity of a chemical.
It would be interesting to combine these ideas with learning automata to trigger different behavior responses and to try this out in some simulations. It would also be interesting to apply it on programmable bricks that would activate different behaviors when combined in close proximity.
Just came across the firefly algorithm for optimization proposed by Xin-She Yang in 2008
A biology-inspired meta-heuristic algorithms (one of many). The algorithm is relatively simple. For example, think of a number of fireflies on a 2D landscape (the objective function). Each firefly gives of light proportional to its height on the landscape (the fitness) . The fireflies are attracted to each other by the light they give off (its so beautiful). The brighter ones will attract the most. The brightest one moves randomly.
Anyway, I haven't tried it yet but it seems to have been applied in a lot of different applications (from digital image processing to structural design) and looks interesting.
This paradox was Maurice Allais a Nobel prize winning economist who died last year.
It shows that expected utility theory and human choice experiments do not always agree.
He showed that independent events influence choice and violate the rational assumptions of economics. Although this effect has been ignored for a long time it has profound implications for psychology and economics.
See some exampes of the_allais_paradox
I would be interested to see how this can be incorporated into some of the ideas from reinforcement learning.
I am currently reading:
Out of Control: The new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world
by Kevin Kelly
I have a paperback copy but it is also available online from his web site
An interesting book on control, cybernetics and the developing of self-sustaining and networked systems. Over 500 pages of thought provoking ideas exploring biologically inspired systems. It also shows that the blurring of the boundaries between biological and artificial systems.
Visited Greenfield village at the weekend -they had a large tree with lots of grapefruit size green fruit lying underneath and all around it. It was an Maclura pomifera commonly known as the Osage orange (apparently). Good for making bows
Didn't know what they were - there is even a 300 page book on the tree ! Wood Eternal: The Story of Osage Orange, Bois d'Arc, etc.