Emergence of altruism behavior in army ant-based social evolutionary system

Army ants perform the altruism behavior that an ant sacrifices its own well-being for the benefit of another ants. They build bridges using their own bodies along the path from a food to the nest. We developed the army ant inspired social evolutionary system by using Swarm library. The system has 2 kinds of ant agents, ‘Major ant’ and ‘Minor ant’. They communicate with each other via pheromones. Army ant can recognize them as the signals from the other ants. The pheromones evaporate with the certain ratio and diffused into the space of neighbors stochastically. If the optimal bridge is found, the path through the bridge is the shortest route from the food to the nest. We define the probability for an ant to leave a bridge as to the number of neighboring ants. The constructing method of the optimal route has been proposed. In this paper, the behaviors of ant under the environment with two or more feeding spots were observed. Some experimental results show the behaviors of great interest with respect to altruism of ants. The knowledge discovery of social evolutionary process from some computer simulation results is described in this paper. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2193-1801-3-712) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.