reallycarlaost/emobank-single-binary · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 1 593 ⌀	label float64 0 3
Common Behaviors	2
A few sub-behaviors will be necessary for more than one behavior.	0
To ease Antie’s on-board memory requirements and processing capabilities (and to make all the rest of the pseudocode easier for the reader to understand), I propose a few global variables and subroutines.	3
The following global variables will be used throughout the pseudocode, and are compiled here for ease of reference:	0
Though fights sometimes do break out with other red harvester ants from different nests, intraspecies interactions tend not to be aggressive (Gordon, 11).	2
Background	1
Because of this, I will ignore other ant species in the design of Antie, and will not create a fighting behavior.	1
Common behaviors will include a forward cruise and turning mechanism, procedures to determine the orientation towards nest and the distance from the nest when outside, in-nest navigation, an escape function for when objects are detected or bumped into, object identification and gripping, a generic algorithm for pheromone plume and chemical trail following, and the identification of other ants.	0
Science fiction writers have been anticipating humanoid androids that could pass a Turing Test for years.	1
For a simple start, the forward cruise function will merely take in a double integer representing a speed and cause Antie to move forward at this speed.	3
The Ant & the Robot	0
Ants of this species are of two types: breeding ants (queens and drones) and sterile female workers.	0
These behaviors will often be used in other subroutines running on a schema basis, and when combined with the forward cruise function, should cause the robot to move at an angle.	3
In order to orient itself toward the nest while navigating outside, Antie will need to determine which direction the nest is in and rotate toward that heading, and also how far from the nest it is at its current location.	3
Antie will therefore have a polarization function that will return a compass direction toward which it should orient in order to return home to the nest, and a distance function that will return the shortest direct distance.	3
We may assume that this first function will return a direction in degrees, positive or negative, and that the second function will return a distance in centimeters.	0
Queens and drones will not be considered in this proposal, as their behaviors and design is much more specialized and would be applicable only during the breeding season, which occurs but once per year.	0
The first function might look something like this:	0
To exit, Antie will seek a high temperature until the photoreceptor reaches a threshold of stimulation indicating sunlight, and to get deeper, Antie will seek a lower temperature.	1
The code may look something like this:	0
The behaviors of the sterile workers may be divided into several subcategories: brood care, nest maintenance, patrolling and foraging.	0
This void function will be called nestEnter(), and will take in no inputs.	3
To avoid bumping into things (including other ants), Antie be provided with an escape function.	0
Each of Antie’s eight bump sensors will cause the robot to rotate a different amount, and the sonar will cause it to rotate 90 degrees in the opposite direction.	3
Regardless, this will be a very simple function.	3
I will include one example:	3
Little is known about brood care, as this occurs only in the deepest regions of the nest and observation would generally require the destruction of the nest.	3
Because this function responds to the sensors on Antie’s around the sides and only its sonar detectors will be able to detect objects in front of it, this escape function will not prevent Antie from being able to locate and pick up objects such as seeds.	1
Before picking objects up, however, Antie will need to identify them.	0
This object detection process will be activated when the front bump sensor is stimulated or when both sonar detectors are stimulated.	3
Chemical inputs will be checked to see what this object is most likely to be given its smell.	3
The code may look something like this:	0
Nest maintenance and seed processing are likewise difficult to observe in the deeper regions of the nest, but the sorting and deposition of waste dirt and nest garbage outside of the nest (midden work) occurs close enough to the surface to be observable.	3
Once the object has been identified, Antie may grip it and lift it.	1
A simple void function grip() taking in no inputs will tighten the grippers until a certain threshold of pressure is reached, at which point the grippers will be lifted for carrying.	0
A void function release() will perform this same action in reverse.	1
Implementations of chemical gradient following robots using two sensors on “antennae” stalks has been successful in with analog robots in the past (Webb, 1998), regardless of the potential problem of airflow causing a disturbed gradient over evaporating pheromones.	0
As a partial control for the problem of imprecise sensing, a function will perform an analysis of the array information coming on from Antie’s four sensors on each stalk.	0
The differences between these outputs is what is being compared everywhere there is a “left_IP” or “right_IP.”	3
Antie will use the chemical gradient algorithm of Braitenberg’s aggressive type 2 vehicle described in his book “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology,” as this was found through a series of experiments by Russell, et al (2003) to be very efficient when compared to several biomimetic models.	0
Because the same general algorithm will be followed for the localization of all three chemical traces, I will provide pseudocode for only one generic subroutine.	3
Note that a portion of this subroutine does run on a schema basis:	0
Patrolling and foraging, too, occur for the most part outside of the nest, and have therefore been studied extensively (ex., Schafer, et al, 2006; Gordon, et al, 2002; Gordon, 2002; Gordon, 1987).	1
Unfortunately, as of yet, no robot has managed to fool a human for more than a few seconds, and no robot has been created that can integrate itself into human society.	3
For the purposes of calls later in the pseudocode, I will refer to these subroutines as trailFollow(), findFood(), and findMidden().	3
All three are void and take no inputs.	3
The final common subroutine will be one for the identification of other ants.	1
As harvester ants tend not to engage aggressively with non-nestmates, Antie will only identify other ants as ants if they belong to its nest.	0
Proposal for a Red Harvester Ant Robot: Colony Infiltration and Task Switching	0
Antie will attempt to determine the tasks of other ants by sensing only the n-alkene levels.	0
The code will be similar to the object identification subroutine and may look something like this:	1
Using these basic common behaviors, more complex behaviors may be coded.	0
Red harvester ants do not retain one task throughout their lifespan, but instead change their behaviors as is appropriate for the colony (Gordon, 1996).	1
Research has shown that red harvester ants switch tasks partially as a function of age (ex., Ingram, et al, 2005) and partially as a function of interactions with other workers (ex., Schafer et al, 2006; Gordon, 2002; Greene & Gordon, 2007).	1
Younger ants work more inside the nest, and older ants work more outside the nest.	1
As a result, I will model the three main behaviors in the order that they are to be engaged in.	0
Midden work, which consists of moving dirt between the inside of the nest and the outside, will occur first; patrolling, which involves a shorter overall amount of time spent outside, will occur second; and foraging will be the final behavior.	0
Finally, I will discuss a main method encoding the task switching between these behaviors.	3
The midden work behavior will be Antie’s default initial behavior.	0
It will be initiated in the morning by the sunrise, and will continue until the outside temperature reaches 52oC, at which point all red harvester ants must return to the nest.	2
As previously stated, a midden worker must identify midden, grasp it, and carry it to the surface, depositing it halfway down the mound before returning to collect more midden.	3
A program encoding this behavior might look like this:	1
These three behaviors each present different puzzles to the ant and to the modeler, though there is some overlap, particularly with navigational problems.	0
The second behavior, patrolling, involves two sub-behaviors: nest patrolling and trail patrolling.	3
Nest patrolling will involve leaving the nest, roaming around on the nest mound for a few minutes, and reentering the nest.	1
This behavior will be implemented in two parts, with a task-switching algorithm based on age.	0
Research shows that ants do change their behaviors based partly on their perceived life expectancy (Moron, et al, 2007), and that task-switching is partly genetically controlled by a switch in gene expression as the individual ages (Ingram, et al, 2005).	3
It is therefore reasonable to assign a constant age at which Antie will switch from nest patrolling to trail patrolling.	0
Harvester ants display a preference to wander in familiar territory, though foragers and patrollers do sometimes wander into other nests’ territories (Gordon, 57-60).	3
In the case of midden work, Antie must be able to identify garbage, grasp it, carry it out of the nest, and deposit it about halfway down the mound before returning to repeat the process ad infinitum (or until stimulated to switch behaviors).	2
To control for this behavior, Antie’s explore subroutine will display a preference for exploration in places where there is a low gradient of nestmate pheromones.	3
This model is reasonable because patrollers and foragers change their explored territory from day to day, even though they do retain some more commonly chosen paths (Gordon, 45).	1
The code may look something like this:	3
Patrolling may be divided into two distinct sub-behaviors, nest patrolling and trail patrolling.	0
Nest patrollers will only call this behavior for a short distance before returning to the nest to idle for a few minutes and exit again.	0
Trail patrollers will go much further, until food sources are found, and will then orient towards the nest and create trails for the foragers to follow.	3
An ant engaged in nest patrolling must exit the nest at the proper time in the morning and wander about for a bit on the nest mound, presumably taking measurements of the temperature and humidity in some way and making sure that it is safe for the other ants to exit.	0
A general site of food is all that the patroller need find; the foragers will dig through the sand for the food.	3
Code for the patrolling behavior might look like this (note that part is on a schema basis):	0
The integers nestpatrol_age and trailpatrol_age will represent the ages at which it is appropriate to switch to these tasks.	3
Perhaps the level of degradation of the nest patrollers’ cuticular hydrocarbons after this short foray into the sun and heat acts as an indication of the outside conditions to the foragers, who may then, upon smelling the returning patroller, be stimulated either to forage or to remain inactive inside the nest.	0
The final behavior, foraging, will involve one extra subroutine that will employ an algorithm designed by R.	3
Andrew Russell to localize an object through sand based on a chemical plume.	3
This will emulate the digging that foragers must often do in order to locate seeds, and will enable Antie to accurately retrieve seeds for its host nest.	0
This algorithm will keep track of the last two intensities of the desired chemical input and compare them.	1
It would also keep track of whether the last rotation was clockwise or counter-clockwise.	1
The code for this, adapted from Russell’s paper, might look like this:	3
Foragers will follow trails marked by patrollers to their conclusion before collecting food to bring back to the nest, even if more tantalizing food presents itself in their path (Gordon, 47).	3
To address this, a strict subsumption hierarchy will make sure that the foragers do not stop to collect food too soon.	0
The code might look like this:	3
An ant engaged in trail patrolling must exit the nest, wander around searching for food sources, identify food upon discovery and return to the nest to show the foragers where the food is.	2
Of course, what makes Antie an innovative robot is the task-switching between these larger behaviors.	0
Because the midden work behavior is Antie’s initial default behavior, I will not address task switching to midden work.	3
To remind the reader, this technique was implemented earlier in this proposal to create the limited task-switching between nest patrolling and trail patrolling.	3
The switch from patrolling to foraging has been modeled as a function of successful foragers’ returns with great accuracy by Schafer, et al (2006), and evidence from experiments in which successful foragers were removed before reentry to the nest does support the theory that returning successful foragers have an effect on the activation of new foragers (Gordon, 2002).	1
Infiltrating insect societies, however, is much simpler.	3
This is thought to be accomplished by the deposition of chemical markers from a gland on the abdomen that the patroller drags along the ground on her return route to the nest that the foragers may then follow (Gordon, 33-34; Holldobler et al, 1990, as cited in Webb, 1998).	0
Activated foragers form a queue to exit the nest and exit at a steady rate.	3
According to Schafer’s, et al. model of forager activation, every time a successful forager returns and no foragers are currently in line to exit, a fraction (modeled at 0.0035) of inactive foragers joins the queue.	0
For the purposes of modeling Antie, I will assume that the switches between these behaviors are permanent, irreversible and partly a function of age, with new foragers being activated by returning successful foragers.	3

Common Behaviors

2

A few sub-behaviors will be necessary for more than one behavior.

0

To ease Antie’s on-board memory requirements and processing capabilities (and to make all the rest of the pseudocode easier for the reader to understand), I propose a few global variables and subroutines.

3

The following global variables will be used throughout the pseudocode, and are compiled here for ease of reference:

0

Though fights sometimes do break out with other red harvester ants from different nests, intraspecies interactions tend not to be aggressive (Gordon, 11).

2

Background

1

Because of this, I will ignore other ant species in the design of Antie, and will not create a fighting behavior.

1

Common behaviors will include a forward cruise and turning mechanism, procedures to determine the orientation towards nest and the distance from the nest when outside, in-nest navigation, an escape function for when objects are detected or bumped into, object identification and gripping, a generic algorithm for pheromone plume and chemical trail following, and the identification of other ants.

0

Science fiction writers have been anticipating humanoid androids that could pass a Turing Test for years.

1

For a simple start, the forward cruise function will merely take in a double integer representing a speed and cause Antie to move forward at this speed.

3

The Ant & the Robot

0

Ants of this species are of two types: breeding ants (queens and drones) and sterile female workers.

0

These behaviors will often be used in other subroutines running on a schema basis, and when combined with the forward cruise function, should cause the robot to move at an angle.

3

In order to orient itself toward the nest while navigating outside, Antie will need to determine which direction the nest is in and rotate toward that heading, and also how far from the nest it is at its current location.

3

Antie will therefore have a polarization function that will return a compass direction toward which it should orient in order to return home to the nest, and a distance function that will return the shortest direct distance.

3

We may assume that this first function will return a direction in degrees, positive or negative, and that the second function will return a distance in centimeters.

0

Queens and drones will not be considered in this proposal, as their behaviors and design is much more specialized and would be applicable only during the breeding season, which occurs but once per year.

0

The first function might look something like this:

0

To exit, Antie will seek a high temperature until the photoreceptor reaches a threshold of stimulation indicating sunlight, and to get deeper, Antie will seek a lower temperature.

1

The code may look something like this:

0

The behaviors of the sterile workers may be divided into several subcategories: brood care, nest maintenance, patrolling and foraging.

0

This void function will be called nestEnter(), and will take in no inputs.

3

To avoid bumping into things (including other ants), Antie be provided with an escape function.

0

Each of Antie’s eight bump sensors will cause the robot to rotate a different amount, and the sonar will cause it to rotate 90 degrees in the opposite direction.

3

Regardless, this will be a very simple function.

3

I will include one example:

3

Little is known about brood care, as this occurs only in the deepest regions of the nest and observation would generally require the destruction of the nest.

3

Because this function responds to the sensors on Antie’s around the sides and only its sonar detectors will be able to detect objects in front of it, this escape function will not prevent Antie from being able to locate and pick up objects such as seeds.

1

Before picking objects up, however, Antie will need to identify them.

0

This object detection process will be activated when the front bump sensor is stimulated or when both sonar detectors are stimulated.

3

Chemical inputs will be checked to see what this object is most likely to be given its smell.

3

The code may look something like this:

0

Nest maintenance and seed processing are likewise difficult to observe in the deeper regions of the nest, but the sorting and deposition of waste dirt and nest garbage outside of the nest (midden work) occurs close enough to the surface to be observable.

3

Once the object has been identified, Antie may grip it and lift it.

1

A simple void function grip() taking in no inputs will tighten the grippers until a certain threshold of pressure is reached, at which point the grippers will be lifted for carrying.

0

A void function release() will perform this same action in reverse.

1

Implementations of chemical gradient following robots using two sensors on “antennae” stalks has been successful in with analog robots in the past (Webb, 1998), regardless of the potential problem of airflow causing a disturbed gradient over evaporating pheromones.

0

As a partial control for the problem of imprecise sensing, a function will perform an analysis of the array information coming on from Antie’s four sensors on each stalk.

0

The differences between these outputs is what is being compared everywhere there is a “left_IP” or “right_IP.”

3

Antie will use the chemical gradient algorithm of Braitenberg’s aggressive type 2 vehicle described in his book “Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology,” as this was found through a series of experiments by Russell, et al (2003) to be very efficient when compared to several biomimetic models.

0

Because the same general algorithm will be followed for the localization of all three chemical traces, I will provide pseudocode for only one generic subroutine.

3

Note that a portion of this subroutine does run on a schema basis:

0

Patrolling and foraging, too, occur for the most part outside of the nest, and have therefore been studied extensively (ex., Schafer, et al, 2006; Gordon, et al, 2002; Gordon, 2002; Gordon, 1987).

1

Unfortunately, as of yet, no robot has managed to fool a human for more than a few seconds, and no robot has been created that can integrate itself into human society.

3

For the purposes of calls later in the pseudocode, I will refer to these subroutines as trailFollow(), findFood(), and findMidden().

3

All three are void and take no inputs.

3

The final common subroutine will be one for the identification of other ants.

1

As harvester ants tend not to engage aggressively with non-nestmates, Antie will only identify other ants as ants if they belong to its nest.

0

Proposal for a Red Harvester Ant Robot: Colony Infiltration and Task Switching

0

Antie will attempt to determine the tasks of other ants by sensing only the n-alkene levels.

0

The code will be similar to the object identification subroutine and may look something like this:

1

Using these basic common behaviors, more complex behaviors may be coded.

0

Red harvester ants do not retain one task throughout their lifespan, but instead change their behaviors as is appropriate for the colony (Gordon, 1996).

1

Research has shown that red harvester ants switch tasks partially as a function of age (ex., Ingram, et al, 2005) and partially as a function of interactions with other workers (ex., Schafer et al, 2006; Gordon, 2002; Greene & Gordon, 2007).

1

Younger ants work more inside the nest, and older ants work more outside the nest.

1

As a result, I will model the three main behaviors in the order that they are to be engaged in.

0

Midden work, which consists of moving dirt between the inside of the nest and the outside, will occur first; patrolling, which involves a shorter overall amount of time spent outside, will occur second; and foraging will be the final behavior.

0

Finally, I will discuss a main method encoding the task switching between these behaviors.

3

The midden work behavior will be Antie’s default initial behavior.

0

It will be initiated in the morning by the sunrise, and will continue until the outside temperature reaches 52oC, at which point all red harvester ants must return to the nest.

2

As previously stated, a midden worker must identify midden, grasp it, and carry it to the surface, depositing it halfway down the mound before returning to collect more midden.

3

A program encoding this behavior might look like this:

1

These three behaviors each present different puzzles to the ant and to the modeler, though there is some overlap, particularly with navigational problems.

0

The second behavior, patrolling, involves two sub-behaviors: nest patrolling and trail patrolling.

3

Nest patrolling will involve leaving the nest, roaming around on the nest mound for a few minutes, and reentering the nest.

1

This behavior will be implemented in two parts, with a task-switching algorithm based on age.

0

Research shows that ants do change their behaviors based partly on their perceived life expectancy (Moron, et al, 2007), and that task-switching is partly genetically controlled by a switch in gene expression as the individual ages (Ingram, et al, 2005).

3

It is therefore reasonable to assign a constant age at which Antie will switch from nest patrolling to trail patrolling.

0

Harvester ants display a preference to wander in familiar territory, though foragers and patrollers do sometimes wander into other nests’ territories (Gordon, 57-60).

3

In the case of midden work, Antie must be able to identify garbage, grasp it, carry it out of the nest, and deposit it about halfway down the mound before returning to repeat the process ad infinitum (or until stimulated to switch behaviors).

2

To control for this behavior, Antie’s explore subroutine will display a preference for exploration in places where there is a low gradient of nestmate pheromones.

3

This model is reasonable because patrollers and foragers change their explored territory from day to day, even though they do retain some more commonly chosen paths (Gordon, 45).

1

The code may look something like this:

3

Patrolling may be divided into two distinct sub-behaviors, nest patrolling and trail patrolling.

0

Nest patrollers will only call this behavior for a short distance before returning to the nest to idle for a few minutes and exit again.

0

Trail patrollers will go much further, until food sources are found, and will then orient towards the nest and create trails for the foragers to follow.

3

An ant engaged in nest patrolling must exit the nest at the proper time in the morning and wander about for a bit on the nest mound, presumably taking measurements of the temperature and humidity in some way and making sure that it is safe for the other ants to exit.

0

A general site of food is all that the patroller need find; the foragers will dig through the sand for the food.

3

Code for the patrolling behavior might look like this (note that part is on a schema basis):

0

The integers nestpatrol_age and trailpatrol_age will represent the ages at which it is appropriate to switch to these tasks.

3

Perhaps the level of degradation of the nest patrollers’ cuticular hydrocarbons after this short foray into the sun and heat acts as an indication of the outside conditions to the foragers, who may then, upon smelling the returning patroller, be stimulated either to forage or to remain inactive inside the nest.

0

The final behavior, foraging, will involve one extra subroutine that will employ an algorithm designed by R.

3

Andrew Russell to localize an object through sand based on a chemical plume.

3

This will emulate the digging that foragers must often do in order to locate seeds, and will enable Antie to accurately retrieve seeds for its host nest.

0

This algorithm will keep track of the last two intensities of the desired chemical input and compare them.

1

It would also keep track of whether the last rotation was clockwise or counter-clockwise.

1

The code for this, adapted from Russell’s paper, might look like this:

3

Foragers will follow trails marked by patrollers to their conclusion before collecting food to bring back to the nest, even if more tantalizing food presents itself in their path (Gordon, 47).

3

To address this, a strict subsumption hierarchy will make sure that the foragers do not stop to collect food too soon.

0

The code might look like this:

3

An ant engaged in trail patrolling must exit the nest, wander around searching for food sources, identify food upon discovery and return to the nest to show the foragers where the food is.

2

Of course, what makes Antie an innovative robot is the task-switching between these larger behaviors.

0

Because the midden work behavior is Antie’s initial default behavior, I will not address task switching to midden work.

3

To remind the reader, this technique was implemented earlier in this proposal to create the limited task-switching between nest patrolling and trail patrolling.

3

The switch from patrolling to foraging has been modeled as a function of successful foragers’ returns with great accuracy by Schafer, et al (2006), and evidence from experiments in which successful foragers were removed before reentry to the nest does support the theory that returning successful foragers have an effect on the activation of new foragers (Gordon, 2002).

1

Infiltrating insect societies, however, is much simpler.

3

This is thought to be accomplished by the deposition of chemical markers from a gland on the abdomen that the patroller drags along the ground on her return route to the nest that the foragers may then follow (Gordon, 33-34; Holldobler et al, 1990, as cited in Webb, 1998).

0

Activated foragers form a queue to exit the nest and exit at a steady rate.

3

According to Schafer’s, et al. model of forager activation, every time a successful forager returns and no foragers are currently in line to exit, a fraction (modeled at 0.0035) of inactive foragers joins the queue.

0

For the purposes of modeling Antie, I will assume that the switches between these behaviors are permanent, irreversible and partly a function of age, with new foragers being activated by returning successful foragers.

3