ANT-WATCHING could soon become a lot less boring for researchers aiming to
unravel their intricate social behaviour. An image-processing system unveiled at
a conference on software robots in Montreal last week not only keeps tabs on 100
individual ants at a time, but can also figure out what jobs they do in the
colony.
Learning more about ant behaviour is not just useful to zoologists. It could
help computer programmers derive simple rules to allow swarms of robots to
cooperate better, and even help to improve telephone networks
(Â鶹´«Ã½, 24 January 1998, p 32).
But watching ants is…
